Comment

Comment by cratermoon

I'm well into the senior years of my career, and I have certainly been all of these things. But a fellow engineer taking things personally is not as problematic as the behavior that often accompanies it: never admitting error.

Years ago I heard the phrase "set to bozo bit" to describe what you're calling a personal blocklist. It was described as an anti-pattern, and setting the bozo bit as a poor choice in nearly every case. It combines the bad parts of an ad hominem attack with the bad parts of personal arrogance and negativity. Don't think your other teammates won't realize you've "blocked" a teammate. Some of them will react badly, and potentially see you as arrogant.

I end with this quote from E.W. Dijkstra:

We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.

ACM Turing Lecture 1972, "The Humble Programmer"

parent cratermoon 5 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton