The longer I've been in tech and the more I learn, the less strong opinions I have. There are things you learn that should be done a certain way, but if the rationale behind that is strong/ubiquitous enough, it's not really an opinion any more. For example, I could say 'metrics/analytics/monitoring is super important... etc.' now the interviewer can decide to either agree with this fairly obvious/ubiquitous 'opinion', or decide this point is not interesting/controversial enough.

Ultimately, I think it's a terrible question - there's no 'right' answer, and you're completely at the mercy of the interviewer's subjective opinions/feelings.

If you want to hear about something the interviewee has passion/knowledge of - ask them about a project they worked on, what problems they ran into, what they learned, etc.

This was similar to my reaction to that question, and how I'd respond to it in the interview (with curiosity around what they're trying to get out of it). It's not that I don't have strong opinions, but they are necessarily couched in context. Strong opinions lacking in context are a sign of a lack of experience. Sometimes unit tests are a must, and in other cases they are an absolute waste of time. Sometimes microservices are the right call, and others they are an unnecessary complexity. The more experience in this field I get, the more gray and amorphous my opinions become, and "it depends" is the default, if not interesting, answer.

i agree with that. as a young person i had a number of strong opinions. i am still kicking myself for insisting that a mailinglist server written in C would be better than one in python, based on the language alone. my opinion was just blind prejudice despite not being strong in C, and always having preferred languages like pike, python or javascript.

basically most strong opinions are based on lack of knowledge. one that i have now for example is that kubernetes is over engineered for most problems. it's based on discussions here on HN and not any actual knowledge or experience with it.

as a consequence i have learned to be very careful with strongly expressing opinions, because it can be difficult to back them up, especially when i face someone more knowledgeable in that space.