Ego, empathy, and humility at work | Hacker News Reader

Ego, empathy, and humility at work

matthogg.fyi

174 pointsmrmatthogg59 comments

> 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?

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'.

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.

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

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

And that's why the proverb about scientific progress goes "science advances one funeral at a time" :)

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.

CS Lewis rolling in his grave rn.

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.

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.

> Gatekeeping is weak unless you've been hired to literally guard a gate.

What a silly argument. So money is the only valid reason to guard a gate? Many people guard gates for the simple reason that they believe they should be guarded.

Gatekeeping itself does fuel some of the toxicity, but much of that toxicity also just comes from internet comments being more like performing for an audience than talking to a person.

Like all good problems, the answer to gatekeeping is "depends".

What he talks about with the initialisms and such, essentially using shibboleths to exclude others is a bad form of gatekeeping. When addressing an audience that may not know everything, it's best to lead off with a definition, then use the initialism from then on.

For example: "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is the way a lot of devices acquire addresses on the network. The DHCP handshake is composed of four actions. etc." instead of "DHCP is how IPs are assigned: DISCOVER/OFFER/REQUEST/ACK".

Both statements say mostly the same thing, but the second is really informationally dense and hides information behind terms.

However

Asking how to perform juggle combos in Street Fighter is not an appropriate topic in a discussion about how to implement DHCP. We should be able to tell that guy to stand outside.

So part of a gatekeeper's duty should be to recognize when it is appropriate to bounce a person and when someone is trying to unfairly exclude others.

Thanks, Matt!

This is a difficult thing to talk about, and I’m glad you did.

I wish could say we age out of this through experience, but I feel like it goes this way: either people respect your experience or they don’t and either you respect your own ignorance or you don’t.

As I’ve gotten older, I forget shit all of the time, and don’t keep up with all of the latest. Then I do things and others do things that are terrible, and I don’t do or say anything about it. I can’t convince anyone anymore that what they’re doing is terrible, and I can’t stop the terrible behavior in myself as I get worse, because I can’t keep up.

why should experts dumb down their interpersonal discussion for perusal by the unaware ? if gatekeeping anything is weak , why is it ok to gatekeep virtue by stating that empathy and humility are obviously virtuous ? honestly some of the article's points are good but anyone capable of understanding and implementing these practices was probably not that egotistical to start with. I don't particularly enjoy the focus on dev egoism when the manager class is by design de-empathized (iirc commanding another human intrinsically down regulates empathy). anyway all of this ramble is definitely egotistical itself and that's intentional - everything is indeed so much bigger than us as individuals , without some form of separation we are liable to be subsumed.

Will Storr would say that the author is playing a status game of virtue.

>Simply mashing a few letters together can be empowering for ourselves while being exclusionary for others. It’s an artifact—albeit a small one—of our egos. We know what the technobabble means. Our justified place in the universe is maintained.

Your Oh So Humble Ego has you thinking there's some ulterior motive to me typing 3 letters instead of 20.

Dialect formation is also an instinct when forming close connections with any group of people. The prevalence of acronyms in workplaces is probably due in larger part to collective rather than individual ego formation.

Yeah I kinda stopped reading there. The author’s pov seem quite skewed by a few experiences and making the wrong correlations

I did get the feeling that all of these "problematic" behaviors were simply about saving everyone's time.

This doesn’t read as all or nothing to me. If you’re communicating with somebody who doesn’t understand the acronyms (or even someone who might not understand the acronyms), and you still do it, then yeah, it’s a signal that there may be something underneath the surface there.

Obviously if we’re all familiar then go right ahead and save us all some time, but it’s worth considering how something as benign as using acronyms might subtly exclude people from the conversation for no good reason. The value of the article is in recognising this.

I'm fine excluding people who can't ask a very simple question when they encounter an acronym they don't recognise. I'm also fine excluding people who think they're owed something because they're ignorant.

It's always a challenge to write on topics like empathy and ego because of how heavily they are steeped in your own experiences, both professional and personal, and especially to do so without falling into the same ego-driven traps you describe.

What experience did the author have, for example, to link his various examples to both gatekeeping and calling people "wizards and towers with their dusty books and potions"? I imagine there's something behind that.

The risk, or challenge, is that you take your own ego-driven experiences and try to make them generic, maybe redefining a few terms along the way for convenience. Someone who has had a run-in with someone more experienced, for example, and miscalculated it as ego or gatekeeping. There's nothing wrong with that as a lived experience but of course, empathy goes both ways and that includes understanding why exactly someone may be 'gatekeeping', which is what this post seems to be about, really.

Daily standup being absolutely useless has nothing to do with ego.

People in tech keep complaining about daily standup don't know that is a common practice in pretty much every line of work. It's just a team synchronisation moment.

It’s a common practice to describe who farted and how loud yesterday?

That's very surprising to me. Even in tech it became common only a decade or so ago. I don't know any other industry where it is common, except the military and the daily morning flag raising/morning formation...

Used to do a daily stand up at the big box store I worked in.

Last year’s numbers, today’s goal, what needed to go out, etc.

I always wondered what they thought I could do about the numbers. People are either coming to buy stuff or they are not.

A meeting with that periodicity (or a multiple of it) is common on shift-based jobs that oversee constant operations.

It's not common on any other line of work... well, except for software development, that is almost universally single-shift, non-operational, and some people insist has exactly the same needs as overseeing patients in a hospital.

Yes, it makes sense when there is a "hand off" of continuing operations to the next shift.

