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Egoless Engineering

egoless.engineering

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Re: Egoless Engineering

#61

Post by Micoloth »

agumonkey wrote: post #32
bibabaloo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this so much. I feel like most of my job is playing politics to make sure people are happy and let them feel like they're adding value. Rather than shipping things to users to improve the product. It's honestly so depressing. Strongly considering going back to work at a small startup, to avoid having to work with these layers of middlemen that really add little to no value.

the one who solves this problem will flood the world with a neverending wave of light.. every day I wonder how come I do so few now that I'm paid compared to when I was jobless and hacking prototypes for $0 finding the recipe for creating goal driven, high speed, high quality, frictionless teams is a difficult quest

A difficult quest indeed, but not impossible. Sometimes teams like this do exist.

You know the ones. They founded the trillion-dollar companies you hear about and became billionaires themselves

Re: Egoless Engineering

#62

Post by weitendorf »

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…

People may bring ego into programming because of some kind of pathology (eg the need to always be right or in control) but I think in many cases it's because they truly care about the work. And the problem is not that they truly care, but that there is a mismatch between the amount of influence/control/autonomy they wish to exert on their work and the amount they are actually able to exert on it.

I wasn't there, but my understanding is that essentially all programming in 1971 was done in large corporate settings or universities/research institutions. Those are environments where it's rare for any individual (even someone nominally in charge of a project) to have full creative and technical control over something, and even when they do, it only lasts as long as the project/grant or until their employer puts them on something else.

Compared to the 70s there are effectively no barriers to a passionate engineer starting their own software project as either an open source project or in their own startup, and I'd argue that those are settings where it's actually highly beneficial to bring ego into programming. It's pretty much the same notion as "founder mode" or why BDFL is one of the most popular forms of governance for FOSS.

Personally I'd recommend anybody who "brings ego" to their dayjob to take a stab at FOSS or a startup rather than trying to fit a square peg (caring a lot about their work) into a round hole (the realities of working on large projects).

Re: Egoless Engineering

#63

Post by smitelli »

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…

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, that's what leads to trouble.

I've seen this manifest as long and scathing code reviews, attitudes of "give me that; I'll do it myself," low morale, burnout... I've never found an adequate solution. Sometimes it was my ego that was the catalyst in a situation. I recognize it now, could I have caught it earlier?

Re: Egoless Engineering

#64

Post by thundergolfer »

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…

A read that book a couple years ago and thought it wasn’t very good, probably the worst of the “classic” 20th century texts. The Psychology of engineering is underrated though and someone should really write a new book on it.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#65

Post by MrLeap »

majormajor wrote: post #6
webdevver wrote: post #5

good guide for allowing everyone to walk all over you

If you're a manager, you put this stuff in place in-part so that everyone understands that you will be watching for attempts to walk all over others.

Agree with you. Every successful team I've been on looked like this. Basically everyone just wanted to ship a thing. If that's the baseline norm, anyone motivated by politics or pecking order bullshit glow hot and everyone can see them.

I've seen multiple people fired on completely different teams for trying to walk over people in environments like this. It's amazing what those firings do to everyone else's morale. It skyrockets.

The message becomes clear "balance compassion for self and others and lets ship the thing, or you can leave."

If that messaging threatens someone, they've got work to do.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#66

Post by tbrownaw »

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's also terribly ill-defined.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#67

Post by MichaelZuo »

weitendorf wrote: post #62
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…

People may bring ego into programming because of some kind of pathology (eg the need to always be right or in control) but I think in many cases it's because they truly care about the work. And the problem is not that they truly care, but that there is a mismatch between the amount of influence/control/autonomy they wish to exert on their work and the amount they are actually able to exert on it. I wasn't there, but…

Well the ‘pathology’ is clear, isn’t it?

They’re not actually smart enough to keep track of what every other team is doing, at any point in time.

FOSS works because there’s usually only at most a few dozen balls in the air simultaneously, so someone who believes they can keep track of balls in the air gets by without looking ridiculous.

But that’s just not viable when there are hundreds or thousands of balls in the air simultaneously… their eye muscles literally couldn’t move and focus fast enough.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#68

Post by aylmao »

psunavy03 wrote: post #38

Really goes to show how the whole "I have the hardest job in the company and all y'all are just morons" attitude really needs to die.

I once had the pleasure of working with a guy who probably did have one of the hardest jobs in the company, but also had a very positive attitude towards everyone else.

He was in platform engineering, ensuring the server fleet was it top-shape etc. It wasn't over him to debug OS-level bugs. Very smart guy; if something was broken and nobody else could fix it, you went to him. He'd previously tracked product bugs down to the JVM garbage collector, or RHEL. He told me about the time he tracked a bug in a binary down to the OCaml compiler— if you read the x86 spec, it turns out OCaml wasn't using one of the registers properly and the binaries, under very specific circumstances, were technically buggy.

And on Fridays he hosted an informal get-together, open to anyone in the company, where anyone could go and chat about tech. Show something off, ask about a bug, bring up something cool found on HN— everyone was encouraged to pitch in (although often we wanted to hear him do the talking lol).

People like that are amazing, and I suspect he was that smart precisely cause he knew there was always more to learn; from the machines, and from other people.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#69

Post by smitelli »

aylmao wrote: post #51
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 searc…

Separate from Twitter the company and Twitter the app, there is Twitter the community. That is absolutely dead, rotting, and never coming back to what it once was.

Re: Egoless Engineering

#70

Post by Dansvidania »

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 :)
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