Ego driven software development is not good software development

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is the kind of emotional impulse that for thousands of years would cause men to challenge one another to a duel:

And finally, I became the exact thing I hated: a toxic asshat throwing his skills around like fists. I don’t do code review for the business, I just like showing the rookies their place. My skills have finally started to pay off.

If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart I feel. And then the brain kicks in and draws up a convenient explanation, like for a politician who screwed up. It’ll say that I’m actually doing the right thing, guarding the code base for the sake of the company. But “convenient” doesn’t mean “true”.

And if you tell me that you haven’t had this feeling ever, then you’re lying. Tell me about higher goals, training rookies and all that — I know you’re simply too full of themselves. And if you try to tell me that you learned to defeat that feeling (however it manifests in you), then I must be a pink unicorn.

But here’s what I thought. On one hand, I learned to code precisely because I was made fun of all this time. People awakened my anger, and this anger helped me improve. The universe blessed me with this trait so I can awaken the anger in other young and inexperienced coders, so they themselves become better coders and do the same to others, and so on and so on for eternity.

Post external references

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    https://habr.com/en/post/440736/
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