> 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.
>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.
Nope, it's worse than that. The reason you pay seniors a senior wage is to make decisions juniors can't. Part of that is to vibe out the right gates and go keep them. Otherwise the manager could just write down a list and save on headcount.
They are paid to have an opinion. But as soon as this OP doesn't like that opinion they snap back with blogs saying "where do you get off?"
> 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.
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
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'.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Everyone[*] is more seemingly reflected about the fault of others[*2] than they are of themselves. Everyone is acutely aware of the ego problems... in others.
[*] With an ego
[*2] At least when broadcasting it; internally we can be very self-critical
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)
> 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.
>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.
Nope, it's worse than that. The reason you pay seniors a senior wage is to make decisions juniors can't. Part of that is to vibe out the right gates and go keep them. Otherwise the manager could just write down a list and save on headcount.
They are paid to have an opinion. But as soon as this OP doesn't like that opinion they snap back with blogs saying "where do you get off?"
> 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?
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
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'.
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.
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" :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
Daily standup being absolutely useless has nothing to do with ego.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Breaking News! Developers Have Egos!
That concerns cleaners too. Ego is a universal currency and a strong element of the human nature.
> 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?
Everyone[*] is more seemingly reflected about the fault of others[*2] than they are of themselves. Everyone is acutely aware of the ego problems... in others.
[*] With an ego
[*2] At least when broadcasting it; internally we can be very self-critical
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.
“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?
Most wisdom is common sense that we are unlikely to be able to practically follow ourselves. (Not commenting on whether the submission is wise)
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)