I wasn't there, but my understanding is that essentially all programming in 1971 was done in large corporate settings or universities/research institutions. Those are environments were it's rare for any individual (even someone nominally in charge of a project) to have full creative and technical control over something, and even when they do, it only lasts as long as the project/grant or until their employer puts them on something else.
Compared to the 70s there are effectively no barriers to a passionate engineer starting their own software project as either an open source project or in their own startup, and I'd argue that those are settings where it's actually highly beneficial to bring ego into programming. It's pretty much the same notion as "founder mode" or why BDFL is one of the most popular forms of governance for FOSS.
Personally I'd recommend anybody who "brings ego" to their dayjob to take a stab at FOSS or a startup rather than trying to fit a square peg (caring a lot about their work) into a round hole (the realities of working on large projects).
I think we've all implemented some clever trick in our code that we started to feel proud of. It's hard not to do. Even if you just contribute to a small piece of the project, you still might have those instances of pride. We're all human, and it's fine to take a little motivation from your accomplishment. But hold on loosely. Be critical of your baby and be willing to throw it out if it isn't the best approach.
I used to really like driver/embedded programming because it seemed like there was a 'best approach' or idiomatic solution for most problems that eliminated ego. It felt more like electrical engineering. I often felt programmers working on higher level software treated their work like a personal art project and that turned me off from it.
There is nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, nor in recognizing that you might actually be more knowledgable/skilled/correct in some particular matter than someone else and communicating that to them - as long as that sense of knowledge/skill/correctness is not misplaced, not expressed cruelly, and the actual reasoning is explained. To me, that is "good ego". But if someone thinks they always know better than someone else in all cases or isn't even willing to open discourse/explain why that's "bad ego".
I guess to me, the sentiment expressed in this article is one that I feel strays too far into the realm of toxic positivity or crabs-in-a-bucket where merely being opinionated or passionate about your work is a bad thing because sometimes other people get their feelings hurt when you explain why their approach won't work well. I just don't think being egoless is necessarily good. I certainly wouldn't sit there smiling while something I worked on for years got destroyed by other people, because it'd be impolite or egotistical to point out that their destroying something. But of course, there is a difference between something actually getting ruined, and having a meltdown because someone started naming variable in snake_case instead of camelCase.
So yeah you need ego. That said, it must also be tempered with the reality of needing to compromise enough to satisfice all stakeholders (including both technical and business stakeholders of all the different flavors). The beautiful thing about software engineering though, is there is a reasonable amount of objective facts, metrics and tradeoffs, that given a critical mass of sufficiently skilled and mature engineers, common ground tends not to be too hard to align on. Or at least, far easier than to get a non-technical stakeholder to understand the long-term implications of a bad decision.
To make the best work you have to take pride in it. This work has my name on it, customers will use it, I want to improve their lives not make them worse.
The developers who come after me will need to assimilate this work. They'll need to build on it. I want to make their work a joy, not a burden.
Do I take pride in what I do. It's not enough that the code just compiles.
Pride is balanced by humility. I'm prepared to defend my choices (with well informed, well experienced) answers. But the choices I make are always a balance of upside and downside. And over my career things have changed which reweights some of those decisions. I'm open to external input from others because I want the result to be good not me to be right.
I want to be proud of my work. But I'm humble enough to let others help me to improve it.
[The above is my goal, sometimes I fall short]
There are 19 pairs of vice/virtue pairs in the ego. We can only decrease our ego's vice-eous tendencies by increasing our consciously manifesting compassion to everyone we encounter. It also helps to contact our Creator and ask for guidance. It awaits us in Its Unfathomable Lonliness to beseech it for help to begin and then see out the complete transformation of our ego into a selfless, servant of the happiness of others and the societies/cultures we inhabit.
That Path of Loving Service is the key to happiness, and is the opposite of narcissistic attitudes and bahaviors.
There is nothing mysterious about the ego; it's just that willful ignorance is one of our heart's vices, and its purpose is to deny that each person's ego transformation is not only possible, but the source of joy and community uplift, and is our free will to choose love or any of its many selfish opposites.
The same sadly has happened with confusion of the word selfless (having no concern with self) with unselfish (concerned with others before oneself) and altruistic (unselfish concern for others' well being).
