TL;DR

Rigid means that you are not flexible, either in technology that you use in your daily work or in career choice you try to achieve. The post is based on a remarkable book written by Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer.

Rigid means that you do not want to bend your choice by any circumstance.  Here is one example from nature that shows how being rigid could be dangerous:

Make a table with two columns, career, and technology. List your rigid choices for those two columns.

My rigid career choice is that any attempt to create a unicorn product is a better choice than being an employee of a company. Let’s reverse this choice. Being in the first five employees of a startup that tries to produce a unicorn product is a better career choice. The thing is that I can test this reverse assumption.

Or that testers are nuts and bolts of every project. But what about other roles? That is easy to test. Open meetup.com and search for developer’s meetup in your town. Attend it and listen to what bothers them. Ask questions and try to figure what is so hard about software development. You are rigid about Ruby or Python; attend a .Net or Java meetup. Or even better, try some small project in those languages.

Books and blog posts are also great resources to explore technologies that you are dismissing. Do not be fragile at your path to passionate software tester.