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Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

A lot of organizational problems all reduce to ego. The second you have someone on your team that isn’t empathetic or humble, it tends to lead to major problems.

I’d take someone that’s not that good at their job but has a lot of humility and is willing to learn over arrogant masters (arrogance is the sign of a false master) pretty much any day. The single exception is probably cases where stuff really does just need to happen and happen quickly without mistakes, but ideally you’re managing projects in such a way that you’re not in that situation to begin with (though of course it can happen).

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Sometimes master’s arrogance is pure ego, which is always counter-productive to expertise.

Other times, though, arrogancy is more of a moat that saves time and resources by warding off bikeshedding or harmful suggestions coming from insufficient expertise, it is intended to be broken through if you have an actual point and underneath the personality is open to new ideas and cares about delivering the best outcome. (Moreover, if all you have is expertise, and a clueless but very politically adept team member suggests a Very Bad Idea, you may not just lose time fighting but lose the actual fight—so you’d rather put it down before it grows.)

There’re also all the individual ways of expression where a person may seem arrogant or rude just from their choice of words, whereas in fact it is a sign of friendliness & means of reducing social distance in their world.

I don’t mean this to come across as elitist, but if you don’t know what it’s like to be very good at your work to the point that other peoples decisions are often absurd to you, it’s not hard to confuse it for ego.

Interpreting conflict as ego is exactly the kind of reframing the article talks about and runs the risk of leaving the problem unaddressed.

Had the exact same reaction. There is nothing worse than objectively being right, and seeing very clearly the reasons why everyone isn't agreeing with you, but because they didn't "logic" themselves into those reasons, you can't "logic" them out of them. Over time this absolutely destroys your soul, and everyone simply calling you "egotistical" or something when you're simply trying to do your best and herd cats at the same time is tantamount to gaslighting.

For example, I'm currently dealing with a situation at work where we need a system up and running for a hard deadline next week. This was just dropped on us.

There's a pre-existing, battle-hardened system that meets 90% of requirements and would require a day's worth of minor tweaks for it to work, so my position is that we simply take that route. Everyone else has for some reason convinced themselves that, no, we need to rebuild everything from the ground up. Rebuilding it is apparently my job, even though it just...isn't. At all. The guy whose job it actually is, is, conveniently, the one who is advocating that it be rebuilt, and also pushing for me to do it.

Any sane third party would A) see that I'm right, that we should just re-purpose the old reliable system, and B) the other guy just wants a new shiny toy and wants someone else to deal with the hard work of getting it up and running...a week before it's needed. To be clear, I don't disagree that the old system should be replaced...eventually. Just not literally a week before it's needed. That is madness.

I am (I would hope understandably) annoyed, and haven't exactly kept that a secret. I haven't been a dick, but I've been curt and straight-forward that I think this is direction is just asking for disaster. This has been interpreted as ego, slacking off, etc. The other guy plays other people's emotions with shit ripped right out of How To Win Friends And Influence People. It's absolutely transparent to me and yet it still captures everyone else.

Fuck me for wanting to work smart and not hard, not do someone else's job, standing up for myself, and being honest rather than kissing ass.

I just want to work with adults who can actually put ego aside and do things that make sense. Instead it's just constant manipulation, and pointing it out is the quickest ticket to being accused of doing precisely what you're trying to combat.

Shit like this just makes me want to move to the woods.

I've seen this many times and completely agree. Nearly every issue that I've had managing teams that hasn't easily resolved with communication has come down to ego. I'd go so far as to say that weeding out ego during the hiring process is the most effective thing you can do.

This sounds like you are exactly the manager the article is about: who will not identify poor performance for what it is, and reframes it as an ego/communication/other character problem (usually on the part of the high performer).

This leads to a highly-agreeable, low-performance team.

A team of high-performance individuals with low agreeableness does not constitute a high-performance _team_.

It is possible to be disagreeable in a constructive way, combined with a “disagree-and-commit” attitude where the team’s success is the priority.

However, I agree with you that it is also possible for a bunch of high performing individuals to have toxic personalities and to form a totally dysfunctional team.

You have to hire people that don't have big egos, and are also high performers. Some people will obviously be higher performers than others but without egos communication works. If someone is not performing well, everyone should feel open and trusted enough to communicate about it and find a resolution.

If you hire even one person with a big ego communication breaks down and you are in for a really bad time. Pretty much every high performance team knows this and put a lot of effort at weeding these people out.

A lot of it is also setting a good example once you've made the hire through your team and company culture. Hopefully when someone joins the team they will see how others communicate and carry themselves and it will rub off on them. Everyone should have enough respect and trust in everyone else not to have a huge ego even if they might have had one at their previous job where people treated one another poorly.

> It is possible to be disagreeable in a constructive way, combined with a “disagree-and-commit” attitude where the team’s success is the priority.

Disagreement is absolutely key to making a team work. Disagreeing with humility, and trusting others to take disagreement without having their egos involved, is what is needed. Being overly agreeable happens when you don't trust the other person to take your disagreement without ego.

> highly-agreeable, low-performance

Sounds like the effects when a company is blessed with good business for a long time but fails to adapt to upcoming required changed. I have experienced such places and it's real horror to change this situation.

Seems like the cause for decadence.

> weeding out ego during the hiring process

Quite difficult to achieve, unfortunately: many people that want to be in a position of power do that to satisfy their ego.

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