Personally, I don't see any incompatibility between having a sense of self and healthy self-esteem and having compassion.
Indeed, I see a major incompatibility between actual selflessness and universal compassion - as selflessness would preclude compassion for oneself.
You're right about the negativity of the ego's self-important nature via conceit and egotism. Those are negative traits of the self. The goal of self-improvement is to become a consciously virtuous person who puts the needs of the whole in its proper place, and doesn't indulge their selfish vices, which always cause unhappiness to those around them.
Positive self-esteem, when due to being a compassionate person, is a necessary component of the self-evolving person, because honesty in grokking the truth of ourselves is an important part of our growth.
And, remember, universal compassion also includes being compassionate to our own self, and as we increase our virtuosness, we are ever more beloved by the universe, itself. The happiness on that path is not known by but a small minority of the world's cultures/societies.
Sorry I'm not writing so clearly this late in the day, but know that the ego we have a birth is mostly selfish. It takes a definite turn towards the light to begin the process of purifying it by degrees from egotist to self-actualized bearer of compassion. It's a true fight, fighting against our own fallabilities and weaknesses and selfishnesses. But it's the most worthy struggle we will ever undertake.
They’re not actually smart enough to keep track of what every other team is doing, at any point in time.
FOSS works because there’s usually only at most a few dozen balls in the air simultaneously, so someone who believes they can keep track of balls in the air gets by without looking ridiculous.
But that’s just not viable when there are hundreds or thousands of balls in the air simultaneously… their eye muscles literally couldn’t move and focus fast enough.
End user software by comparison, has not really been successful in the FOSS model. There have been many attempts, but they perenially lag behind commercial offerings, and thus primarily see adoption from the ideologically motivated and/or very cost sensitive users.
I've seen this manifest as long and scathing code reviews, attitudes of "give me that; I'll do it myself," low morale, burnout... I've never found an adequate solution. Sometimes it was my ego that was the catalyst in a situation. I recognize it now, could I have caught it earlier?
We are the only beings on Earth that can self-evolve, by using our conscience and mind to evaluate of our actions to find out where we are causing unhappiness. Then, we must engage our free will to choose to be better, and do the things that help us to grow spiritually out of the immature, selfish mammals we begin as, into the humanitarians that result from reaching our highest potential.
The most destructive lie we let our minds tell us is that this transformation is not possible, or is the figment of someone's imagination. The ego tells us this because the spiritual path entails the destruction of the negative ego. Under this existential threat, the ego defends itself like hell.
Peace be with you. You are loved.
Ego would be making sure you got "your" sprint tickets done, did no code reviews, skipped the retro. I think few people do that but they will if Goodhart's Law happens.
It's a tricky business, being a human being, with its very many pitfalls.
For practical purposes, if you don't acknowledge how good and bad behaviors can both spring from the same base emotions/thought processes then it's harder to grow out of the bad behaviors. You need to be able to reframe how the ego interacts with your work, not just try to kill it off.
Thus, it's never a balanced setup where everyone's happily working towards a shared vision in equilibrium.
There's always someone having a larger incentive than the other person, overriding their decisions in a haste, in order to reach a bonus objective.
Welcome to the real World driven by capitalism.
One of the reasons Communism eventually failed is that it assumed that we could all accept the philosophy "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The assumption that we could all subjugate our needs to those of others is about as faulty as the assumption that we can subjugate our egos for the betterment of the team. A system that works will have to acknowledge fundamental human traits and work within the bounds they create. And ego is one of those traits.Current systems don't have a 1:1 with "hard work" and success/comp but its about as close as you can get, IMO.
Actually, no, it’s still not fine, because whole heaps of people will pretend to be unable to do much.
Perhaps the disconnect between effort and outcome was a factor, though as discussed above don't under estimate the satisfaction of a job well done.
I think it's more likely to be the centralized decision making, and how the people who make those decisions get chosen. A centralized system where people are choosen based on political ability/connections is likely to lead to corruption and mediocrity.
Note the above problem can happen in other systems as well - I'm not sure US politics is operating well at the moment for example.
Nit: they had worker’s medals and similar non financial recognition.
However yes, the price paid for labour was far below the point to ensure supply met the demands of economic development.
