Methodologists

Once upon a time, way back before I was even married, much less a divorced dad, my brother Andy and I worked together at a certain company. This was my first professional job and the beginning of my long, sordid IT career and I owe it all to nepotism.

Anyway, shortly after I started at this company, there was an internal change in management and our divisional president was replaced with a new hire - a fellow of South Asian extraction. Alright, alright, he's an Indian immigrant. And regardless of his relative value and talent, he had a comically thick accent, which only served to make his first impression all the more awkward.

During the meeting in which he gathered the local office staff in order to introduce himself, he said something which I had heard as a joke before, but was made all the more hilarious by this man for two reasons: first, he was deadly serious about it, and second, he delivered the following lines in his unfortunate Apu-from-The-Simpsons, "please-do-not-offer-my-god-a-peanut" accent:

I would like to introduce myself; my name is [redacted] and I am a staunch methodologist. In case you don't know the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist - you can negotiate with a terrorist.

After I was done gut-laughing about the absurdity of this line being delivered with the accent with which it was delivered, my next reaction can be summed up thusly: "Wow, what an ass."

Not all that long ago, I found myself arguing vehemently in favor of a SOLID and TDD based approach to developing an application, against an extremely effective Devil's-Advocate of an opponent who kept asking questions which I was ill-equipped to answer then (and perhaps still now). And the profound impression left upon me was this: "Holy crap; I've become a Staunch Methodologist - it's easier to try to negotiate with Al Quaeda than with me, on this subject."

Naturally, I became worried by this realization. After all, my first encounter with a Staunch Methodologist equated that trait with "pillock." And to this day, I grok TDD and the SOLID principles (or rather, the SOLID principles which I do grok) from an almost-purely instinctual level, lacking the ability to discuss them or argue for them from a rational standpoint.

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. If I can't defend my position rationally, then what is it really worth in the grand scheme of things?