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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#201

Post by sethammons »

fefe23 wrote: post #118

I like his other two talks better than this one. I find "this worked for me once at Etsy when we were a 20 person team" not a very convincing argument. That does not mean I think he's wrong. Just that the conclusion needs better arguments. One argument that comes to mind is: If you treat people like children, they will start behaving like children. Treat people as adults if you want them to shoulder responsibility. T…

Why can the tests not be ran automatically and why not let anyone deploy at anytime? Like, if super senior dev or first day intern deploy, I expect tests to run and the deployment to go out and for systems to be automatically monitored and the deployment reverted if errors pop up, and also manually revertable if a test missed something.

Absolutely, let the designer deploy. Let them have stage access first so they can play, sure. But let them not be blocked. And if they turn the site purple, consider revoking the trust. But default to trust

Re: Egoless Engineering

#202

Post by jamil7 »

Aeolun wrote: post #161

Ok, but how do you deal with people that submit broken CSS, break the site, and are unapologetic? Especially when you are in no position to fire them (because laws, or organisation)? All these “if you do it this way it works” posts seem to assume everyone has the best of intentions (or at least want to do the best job possible), and especially in corporate settings I just don’t think that’s always the case. People ar…

I guess you need to put automation in-place that interrupts these people when they're trying to deploy something broken. Tests, linters, static analysis etc.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#203

Post by sethammons »

thanksgiving wrote: post #59

I want to go off a small tangent > In Theory There Is No Difference Between Theory and Practice, While In Practice There Is I for one used to believe in a cross functional team. I used to believe that everyone in a team should be able to do every task in the team. I still believe it somewhat but my ego is shattered. I worked on one team where the lead believed in this more than I ever did. Consequently, I was doing t…

I left a role because we owned it as a team, and as a lead on the team, I opted to take the shit work, so I found myself in yaml hell, configuring and tweaking configs in ever cryptic error messages. I was there to code and design efficient systems. Yaml sucked. Eventually, I left. We should have brought on someone who likes that shit.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#204

Post by quonn »

Dansvidania wrote: post #70
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #41

"How do we tear down parochialism and ego?" First, by not writing rambling, pretentious, navel-gazing, ignorant powerpoints. This would be amazing if it were satire.

I don't see what you see. Would you mind what part of this seems pretentious, navel-gazing, ignorant? ( I think rambling was stated in the article :)

Literally on the second slide: "I’ve done engineering since the turn of the century, and led small teams and biggish orgs."

If that is not navel-gazing or humble bragging, what is?

Re: Egoless Engineering

#205

Post by sethammons »

harshaw wrote: post #4

Random comment: slide 10 talks about using Twisted and then adding a twisted middle layer. 2010 me (or earlier) liked Twisted a ton but not sure I would have foisted this technology on a development team. As a single dev doing all kinds of crazy shit it (sort of) worked but was pretty hard to debug or understand.

Twisted was aptly named. It was the only async python we used around that same time. We moved to Go. It was glorious.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#206

Post by Dansvidania »

zdw wrote: post #123
Dansvidania wrote: post #54

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.

This is pretty close to what's espoused in the Jim Collins books which are descriptive of specific companies but get turned into proscriptive nonsense by people who don't get that. Specifically, in "Built to Last" the ability to hold two contradictory goals is praised as "Genius of the AND", as opposed to "Tyranny of the OR".

I think the discussion gets complicated but I’ll make an attempt at brevity: IMO executives/higher management must be able to juggle/balance _potentially_ contradictory goals. The issue is when they push this responsibility to rank and file employees.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#207

Post by yard2010 »

lysecret wrote: post #196
miki123211 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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 feel like everybody needs to internalize this one (and that notably includes governments and politicians), but it's a really hard problem to solve. If something bad happened, people (whether that be higher-ups, journalists, lawyers or your constituents) expect you t…

Yea Germany quitting all nuclear comes to mind…

Bad example in my honest opinion: Merkel made me believe it's the "worst case scenario" kind of thing - same reason there shouldn't be capital punishment. If you can't afford to pay the price in the worst case scenario you shouldn't take the risk.

That being said, I believe failures and mistakes are simply part of our lives. I would turn the other way and run when someone says that he found the perfect system, in which there are no losses failures and problems. You are always limited by what you don't know you don't know.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#208

Post by DrScientist »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #95
srid wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last paragraph is the interesting one, and here's the full quote in context: One of the reasons Communism eventually failed is that it assumed that we could all accept the philosophy "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The assumption that we could all subjugate our needs to those of others is about as faulty as the assumption that we can subjugate our egos for the betterment of th…

One of the reasons Communism failed was because of incentives. People were not rewarded with more compensation for working harder.

When you mean incentives - do you mean the threat of starvation or the promise of a glittering palace?

Perhaps the disconnect between effort and outcome was a factor, though as discussed above don't under estimate the satisfaction of a job well done.

I think it's more likely to be the centralized decision making, and how the people who make those decisions get chosen. A centralized system where people are choosen based on political ability/connections is likely to lead to corruption and mediocrity.

Note the above problem can happen in other systems as well - I'm not sure US politics is operating well at the moment for example.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#209

Post by Dansvidania »

quonn wrote: post #204
Dansvidania wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what you see. Would you mind what part of this seems pretentious, navel-gazing, ignorant? ( I think rambling was stated in the article :)

Literally on the second slide: "I’ve done engineering since the turn of the century, and led small teams and biggish orgs." If that is not navel-gazing or humble bragging, what is?

I would propose to you that those might be factual statements. I don't really see any self-indulgence in stating where one is coming from when writing a post that is a critique of organizations.

It is a pretty common thing for people giving a talk to introduce themselves to give an idea of the experience on which the information that follows is built, normally at much more length.

I don't think it is uncommon for people on HN to have led small teams or biggish orgs :)

Re: Egoless Engineering

#210

Post by ulyssesv »

MrMcCall wrote: post #109
smitelli wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our expertise in any kind of technical skill that allows us to participate in society is of no importance compared to our becoming a positive member of all the societies/cultures we encounter. This requires becoming a compassionate, empathetic human being via deliberate, honest, self-critical work on the areas of our personality that cause unhappiness to others via selfish negativity. We are the only beings on Earth…

wow, thanks for this.
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