Comment by drdaeman
5 days ago
> The following is a short, incomplete list of typical statements we as developers might say or hear at work. If you parse them more precisely each one is an attempt at self-justification: […]
> “We should start using this new tool in our pipeline.”
> “We should never use that new tool in our pipeline.”
I don’t get what’s “wrong” with those two. There’s no justification (self- or otherwise) whatsoever in any of those statements, not even a hint of an attempt. Justification, as I understand it, requires a “why” (possibly, only suggestively implied, but nonetheless present in some form) and I see absolutely none, just a call to action.
If someone sees it, can you please explain?
People who make these statements may or may not be ego driven. Not: everybody who says one of these sentences is 100% ego driven.
There are valid reasons to suggest use or avoidance of a tool, but there are also ego driven reasons. And everybody who has worked in any organizational context knows that. That guy may suggest to use Excel for a job that he knows require databases, but he is a wizard in Excel and hates to work with databases for some reason. So the ego driven part here is to instead of considering the needs of the project, he considers his own needs and potentially pushes them more than would be good.
Or the guy who says we should never use $X because he had been bitten by a thing programmed with $X in a hot summer night in the late 90s and he hasn't had a look at $X ever since. While it is okay to phrase such bad experiences, insisting on it for a whole team without real rational reasons or proper research can again be ego driven.
Or the person that just wants to suggest a new tool so they look as if they contributed without even having tested the tool themselves. The reason for the suggestion isn't that it would help the project, but one of gaining social capital.
Note that many of these people wouldn't even be aware of that, to themselves they would have perfectly fine reasons why they said what they said.
> programmed with $X in a hot summer night in the late 90s and he hasn't had a look at $X ever since
Oh, I’m all in agreement with this but there’s another side to this:
Programmer worked with a product from the company back in ‘00 enough to know it is a piece of shit and the whole company culture is bullshit and band-aid fixes. They know they can still find similar bugs to the ones they reported, just using the new shiny API that got tacked on.
Taking into account the context before the bullet pointed "typical statements": there are developers who seemingly like to gatekeep. They get to feel like wizards in their towers with their dusty books and potions [...] My point is our egos can “leak” in so many ways that it takes diligence to catch it let alone correct it.
It's a bit of a Chesterton's Fence situation. The wholesale statements themselves don't point to having an understanding of the pipeline, only that the person making it supposedly knows better than everyone there and is self-justifying or "leaking" their ego instead of engaging in discussion about it
personally it has become clear that discussion involving good vs bad is inherently relative to personal frames of reference. in this logic , usage of 'should' degenerates an argument to a personal judgement.
a more professional and unbiased statement would be 'it seems to me that using tool X would mitigate problem Y in our pipeline, because of Z.' this amended statement maximises objectivity compared to the original.
but nobody is gonna spend their whole life delivering extended objective justifications when 'we should start using this tool' suffices for the most part. so i too don't see the value of questioning such benign conversational aspects.
Agree. I rather work with people who suggest stuff ("We should start using this new tool in our pipeline") than with people who ever suggest anything (typically they don't care).
However, that is not the context that the referred to statements are in. This is about the kind of statement that is more quip like, with an air of pretentiousness.
They are similar to the other examples, but more subtle. One could more easily tell the difference if heard than if trying to parse it from written form.
If the words are only read as is -- linearly as many articles are -- the reader will read in the context of personal experience (ego cognition, if you will), not the context the author was trying to provide -- which requires reading recursively. As someone commented here, it is difficult to try and write about these topics; that's a big reason why. Imo, thats why many of the comments here are reading this in wildly different ways.
In a way, it's a meta-practice in what the article talks about, using humility and empathy to approach angles the ego is not yet familiar with or use to going down.
I didn't see it either at first. I had to go back to see if I had missed context. The author even tried to provide instructions for reading the statements and says "If you parse them more precisely" that I had myself discarded on a couple reads.
I think by including those, the author is saying that we tend to think that what is best for us (this tool is great/awful for my work) is also best for everyone else. It might also be a case of 'I understand this tool better/worse than others so if it's adopted I'll become more/less important' but that's a little more of a conscious thought process than what I think the article is pointing towards.
I also think the whole thing is written in a deliberately accusatory tone to provoke discussion among the target audience - rather than say that 'the ego wants to be at the center' the author could just as well have said 'our model of what other people know skews to be too similar to what we ourselves know'.
IMO team X needs or wants something and tries to get the other teams to accept it too. The other teams might not need it and in fact it might make life more complicated and difficult. If anyone objects then the last resort is "best practice" which is an incantation that appeals to leadership and everyone who doesn't really know how the sausage gets made in the various teams.
It's ego to think you know everything and that your needs are paramount - but it's not ego to try to make life better for everyone.
....and that's the problem because sometimes you ARE right and sometimes you're not.
even if someone IS ego driven, if the justification is scientific or evidence based then It doesnt Matter too much. Science is the antidote to ego, not morality
Unfortunately that is not true. Science is made by humans. And we humans have egos. A big enough ego will make us not see evidence even if it hits us in the face.
And that's why the proverb about scientific progress goes "science advances one funeral at a time" :)
CS Lewis rolling in his grave rn.