Against Best Practices

It took me way too long to realize this, but my experience is that "zealots, idiots, and assholes" (as the author says) are going to abuse something and wield it as a bludgeon against other people. This appears to be a fixed, immutable property of the universe.

If you take it as a given that some number of people are going to get an idea lodged in their head, treat it like gospel, and beat as many other people in the head with it as they can... the best strategy you can adopt is to have the ideas in their head be at least somewhat useful.

Yes, reasonable people understand that "best practices" come with all sorts of context and caveats that need to be taken into account. But you won't always be dealing with reasonable people, and if you're dealing with an asshole, zealot, or idiot, I'd sure as hell prefer one who blindly believes in, say, test-first development versus believing that "test code isn't real code, you should spend all of your time writing code that ships to users" or some other even worse nonsense.

The one thing that gives me pause, is that I have seen stages of mastery where the base stage is repetition and adherence to rules to internalize them before understanding them and knowing when to break them.

If much of our industry is new, evangelizing these rules as harder and faster than they are makes a lot of sense to bring people to get people ready for the next stage. Then they learn the context and caveats over time.