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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#151

Post by RHSman2 »

aylmao wrote: post #60
spuds wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think there's almost always a point where a company decides they need to stop generally trusting their employees. Then all the trustworthy ones start getting more and more frustrated, or just start checking out. Agreed that most startups lean towards trust. Need to keep that going as long as possible, and stay away from hiring managers who think their primary job is "protecting" the company from anyone who mi…

> Need to keep that going as long as possible, and stay away from hiring managers who think their primary job is "protecting" the company from anyone who might make a mistake. On that note, a quick shot-out because I've been lucky enough to see the opposite happen at a big company too. Performance cycles at the company very much disincentivized big bets. Some engineers really thought project "X" was important, but it…

This. This is what ‘higher’ ups should be aiming for. I try and do it with all my attention. The good fight.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#152

Post by travisgriggs »

agumonkey wrote: post #32
bibabaloo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the one who solves this problem will flood the world with a neverending wave of light.. every day I wonder how come I do so few now that I'm paid compared to when I was jobless and hacking prototypes for $0 finding the recipe for creating goal driven, high speed, high quality, frictionless teams is a difficult quest

Lobby your government to tax management hours. That’ll fix things.

I often wonder how some open source projects manage to be so successful/productive with so little of what looks like corporate management.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#153

Post by RHSman2 »

01100011 wrote: post #73
weitendorf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

How very well put.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#154

Post by mcfunley »

coderintherye wrote: post #147

Kiva's engineering drew quite a few lessons from Etsy, though we never got so big. I think Dan is missing mentioning one ingredient: Security. Not code security, the human feeling of personal security. Most especially, of being secure in one's role. And that drives so much of this. If everyone is secure in themselves, or able to transcend worrying about their personal security, then magic happens. Without it, things…

Yeah you are right about this, psychological safety is a key ingredient in what “good” looks like. Blameless culture stuff is a bit of another ball of wax, so I didn’t get into it too much.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#155

Post by bjornsing »

worksonmymach wrote: post #102
dakiol wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It needs a culture change. The magic words: "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.

I agree. First step I think is to start measuring what’s important at the top of the organization. When you have weekly progress meetings with the CTO and CPO and only look at lists of new features, then new features will be what people think about. “What gets measured gets done”, as they say.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#156

Post by boruto »

nox101 wrote: post #19
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 awa…

I am from an eastern society, So my first day in western society I saw a blue collar worker clean up his food crumbs on a REWE deli table. This might seem normal to do for you, but I swear I never seen anything like that in my life in the eastern society. I was 27 this had profound impact on me than reading any book, I still remember it after a decade.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#157

Post by Nevermark »

MrMcCall wrote: post #139
Nevermark wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we are witnessing across the Earth's societies is nothing less than the apotheosis of the masses' majorities exercising their free will to choose ignorance over wisdom There is a mismatch between your observations about humans as a whole, and the appeal to individuals and their individual values. I am all for individual ethics, but half the people on the planet could have great ethics, and things could still d…

There is no mismatch, friend. "Pulling others in", as you put it, requires two ends of the leveling-up: first, the initiate explains how to begin the self-evolution, and second, the newcomer accepts the challenge and begins their own path to self-evolution. For those who invite, we are to do so with loving kindness, because the result is wholly dependent upon the receiver opening and then walking through the door we…

Thanks for the rebuttle.

You are right, I stand corrected - I think both approaches make sense for spreading change.

Yours on an every day basis, the viewpoint I gave requires opportunity, but matters too.

The thing with game theory, is it’s the right way to think of social structures that scale.

I think a lot of people’s behavior responds strongly to their incentives. All those people you (and I) are cynical about.

And ethics really are the positive sum “games”. Keeping one’s word, safety nets, helping our neighbors, win-win transactions and relationships - we adopt them as individuals for the immediate good it does, for us and who we interact with. And knowing if everyone did that we would all be better off. Even the self-isolating rich since society as a whole would run better.

Bottom up or top down encouragement are both with it.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#158

Post by didibus »

One thing I've realized is that people in different roles have different levers to solve problems, and they naturally skew to using that lever to try and solve all problems, even if that lever can't solve the problem and could make it worse.

A manager, to which directors, CEOs, and so on are all included in, have this lever which is that they can hire more people and create new roles/re-organize teams. And they skew towards it for many problems...

We want to deliver features faster, what can I do, me, a manager?

    - I could hire more engineers!
    - I could reorganize my engineers so each one works on a specific type of issue
It becomes really hard to accept that, maybe, as a manager, you can't do anything about it, except support and encourage those that can, like the engineers themselves. How could you help them deliver features faster?

I'm picking at managers, but every role has this issue. Engineers have this lever of "technical ingenuity". And they skew to it as the solution to all problems.

We want to deliver features faster, what can I do, me, a software engineer?

    - I could rewrite this in a more productive language/framework
    - I could redesign this to make it simpler and easier to work on

Re: Egoless Engineering

#159

Post by Aeolun »

agumonkey wrote: post #32
bibabaloo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the one who solves this problem will flood the world with a neverending wave of light.. every day I wonder how come I do so few now that I'm paid compared to when I was jobless and hacking prototypes for $0 finding the recipe for creating goal driven, high speed, high quality, frictionless teams is a difficult quest

> every day I wonder how come I do so few now that I'm paid compared to when I was jobless and hacking prototypes for $0

Salary is inversely proportional to how much you actually (need to) do.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#160

Post by Aeolun »

T-Winsnes wrote: post #133
Aloisius wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Require ownership all the way to prod and beyond, no matter the role. (Turns out people tend to really like that.) Depends on what you mean. Individual ownership over code/feature/module/etc would seem to run counter to the article - it's just another fiefdom. Collective ownership? Sure.

I think the right balance here is to have ownership of the outcome rather than the thing. E.g. you have ownership of making sure the feature you’re working on makes it to production and works properly With that ownership comes there responsibility and accountability of making sure it happens. The level of responsibility and autonomy that comes with that is what I’ve found people react positively to

Ownership to ‘make sure it happens’ is entirely different from being able to ‘make’ it happen. The first is absolutely toxic.
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