S-Tier
I like it because its amusing and always gets a new generation of gullible people.
"hey, rent's pretty high, how about you all give the state all your property instead and I run the state until further notice"
That paragraph is as completely wrong in its understanding of human nature as a paragraph can be. Yes, it is difficult, but we are all capable of choosing to put ourselves through this self-evolution of our ego's vices into their corresponding virtues.
As I personally caught the last chance to see a country promoting the selfless version, my stance is that the quote is spot on.
We all have some hopes about altruism, if we care enough. But then you look around and 90% of people don't care enough. By default we want dollars to buy ourselves coca-cola and american jeans. That's how everyone was in kindergarten, and maybe <10% will attempt self-modification after they grow up. That's not enough for a system to work.
Still, the odds what they are, with the negative momentum of the selfish, by either their ebbs and flows, or by their deliberate selfishness, we must become good within ourselves for our own peace and happiness and for the ripple effects our goodness will have on those around us. It does not matter that those ripples will likely not progress very far out into the populace, because we need to do it for our own peace and happiness; that is why the universe's sublime Law of Karma exists (only for we humans with our free will, conscience, and mind) to give us internal feedback as to how our treatment of others affects their happiness, positively or negatively. That is why regime dictators are never happy or peaceful, as the unhappiness of the countless folks they have oppressed comes back into their being as a force of unhappiness. Stalin may have died in his sleep, but he was NOT happy.
The most important thing to understand is that, as evidenced by our knowing of but not in-any-way understanding Dark Matter and Energy, we live in a universe we don't understand very well yet. Our souls, minds, and free wills, are parts of our multi-dimensional selves that have no direct observability in this physical world -- we can only see some bits of their effects, and only if we are very open-minded and observant. So, when I talk about self-transformation, you must understand that our soul ("energy/astral body" that we dream with and resides within our physical body's 3-space while we are conscious) is what the spiritual path evolves/changes from vice-eousness to virtue-ousness, from selfishness to selflessness, from callous disregard to compassionate, caring service.
The spiritual self-evolution of human morality happens on that plane, not in our physical body. Yeah, that's quite a leap from where common human understanding currently is, at this point in history, but the destructively selfish ignorance is so deep and pervasive in nearly every culture on Earth that an open-hearted person should wonder how deep this willful ignorance goes, and what is its source. Read my other comments to find the explanation, if you are bold enough, that is.
Peace be with you. You are loved.
Ironically, it's the "egoless" crowd which tends to be ego-obsessed and solipsistic. They imagine an egoless world which simply requires that everyone thinks just like me; in effect, everyone shares the same "ego"/perspective. Only in this bizarre fantasy world can we move past the ego and focus on "objective reality". Ayn Rand is an example of this worldview.
In my experience, It's both non-factual (ego-less people are the first to learn from others when poised with new ideas) and short-sighted.
Now that you mention it, there are parallels with the "tolerance" ideologues. There are people who are naturally patient and empathetic, and then there are people who opportunistically pursue the in-vogue virtue of "tolerance", and end up practicing de facto intolerance in the process. Don't conflate the two.
Sleep tight. :)
You are correct, we can't "get them out"; only they can do that by exercising their free will to choose to become better human beings. We can, however, attempt to teach them with our positive ideals, attitudes, and behaviors, but we can only lead the horses' asses to water, not make them drink.
Note that we must remain humble and grateful in remembrance that we ALL used to be horses' asses, once upon a time, before we entered the Path of Love.
If our heart is aimed right, we can take advantage of religious practices to level-up, but with a callous or cruel or hateful heart, no amount of religious practices is going to do anything but cement our horrible behavior. This is because we each have the choice of how and why to behave one way or another.
The love one feels in one's heart is of little consequence if there is no selfless action in service to the loved person's happiness. It all adds up, as do all the petty callous treatments of the people in out-groups we don't give a sh_t about. And we should care about everyone; that is the way of compassion.
Junior stays a junior in my book until they learn to "satisfy code" or to bring elegance instead of primarily satisfying specific people.
If Henry Ford was listening to customers, he would start breeding a faster horse. That perfectly shows that ego can have a good side.
Re ego, I think maybe the vocabulary choice is misaligned here. Anyway, these days, "team player" is becoming a sarcastic innuendo.