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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#51

Post by aylmao »

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…

Musk aside, I personally don't think Twitter is working better than before.

On a technical level at least, there's times when it makes my phone warm up. There's random layout bugs, and things not rendering properly. At some point ads started opening on press-down, as opposed to a proper tap interaction (press-down, don't move, press-up). Now I accidentally open ads all the time.

Moreover, it's slower. Media and search specifically take longer to load. I work on web performance, so I very much noticed that suddenly one day things started loading more slowly for me. I thought it might be some temporary issue with their CDN or bad change messing up the way they schedule network calls, but it just stayed that way.

Perhaps you mean Twitter the company, in which case I don't know, maybe it's making more profit now and in that sense "works better"— but Twitter the app in my experience definitely doesn't.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#53

Post by aylmao »

pphysch wrote: post #50
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…

> 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…

Claiming that the "egoless" crowd is egotistic, because "they want everyone to think like them" is like claiming the "tolerance" crowd is intolerant, because "they don't tolerate intolerance".

In my experience, It's both non-factual (ego-less people are the first to learn from others when poised with new ideas) and short-sighted.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#54

Post by Dansvidania »

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.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#55

Post by claytongulick »

simonw wrote: post #33
zomglings wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where was the Musk bashing? I didn't see that in the slides.

I had to look pretty hard to find the Musk bashing - there's a (face redacted) photo of Musk carrying his sink around on the slide about narcissistic personality disorder.

The slide that has an iconic, well known photo of Musk, where his face is scratched out and "screw this dumbass" is written on top is pretty easy to find.

"Redacted" is a very polite way of describing what the author did.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#56

Post by Dansvidania »

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…

this really must be common. I myself could have written a similar (less well put) summary of my last two jobs.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#57

Post by bithive123 »

pphysch wrote: post #50
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…

> 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…

How predictable the ego's self-defensive reactions are. Merely encountering the suggestion that the ego is a necessary servant but a terrible master and it yelps "I'm not an egotist, you're the egotist!"

Re: Egoless Engineering

#59

Post by thanksgiving »

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 tasks I sucked at and therefore didn't enjoy s lot more because as she said, it will help me improve.

Long story short, I didn't improve. I just got frustrated and I quit. I guess it was all fine from the leader's perspective as her team stayed the way she wanted anyway.

I went down this tangent to remind people that when things are going well, we can say a lot of things that are nice like kumbaya my lord but when things are tough is when our ideals and morals are actually put to the test.

When poop hits the fan, will leadership throw someone under the bus? Will team members feel like leadership will throw people under the bus? Kind of a difficult question that we can't answer until we are there and at that point it is too late.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#60

Post by aylmao »

spuds wrote: post #43
aylmao wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 was risky— if it didn't pay off by the end of the cycle, per the way the bureaucracy worked, it wouldn't be great.

The manager very much tried his best to protect them against this. In fact I don't think it paid that cycle, but the project remained active until it did eventually pay off. Shoutout to managers like this. The easy route is to act like a messenger for higher-ups, and never put your own skin in the game— but there's some out there that want to do what's best, not what's easy.

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