101–110 of 309 posts
I did not finish yet to read, but "Executives are well-adapted to insisting on fundamentally contradictory goals" Is so well worded (and also so hilariously true) that I wanted to symbolically tip my hat at the author in case they read here.
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…
"Our customers prefer the product works over getting a new feature, so let's ensure that at any cost"
Number of features is a dial. You turn that down. You turn the operations (devops) dial up.
There is nothing modern about releasing half arsed shit... we been doing it since the dawn of civilization.
An ageless idea... "There once was the first software engineering best-selling book. It was called The Psychology of Computer Programming (Weinberg 1971). There was a peculiar idea contained among the many excellent ideas of that book. It was the idea that the task of programming should be egoless. Programmers, the author said, should not invest their ego in the product they were building. ... What’s the alternative…
People may bring ego into programming because of some kind of pathology (eg the need to always be right or in control) but I think in many cases it's because they truly care about the work. And the problem is not that they truly care, but that there is a mismatch between the amount of influence/control/autonomy they wish to exert on their work and the amount they are actually able to exert on it. I wasn't there, but…
How does something like this scale for more than 10 people? 100? 1000?
There were some annoying parts of the ultra-permissive culture. Sometimes you'd need to literally beg people to stop YOLO-committing code into your UI component because they're not checking how it looks with your flag enabled and they're breaking your A/B test over and over and you just lost a week because you need to restart it. But we gained more than we ever lost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes a person's dedication and care expresses itself to others as ego. Sometimes it is just ego. I think we've all implemented some clever trick in our code that we started to feel proud of. It's hard not to do. Even if you just contribute to a small piece of the project, you still might have those instances of pride. We're all human, and it's fine to take a little motivation from your accomplishment. But hold o…
The problem with "ego" as a concept IMO is that it carries negative connotations with most people and isn't exactly well-defined - some people might see it as always a bad thing (I think you might fall into this camp given that your phrasing "dedication and care expresses itself to others as ego" rather than saying it merely is ego). Personally I think that that is ego, but that ego is not necessarily a bad thing. Th…
So yeah you need ego. That said, it must also be tempered with the reality of needing to compromise enough to satisfice all stakeholders (including both technical and business stakeholders of all the different flavors). The beautiful thing about software engineering though, is there is a reasonable amount of objective facts, metrics and tradeoffs, that given a critical mass of sufficiently skilled and mature engineers, common ground tends not to be too hard to align on. Or at least, far easier than to get a non-technical stakeholder to understand the long-term implications of a bad decision.
This really hits > Computer Scientists are also really bad at it > Despite literally studying the asymptotic limits of work completion under various conditions There are so many times that I'm looking at the workflow thinking "We know how to break this up using distributed systems knowledge, why are we doing it this crazed way"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes a person's dedication and care expresses itself to others as ego. Sometimes it is just ego. I think we've all implemented some clever trick in our code that we started to feel proud of. It's hard not to do. Even if you just contribute to a small piece of the project, you still might have those instances of pride. We're all human, and it's fine to take a little motivation from your accomplishment. But hold o…
The problem with "ego" as a concept IMO is that it carries negative connotations with most people and isn't exactly well-defined - some people might see it as always a bad thing (I think you might fall into this camp given that your phrasing "dedication and care expresses itself to others as ego" rather than saying it merely is ego). Personally I think that that is ego, but that ego is not necessarily a bad thing. Th…
There are 19 pairs of vice/virtue pairs in the ego. We can only decrease our ego's vice-eous tendencies by increasing our consciously manifesting compassion to everyone we encounter. It also helps to contact our Creator and ask for guidance. It awaits us in Its Unfathomable Lonliness to beseech it for help to begin and then see out the complete transformation of our ego into a selfless, servant of the happiness of others and the societies/cultures we inhabit.
That Path of Loving Service is the key to happiness, and is the opposite of narcissistic attitudes and bahaviors.
There is nothing mysterious about the ego; it's just that willful ignorance is one of our heart's vices, and its purpose is to deny that each person's ego transformation is not only possible, but the source of joy and community uplift, and is our free will to choose love or any of its many selfish opposites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is all well and good to advocate egoless programming, but the fact of the matter is that human ego is a very natural thing, and it is difficult to find people who can—or even should—divorce their ego from their work. Ironically, it's the "egoless" crowd which tends to be ego-obsessed and solipsistic. They imagine an egoless world which simply requires that everyone thinks just like me; in effect, everyone shares…
How predictable the ego's self-defensive reactions are. Merely encountering the suggestion that the ego is a necessary servant but a terrible master and it yelps "I'm not an egotist, you're the egotist!"
Sleep tight. :)
An ageless idea... "There once was the first software engineering best-selling book. It was called The Psychology of Computer Programming (Weinberg 1971). There was a peculiar idea contained among the many excellent ideas of that book. It was the idea that the task of programming should be egoless. Programmers, the author said, should not invest their ego in the product they were building. ... What’s the alternative…
I've noticed that some of the worst ego-related issues arise from people who care the most about their work -- the craftspeople, if you will. There is a type of person who will pour their entire soul into creating the most ideal expression of whatever it is they are trying to do. Sometimes that level of investment is warranted and even required. But mixed together with others who don't -- or can't -- operate that way…
We are the only beings on Earth that can self-evolve, by using our conscience and mind to evaluate of our actions to find out where we are causing unhappiness. Then, we must engage our free will to choose to be better, and do the things that help us to grow spiritually out of the immature, selfish mammals we begin as, into the humanitarians that result from reaching our highest potential.
The most destructive lie we let our minds tell us is that this transformation is not possible, or is the figment of someone's imagination. The ego tells us this because the spiritual path entails the destruction of the negative ego. Under this existential threat, the ego defends itself like hell.
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!
You want selfless devotion to the goal then you damn well better not be wasting my time and cutting costs at the expense of my productivity.
Managers who don't know what they're talking about and insist they do and insist they are right causing massive lost time, then want to hold meeting after meeting about how it is everyone else's fault. You've seen it. Why am I working long hours doing work, some of which is shovelling sand that need shovelling because I'm not too good for it when if that idiot had been restrained to their level of competence we'd already have delivered and I'd see more of my family. Selfless devotion? To what?
In the old days when SSDs were 'expensive' and companies economised and didn't immediately buy them for the team because my time isn't worth saving but they want me to stay back to get more done for a deadline? Selfless devotion to a goal you're showing clearly you don't care about.
This stuff is really normal. You have stories, everyone does. And so we take the path that is best for ourselves and those we like. Any other choice isn't "egoless" it's insane.
Managing a team is hard. Keeping idiots from having idiotic influence is hard. Spotting who is managing up is hard. Noticing, supporting and retaining who is good is hard.
Having someone with a massive ego who you might cross the road to avoid having to socially interact with other than they do a decent job of that hard managing might work out better than "Egoless."