[HN Gopher] Ego, empathy, and humility at work
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Ego, empathy, and humility at work
Author : mrmatthogg
Score : 152 points
Date : 2025-11-24 02:01 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matthogg.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (matthogg.fyi)
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| 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.
| sesm wrote:
| Will Storr would say that the author is playing a status game
| of virtue.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > 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?
| eucyclos wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| 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
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| DuperPower wrote:
| 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
| ajuc wrote:
| And that's why the proverb about scientific progress goes
| "science advances one funeral at a time" :)
| otikik wrote:
| 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.
| jackblemming wrote:
| CS Lewis rolling in his grave rn.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > 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.
| dakiol wrote:
| 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).
| N_Lens wrote:
| "A guide for people with Autism"
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| 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?
| wiseowise wrote:
| How old are you? It might be common sense to you, because you
| grew up at a different time with different parenting.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| 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.
| RankingMember wrote:
| 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)
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| >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:
| 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.
| mabedan wrote:
| Yeah I kinda stopped reading there. The author's pov seem quite
| skewed by a few experiences and making the wrong correlations
| axus wrote:
| I did get the feeling that all of these "problematic" behaviors
| were simply about saving everyone's time.
| Toqoz_ wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Daily standup being absolutely useless has nothing to do with
| ego.
| zyngaro wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| It's a common practice to describe who farted and how loud
| yesterday?
| myth_drannon wrote:
| 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...
| doubled112 wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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._
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Ah, you're right, handover procedures between shifts.
| browningstreet wrote:
| 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.
| ljm wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Both can be true at the same time. And there's nothing wrong
| with not dancing in the circus just because everybody does.
| zipy124 wrote:
| 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.
| ljm wrote:
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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.
| begueradj wrote:
| >Breaking News! Developers Have Egos!
|
| That concerns cleaners too. Ego is a universal currency and a
| strong element of the human nature.
| fathertimex wrote:
| 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.
| umpire-lex wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| > 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?
| stuffn wrote:
| 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.
| dogleash wrote:
| 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.
| mebiles wrote:
| 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.
| BruSwain wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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."
| conartist6 wrote:
| > 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.
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| steele wrote:
| Tell the CEO & COO
| bdangubic wrote:
| start a business than both are you :)
| dakiol wrote:
| 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
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