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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#271

Post by kubanczyk »

pjmorris wrote: post #45

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…

My humble experience is different. There is no surer way to create shitty, incoherent code, flaky tests, architecture mistakes, and Rube Goldberg machines, than when trying to satisfy various people in your org.

Junior stays a junior in my book until they learn to "satisfy code" or to bring elegance instead of primarily satisfying specific people.

If Henry Ford was listening to customers, he would start breeding a faster horse. That perfectly shows that ego can have a good side.

Re ego, I think maybe the vocabulary choice is misaligned here. Anyway, these days, "team player" is becoming a sarcastic innuendo.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#272

Post by dpc_01234 »

sfink wrote: post #121
dpc_01234 wrote: post #34

The stab at Musk seems out of place. You might not like him, or his politics, but he took over and reformed a slow and bloated place, and despite all the doomsayers Twitter is still working and IMO better than before. And he has a solid track record of delivering: finance app, electric cars, rockets. Sure he over-promises and under-delivers, sometimes borderline lies, etc. but there is a huge amount of wisdom behind…

It was illustrating narcissistic personality disorder. Debating whether or not Musk delivers, or what personality traits might be behind delivering or not, is irrelevant to whether or not Musk illustrates NPD. It is easy to find examples of his behavior that matches [a layman's understanding of] NPD, so it seems fair. Saying that Musk's personality resembles NPD doesn't say whether he is or is not effective at some t…

It has nothing to do with the rest of generally good article. It's just a forced personal stab at disliked public figure. Ironically quite the opposite of egoless. Your politics are a big chunk of your ego. If you can't leave them aside and when dealing with technical stuff, then it's very much egocentric. Which surprise surprise is typically the case.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#273

Post by dpc_01234 »

n4r9 wrote: post #48
dpc_01234 wrote: post #34

The stab at Musk seems out of place. You might not like him, or his politics, but he took over and reformed a slow and bloated place, and despite all the doomsayers Twitter is still working and IMO better than before. And he has a solid track record of delivering: finance app, electric cars, rockets. Sure he over-promises and under-delivers, sometimes borderline lies, etc. but there is a huge amount of wisdom behind…

What is the wisdom, in your opinion? Revenue and user ship are steadily decreasing according to most estimates. Glitches and outages started happening immediately. Third party apps have been exiled. Hate speech and misinformation has surged. From the outside it seems like the ship is gradually, painfully sinking.

Lean and focused execution, quick iteration, over promise and under deliver (yes, in business it pays as much as engineers hate it), most people are actually a drag to productivity. Specifically with Twitter he drastically cut the head count and cost and all the people swearing how irreplaceable people being fired were and his Twitter is going to collapse any minute now were all wrong.

Unlike most people praising the idea of egoless I don't need to like the guy to learn from him.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#274

Post by kubanczyk »

MrMcCall wrote: post #114
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…

The failure in this paragraph is that our highest and most important ability as human beings is to self-evolve ourselves out of our selfish ego into its selfless version. That paragraph is as completely wrong in its understanding of human nature as a paragraph can be. Yes, it is difficult, but we are all capable of choosing to put ourselves through this self-evolution of our ego's vices into their corresponding virtu…

First of all, be it "self-modification". We all have some hopes about that, if we care enough. (Self-evolution implies playing with genes as species, which is a dangerous business.)

As I personally caught the last chance to see a country promoting the selfless version, my stance is that the quote is spot on.

We all have some hopes about altruism, if we care enough. But then you look around and 90% of people don't care enough. By default we want dollars to buy ourselves coca-cola and american jeans. That's how everyone was in kindergarten, and maybe <10% will attempt self-modification after they grow up. That's not enough for a system to work.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#275

Post by dpc_01234 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #42
dpc_01234 wrote: post #34

The stab at Musk seems out of place. You might not like him, or his politics, but he took over and reformed a slow and bloated place, and despite all the doomsayers Twitter is still working and IMO better than before. And he has a solid track record of delivering: finance app, electric cars, rockets. Sure he over-promises and under-delivers, sometimes borderline lies, etc. but there is a huge amount of wisdom behind…

And he'd be even more successful if he didn't insist on also being a complete, utter egotistical asshole. Leave whether or not you agree with his policy positions aside for a moment; it's fairly obvious that the guy is a complete shitheel of a person who's basically the dictionary definition of "brilliant asshole." Steve Jobs seems to have poisoned the brains of whole huge swathes of people into thinking that "being…

First, I have no idea if he's a "utter egotistical asshole". Never met the guy, and I assume that most people hating on him formed opinion of him by consuming heavily negatively biased sources.

However, I assume he is some type of an "asshole". And "he'd be even more successful" if he wasn't is just very wrong, IMO. From my experience the top of any organization is completely overrun by assholes. Some smart, some dumb, some more moral, some less, but generally assholes. Being an asshole is selected for in hierarchical organizations and simply required. Part of the reason why leftists dream about some socialist utopia, when attempted in practice is ruined by some asshole(s) taking over power and turning the social utopia into totalitarian distopia.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#276

Post by Aeolun »

rglynn wrote: post #167
Aeolun wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to the countryside and be amazed. Exactly why people litter to that extend 20km from civilization escapes me. But yeah, most people just bring their trash home. For those interested, Visas are really easy to obtain as long as someone is willing to hire you.

How is the work culture in Japan these days? Is it possible to find a company that doesn't have their peculiar (read "awful") work culture?

If they’re willing to hire you when you’re overseas they are generally reasonable. Or trying to exploit cheap labor, but then it’ll be abundantly clear and you can just say no.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#277

Post by beryilma »

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…

I really believe in the ownership model, which is why I hate the Jira ticket-based development model so much.

There was a time in my company where a single developer, who owned the product, would ship an entire app in a year. Now we have a "cross-team" where you have to constantly manage all feedback and try to shut down stupid ideas from getting into the product. I really hate design by committee: all talk and no ownership.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#278

Post by Spivak »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #259
didibus wrote: post #158

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…

The main thing a good manager can do is act as a wall between the engineers and everyone above them, which is hard to do politically because it exposes a whole subtree of the org chart as useless.

I think that's a little myopic because that subtree is providing the comfortable fiction that you can just go into work, do engineering, go home, and get a paycheck. I'm not saying I don't want to blow my brains out dealing with them but it's comparably a small amount of pain in return from being completely insulated from all of the realities of operating a business and the messiness that entails.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#279

Post by oscillonoscope »

itishappy wrote: post #93
oscillonoscope wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely convinced that ego-less is even a better way of doing things. Sure, the ego can go overboard but it also gives a sense of drive and direction. It isn't just the bad stuff. Without it, there's nobody taking ownership of the design or it's just designed by an apathetic committee.

Pride and passion can exist without ego. I view this as appreciating things for what they are, not who they belong to.

I don't really agree with that unless you redefine the ego as being synonymous with 'being egotistical' or 'sinful pride'. You need a sense of self to feel pride and something more than base passion.

For practical purposes, if you don't acknowledge how good and bad behaviors can both spring from the same base emotions/thought processes then it's harder to grow out of the bad behaviors. You need to be able to reframe how the ego interacts with your work, not just try to kill it off.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#280

Post by ariosto »

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…

Interesting how you described the scenario quite accurately that is currently playing out and the current tech company of 5-8 years I am at.
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