> “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 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'.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Kids are awkward as fuck these days. Humans need to be socialised.
Your Oh So Humble Ego has you thinking there's some ulterior motive to me typing 3 letters instead of 20.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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PSA: Please don't be like Marvin.
That concerns cleaners too. Ego is a universal currency and a strong element of the human nature.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Ne supra crepidam? "not beyond the shoe"
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.
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.
> 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
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.
I think this is what AIs will call human slop :)
The irony is that the article isn't humble at all.
Aeglaecia•2mo ago
sesm•2mo ago