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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#11

Post by MrMcCall »

The success of any organization depends upon each member behaving selflessly to meet the needs of the group. Selfishness in any organization is a parasitic drain on energy and productivity.

Embracing compassion for all those who drift into our orbit is the only way to improve oneself in all dimensions. Compassion is the common factor in virtue, and the cure for selfishness.

It is also the measure of every person, so once you begin orienting yourself in the moral compass' proper direction, you can begin to see how others are aligned or misaligned. Such selfish folks are those who just don't give a damn to become a better person, which would result in lessening the amount of hurt they inflict on others. Treat such people as well as you can, but be wary of their nature.

Unfortunately, very few human beings really give a damn about anyone not in their in-group. Such is our baseline mammalian heritage, which we must each overcome with deliberate spiritual self-evolution.

"The Way goes in." --Rumi

Re: Egoless Engineering

#12

Post by bibabaloo »

dakiol wrote: post #9
spuds wrote: post #3

Really resonated with this, reminded me of the journey I went on over the course of my dev career. By the end, my advice for every manager was roughly: * Don't add process just for the sake of it. Only add it if seriously needed. * Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.) * Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, e…

With modern team structures it’s difficult to have ownership all the way to prod. My team consists of: one product manager, one staff engineer, one or more lead engineers, one or more senior engineers, one engineering manager. The PM wants his share of the cake, so any big feature needs to go through his approval (“does this feature delivers value?”, “how many users will use the feature?”, etc.) The staff engineer ne…

I feel this so much. I feel like most of my job is playing politics to make sure people are happy and let them feel like they're adding value. Rather than shipping things to users to improve the product. It's honestly so depressing. Strongly considering going back to work at a small startup, to avoid having to work with these layers of middlemen that really add little to no value.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#13

Post by nox101 »

frigidnonce wrote: post #10
spuds wrote: post #3

Really resonated with this, reminded me of the journey I went on over the course of my dev career. By the end, my advice for every manager was roughly: * Don't add process just for the sake of it. Only add it if seriously needed. * Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.) * Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, e…

[flagged]

Can you unpack your comment?

Re: Egoless Engineering

#15

Post by aylmao »

MrMcCall wrote: post #11

The success of any organization depends upon each member behaving selflessly to meet the needs of the group. Selfishness in any organization is a parasitic drain on energy and productivity. Embracing compassion for all those who drift into our orbit is the only way to improve oneself in all dimensions. Compassion is the common factor in virtue, and the cure for selfishness. It is also the measure of every person, so…

> Such is our baseline mammalian heritage, which we must each overcome with deliberate spiritual self-evolution.

Personally I don't see it through such an individualist lens— I think this is a collective issue that can't possibly rely on an individual's "spiritual awakening".

As such, I think the bigger issue is that (in some cultures more and some less) people are actively encouraged to compete and feed their ego. At a societal level, for example, it'd be easy to blame schools or parents for this kind of education, but I think they're just doing what makes sense in their economic environment. If the world is winner-takes-all, I can't blame parents for wanting their kids to be "winners", lest they are left with nothing instead.

Going back to the post and the way this played out at the company— it was upper-management with the wide impact their decision-making has on organization as a whole, its rules and procedures, that led the change. It wasn't individuals each individually overcoming their own egos that led the change here. Once the precedent is set up-top, and the policies are changed, the rest could follow. It was top down and systematic.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#16

Post by instalabs »

> So that was a high-level overview of how all struggling companies are unique. But they’re also all the same.

Reminds me of Tolstoy's “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Re: Egoless Engineering

#17

Post by layer8 »

spuds wrote: post #3

Really resonated with this, reminded me of the journey I went on over the course of my dev career. By the end, my advice for every manager was roughly: * Don't add process just for the sake of it. Only add it if seriously needed. * Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.) * Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, e…

* Separate bullet points by blank lines on HN. ;)

Re: Egoless Engineering

#18

Post by tayo42 »

spuds wrote: post #3

Really resonated with this, reminded me of the journey I went on over the course of my dev career. By the end, my advice for every manager was roughly: * Don't add process just for the sake of it. Only add it if seriously needed. * Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.) * Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, e…

> Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, extremely unlikely lark, don't act like it's going to happen again next week

I hate this, like when there's an outage and the outcome is 100 half baked ideas that must be implemented, that just make things worse to work with

Re: Egoless Engineering

#19

Post by nox101 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

The part about intentional team values is very good: • Digs ditches. Nobody is too good for any task. • Returns shopping carts (even if nobody's watching). We leave things better than we found them. It's amazing how most teams don't set norms/values at all!

Western society (or at least USA society) seems to me to foster the idea of "not my responsibility". My example would be, going to a fast food place and not cleaning your table even though there are trashcans and places to put your tray. Spilling something and not even attempting to clean up after yourself.

Unions have this in spades. "My job is X, I don't do Y, in fact I'm not allowed to do Y as that takes a job away from whoever is supposed to do Y"

Re: Egoless Engineering

#20

Post by spuds »

dakiol wrote: post #9
spuds wrote: post #3

Really resonated with this, reminded me of the journey I went on over the course of my dev career. By the end, my advice for every manager was roughly: * Don't add process just for the sake of it. Only add it if seriously needed. * Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.) * Stop making reactive decisions. If something bad happened on a total, e…

With modern team structures it’s difficult to have ownership all the way to prod. My team consists of: one product manager, one staff engineer, one or more lead engineers, one or more senior engineers, one engineering manager. The PM wants his share of the cake, so any big feature needs to go through his approval (“does this feature delivers value?”, “how many users will use the feature?”, etc.) The staff engineer ne…

Yeah I completely agree that a lot of structures work actively against this. Lot easier for me to write a bullet point about it than actually implement it at a company with an existing way of doing things. And I think it's almost impossible to implement from the bottom up, as it often requires some real process (and culture) changes.
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