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Comment by Ethee | Hacker News Reader

To add to this, it feels to me like SWEs have the biggest egos as well without a related checking mechanism. In other engineering disciplines getting something wrong very often comes back to you as the engineer, in SWE it feels like there are so many abstractions people like to point fingers at instead. "It's not my code that's the issue, its X implementation's fault" the amount of times I've heard something similar to this is too often.

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100%. I don't know what to call it other than coddling, but there was very, very, very, little true responsibility. Safety in the herd: don't let the people who got the stuff done get too up in their heads about it, via their design had issues at the end of the day, and conversely, if I did deliver something of low quality, it was someone else's design that was the problem.

All the firing BS in from mid-2022 in this industry was poorly motivated, and a lot of the initial wave was used for settling political scores, and there's a lot still there. But I hope in the long run it engenders a stronger sense of needing to have some sort of shared reality and responsibility.

You might be right that SWEs have the biggest egos compared to other engineering disciplines. When I've worked with mechanical and electrical engineers, that was the case.

But where I work now, the biggest egos are easily the people around the SWEs - especially architects and product owners. Is that not the case where you work?

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