For something like software, being produced by ICs or even pairs, a fixed daily meeting is much more likely (at least in my experience) to become a ceremony[1] over time even if it is occasionally or initially beneficial.

[1] was wanting to find a link but could not. I'm using this word in the sense that Tom DeMarco used it in Peopleware.

Ah, you're right, handover procedures between shifts.

I've been on daily standups for groups of people who weren't on a team. It was like a floor's #random slack channel.

Depends how you come at it.

Useless because you personally think it's a waste of your time, or you're above it? Definitely ego, it's not all about you.

Useless because it's poorly executed or mismanaged? Perhaps not. Things are always able to be improved.

Both can be true at the same time. And there’s nothing wrong with not dancing in the circus just because everybody does.

I think it does but both ways tbh. A lot of the times they exist because people think managements job is to have meetings, like people think a developer's job is to write code. We are well aware that both of these job's have far more than this, but these are easy things to track and if a software guy is writing code, people assume that is productive and it is often the same for management having meetings.

It 'can'(strong emphasis) also give the manager a sense of importance and power or control through micro-management. The key is that the manager should be able to realise when the stand-up is not needed or has done its job on a particular day and end the meeting early, or adjust frequency based on how everything is progressing. That is the manager should side-line the ego and put the function of the meeting over their own feelings of control or power.

I don't believe armchair diagnostics is a productive way to inspire change in others. Even if you happened to be correct, which I won't opine on, it's using pop-psych to make people malleable rather than empower them to growth.

>Breaking News! Developers Have Egos!

That concerns cleaners too. Ego is a universal currency and a strong element of the human nature.

I think the article mixes different things.

> That’s the way we’ve always done it.

That's not ego, that's laziness. At least based on experience, engineers are reluctant to change simply because they feel comfortable enough with their codebases.

> Assign it to me. Nobody else will be able to fix it.

Yep, that looks like ego.

> This feature is too important to assign to the junior dev.

Bad communication style perhaps? There are features that require a senior to drive them. What's wrong with that? Sure thing, I wouldn't phrase it as the author, but I don't see the ego anywhere. I see transparency and being upfront.

> We should start using this new tool in our pipeline

Again, perhaps it's just bad communication style. An engineer that says this is someone who cares enough to suggest things, even when nobody is asking. I know engineers who never suggest (or gatekeep) anything, they simply don't care

> That’s the way we’ve always done it.

I'd read this - "I decided some time ago that's how it's done and none should question nor know about the reasons". Not explaining the reasons (if they are not clear) is gatekeeping.

Not a developer myself, I work in finance and work with developers from time to time. From my experience the issue is developers assume because they have some sense of self evaluated expertise in whatever they do they also can extrapolate that expertise in things they have absolutely no clue about.

I thought there was a name for this(cant find it), but its not just devs, its most people with a deep technical expertise.

I remember watching a youtube video about this, where they used Neil deGrasse Tyson as a case study. Showing cases of him confidently saying wrong things in fields he's not very knowledgeable in.

>I thought there was a name for this(cant find it)

Ne supra crepidam? "not beyond the shoe"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_supra_crepidam

In my experience, this is more or less anyone with graduate education or engineering experience. It's a common failure mode to go from "I am an expert in X" to "being an expert in X means I can solve all the world's problems."

> As developers we’re more susceptible to letting our egos run free.

Kind of funny because it shows a complete lack of empathy. Comes after the author claims:

> In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious virtues we aspire to

If this was the case why are so few people humble and empathetic?

I see no purpose in having empathy at work when I've basically lost all agency to the tyranny of the failed-developer-turned-PM, the spiteful C-suite that sees you as a cost center, and the very obvious effort to not let professionals do their jobs.

Road goes both ways. If you don't respect me I don't respect you. It only seems that this problem exists in tech where nepo baby C/VP and PMs deem you unworthy of any kind of respect. Strange how I never had this problem when I worked construction.

Empathy and humility are ok when shown by behavior, not when used as a "manipulative card" against "ego". E.g., when the "empathy card" is used to manipulate others in "you're an ego-driven person that always knows better than me". In my opinion there are less confrontative ways, e.g., a team lead handling the frictions with procedures, diplomacy, and other soft skills.

Surprisingly, Anne Rice novels do a good job of discussing experience, respect, and power dynamics. For anyone interested in this subject, I recommend her Vampire series.

Counterexample to give stark contrast, but in the field of aviation:

The Most DISTURBING Pilot I've Ever Investigated! https://youtu.be/DyY4AtpQLy8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlink_Flight_5719

PSA: Please don't be like Marvin.

Thank God my managers are not like this. I'am work from Huawei

Few times I wasn't that sure that this wasn't written by a version of New Age Bullshit Generator.

I think this is what AIs will call human slop :)

The irony is that the article isn't humble at all.

Tell the CEO & COO

start a business than both are you :)

“A guide for people with Autism”

You're preaching to the can stacking choir.

Jokes aside, so many "guides" and analyses found online these days seem to be just common sense if you're an adult.

But if it helps people who do not seem to possess it, I guess that's a good thing?

How old are you? It might be common sense to you, because you grew up at a different time with different parenting.

It is probably a combination of the over-representation of the socially incompetent on the internet, and the increasing prevalence of social incompetence due to the isolation induced by technology and modern ways of being.

Kids are awkward as fuck these days. Humans need to be socialised.

As someone who grew up before cell phones even existed, kids have always been awkward as fuck. (I don't disagree with the general subtext of your comment re: the negative impact of isolation, though)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com