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   URI   Ego, empathy, and humility at work
       
       
        wiseowise wrote 2 min ago:
        Daily standup being absolutely useless has nothing to do with ego.
       
        000ooo000 wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
        >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.
       
          eucyclos wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
          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.
       
        N_Lens wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
        “A guide for people with Autism”
       
          4gotunameagain wrote 1 min ago:
          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?
       
        drdaeman wrote 2 hours 16 min 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?
       
          DuperPower wrote 19 min ago:
          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
       
          t43562 wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
          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.
       
          1659447091 wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
          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
       
          Aeglaecia wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
          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.
       
          eucyclos wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
          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'.
       
        Aeglaecia wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
        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.
       
       
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