>Most of these have wide acceptance among the HN/Startup crowd; I might expect to see more disagreement if the list were exposed to corporate programming environments, or especially to their managers.
Hi, corporate code monkey here: that list looks entirely fine and not particularly controversial. Thanks.
It's telling that these are the 20 most upvoted "controversial" opinions. I don't think they should have taken the 20 most controversial (according to the voting system), or the 20 most downvoted, but the system chosen does have obvious consequences. Looking at the results, they break down a few ways - Reactions to corporate processes and "things management likes", old and unpopular things are no good, programmers should be more free to express themselves and so on.
The reason people think these things are "controversial" is that the sources of information these programmers are getting are often limited to their immediate environment, their university profs, and what they read online. That naturally excludes the bulk of competent programmers who don't blog or speak in conferences[1]. It's impossible to constantly remember to account for the biases in the media you consume, so people are naturally (and gradually) led to believe that the trendy ideas of yesterday and today are ubiquitous. They forget about the masses of programmers doing heads-down development on non-web, non-mobile platforms because the web and mobile guys are trendy and they all have blogs.
Hi, corporate code monkey here: that list looks entirely fine and not particularly controversial. Thanks.