"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.
Egoless Engineering
41–50 of 309 posts
Re: Egoless Engineering
#42The 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 an asshole to others" == "success," because it shows you're powerful enough to not have to deal with the consequences or something.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#43Really 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…
Recently, I was thinking plenty about trust within organizations, and it resonated with me too. I've worked at a few startups and have seen high-trust environments lead to a lot of productivity, comfort and success— and the opposite for low-trust startups. In general, I think startups tend to lean towards high-trust, especially when they're small and early, but I was part of a 15-person one that was quite the opposit…
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 might make a mistake.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#44Really 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…
> 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.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#45An 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 to an ego-invested programmer? A team-player programmer.
The team player sees the software product as a team effort and a team achievement. Error reports and reviews and questions become team inputs to help improve the product, not threatening attacks to derail progress.
...
But after further thought, this notion begins to unravel. 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.
...
A system that works will have to acknowledge fundamental human traits and work within the bounds they create. And ego is one of those traits.
"
- 'Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering', Robert Glass, 2002Re: Egoless Engineering
#46Is there a video of the talk somewhere ? I prefer recording over slides.
Unfortunately no, I've only done it as a private event within a company so far.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#47I joined my current company to work on Growth. I was added to Gitlab, and for the first 3 months I pushed all my commits as MRs that my manager reviewed and merged into main. Standard procedure.
One day I needed to get a hotfix out to prod STAT. I pinged my manager to accept the MR and explained all the testing I've done. He said I could just accept it myself if I wanted it up now.
Turns out I've had the permission to push to prod since day one. The only red tape I had to cross was my own confidence.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#48The 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.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#49The section on Deriving the Equation for a Disaster is perfect.
After being acquired (~80 person startup) we were part of 1000 person org.
As the CTO of the acquired company, coming into a larger org, I was front row to this type of infighting.
Especially when the CPO wants direct ROI, and less worried about creating compound value.
Re: Egoless Engineering
#50An 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…
> 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 the same "ego"/perspective. Only in this bizarre fantasy world can we move past the ego and focus on "objective reality". Ayn Rand is an example of this worldview.