Later in life, after becoming a software engineer, it occurred to me that point of view has some resemblance to managers trying to determine whether a software engineer or a team of engineers are doing good work. If you apply a method too rigorously, you'll end up rewarding the wrong people.

It's been ages since I read these philosophers but in my mind Feyerabend's position sort of boiled down to 'at the forefront of any specialization only the experts are able to judge which investigations are worth pursuing further'. With the corollary that experts sometimes disagree among themselves.

In the field of software engineering I've encountered several cases where new engineers are onboarded and they promptly decide that the codebase is unmaintainable and should be rewritten from scratch. I usually don't give up on legacy code so easily, but there was one project where I did genuinely held the opinion that rewriting it would have been more efficient than refactoring. It occurred to me, though, that when a software engineer says a particular piece of codebase is crap, there usually is no good way for outsiders to tell whether that's true or not.

Incidentally, Feyerabend's Against Method originated out of a challenge by Lakatos to copublish a book in which they debate various ideas. That's a useful thing to keep in mind when reading Against Method. Later someone did publish a book titled For And Against Method [1], in which writings of both Lakatos and Feyerabend are juxtaposed.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo362971...