This can be taken the wrong way by self-centered people and cause damage- specifically, the advice to “take strong positions even if uncertain.”

I work with someone that does this regularly, and it’s made for a hellscape.

A lot of it is quite debatable if not outright wrong.

Imagine you find yourself going into a meeting with no strong opinion on whether the new queue should be implemented with Kafka, Redis, or your existing SQL DB, and only average time pressure. The possible solutions here, in order of worst to best, are:

- equivocating until your manager picks the worst one

- picking one and not telling anyone you're unsure

- picking one and mentioning it might not be optimal but you think it'll work and we need to pick something

- cancelling the meeting midway through once you realise you don't know because you didn't do your homework

- moving the meeting to tomorrow three hours before it starts so you can do your homework

- turning up to the meeting having already picked one, with a reasonable understanding of the trade-offs and a quick write-up for everyone to review (bonus points if you sent it around beforehand, and if you're able to change your mind in response to valid criticism)

If you don't know the answer, that's a problem, and you should go work it out. If you are in a meeting to decide something that's not important, that's a problem, and you should cancel it and give everyone their time back (and also, how do you know it's not important?).

Yes. Letting the young ones drive because they seem confident is a recipe for disaster over the long haul.