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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#301

Post by Cpoll »

yard2010 wrote: post #207
lysecret wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whi…

> If you can't afford to pay the price in the worst case scenario you shouldn't take the risk.

Which probably precludes leaving your house (or staying in it, for that matter).

Re: Egoless Engineering

#302

Post by stavros »

mrweasel wrote: post #234
iterance wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, but if it makes you at all curious to learn what he means, you night find it rings true - if not for you, certainly people you know. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

I feel like the concept of "protestant work ethic" has been coming up a lot lately. Make me wonder if this is going to be the stoicism of 2025.

I hope not. I, for one, don't view the Protestant work ethic in as positive a light as I do Stoicism.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#303

Post by n4r9 »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #273
n4r9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> all the people swearing how ... Twitter is going to collapse any minute now were all wrong.

This I agree with you on. I was one of the people thinking that it couldn't last long, and I eat my words. It's remarkable how long a stubborn maniacal captain can keep a sinking ship above the water.

> I don't need to like the guy to learn from him.

This is the bit I don't get. Estimates put total revenue at well under $1b this year, compared with over $3b in 2023 and over $4b in 2022 [0]. Cutting the headcount would mitigate some of this, but surely not that much?

It seems likely that the daily active users are also seeing a big hit, although the company has been very guarded about this figure since Musk's takeover. Instead Musk has given platitudes about being the "number one source of news" in some countries. If the DAU was doing well I think he'd be talking about that instead.

[0] https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-statistics/

Re: Egoless Engineering

#304

Post by seadan83 »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #113
nox101 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Huh? US society doesn't foster that. Sounds like you just live in a crappy area or a rich super entitled one. I've never lived in an area where people just left their fast food mess or just left spills. It's never been an attitude fostered anywhere I've lived. To be fair I mainly had experience with the midwest/western USA, maybe the east coast is different.

Maybe some things feel more prevalent. I'd say this is largely confirmation and/or sampling bias. Nobody knows without actually doing the sociology that there are these tendencies. To the extent that we have anecdata, we don't know how much more prevalent such tendencies are. The USA is a big AF place, 400 some million people.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#305

Post by seadan83 »

neolefty wrote: post #240
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!

I've encountered people who sincerely dislike talk of "values", and I think it's because they have seen them used as a flog rather than an inspiration. My guess is that there was a leader in their past who set values but didn't actually follow them. "We dig ditches" means "everybody but me digs ditches". It's hard to be both technically and morally capable, but I think that's what leadership requires. So an approach…

I'm sincerely skeptical of values. "Customers first", except when we are making money off of them. It's in part observing the actual action, and not just the talk. It's funny how guidelines becomes the rubric for a performance review, yet you are promoted or fired for completely different reasons. Too often the values are whatever the hell the management wants to interpret them to be, whenever.

It's perhaps a difference of "We dig ditches", vs "the manager dug a ditch last week, the prior week, and this week we are digging these ditches together." All that can change, but the tract record and the habits speak more than just a motto on the wall.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#306

Post by seadan83 »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #76

Sports metaphors are a bit unpopular in tech, but the teams that win championships in sports have exactly the same dynamics as a good business team and we should be taking a lot more from that school of thought.

What are those dynamics specifically? How often do winning teams actually share those dynamics? Which dynamics are more important? Which dynamics are required but not necessary to win (ie: which dynamics are required to not fail, but not sufficient to win?)

Re: Egoless Engineering

#307

Post by seadan83 »

claytongulick wrote: post #22

Was an interesting discussion, but lost me with the sort of pointless Musk bashing near the end. I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's it was similarly cool to bash anything related to Microsoft. I spent a good bit of time writing a lengthy comment on slashdot about "Why to code". It was fairly poignant and well-received, except at the end of it I took a low effort pot-shot at Microsoft - because it was c…

The bashing wasn't quite pointless. Musk is an example of the exact management style that is the opposite of what is being advocated for in the article. Musk is notorious for being an asshole to his employees.

That you got so distracted by the bashing that you lost sight of the whole point of what you are reading, speaks a bit I think to a defensive reaction and bias on your part. Objectively, people can think of Musk as an asshole, he does have a reputation for a certain management style, and this article is about how that management style is on the wrong side of the fence compared to what they are advocating. The article starts off with a big description of a dysfunctional organization, a variety of CEOs/CTOs run organizations that are hallmarks of that type of dysfuntion - Musk is a very prominent example of that (love him or hate him). Some people rave about the idea of working for Steve Jobs; these are exceptions - survivorship bias. The point of the article is that it is survivor bias, that typically you get dysfunctional organizations instead. So, don't try to emulate these notable and notorious exceptions - it usually doesn't work out well.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#308

Post by seadan83 »

default-kramer wrote: post #90

Kind of tangential, but: > Then one day, our designer broke the build in the middle of the night. Everyone came in the next day and couldn’t work until they figured out what had happened. I've heard this [campfire?] story before. A bad commit happens and now no one can do any work. And I don't understand... Is it really that big of a deal to have to revert to an older commit or comment out the broken code until it ge…

It's not a big deal usually to revert a commit. Sometimes nobody has no idea it was a commit done in some other code repo in some other distant team. It's a problem of visibility; it just turns out the cause was a commit somewhere. Figuring that out can be non-obvious.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#309

Post by wkrsz »

9rx wrote: post #228
wkrsz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Resist the urge to build walls between people/teams/departments Do you often have to deal with support staff reaching out directly to developers on Slack to investigate some problem – without going through "normal" process of creating a ticket that gets assigned? Or even asking for features. Developers generally want to be helpful, but also small requests often turn out to be rabbit holes. And even in best case it…

In fairness, it seems the problem in your case is that the "manager" has built up walls between people, trying to own the work, and in that not allowing you the full context that would allow you to make informed decisions around such asks. "The manager not wanting you to spend time debugging this now" should be a false premise. Knock down the walls and you will know yourself that you shouldn't spend time debugging it…

That makes sense. Either knock down the walls all the way and empower developers to make decisions, or keep the walls and let all requests go through the pipeline.
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