Put Your Ego Aside: Humility and Confidence in Software Development

In the dynamic realm of software development, finding the right balance between humility and confidence is paramount. The interplay of egoism, humility, and confidence can profoundly impact teamwork, project outcomes, and overall success. In this article, we explore the significance of managing egoism to foster a collaborative, innovative, and positive software development environment.

Humility

The analysis of the influence that programming languages have on the thinking habits of their users and the recognition that, by now, brainpower is by far our scarcest resource gives us a new collection of yardsticks for comparing the relative merits of various programming languages.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his skull; therefore, he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things, he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

We must not treat our brains as the perfect computing machines. We must be open to the possibility at all times that we have made a mistake.

We are not reinforcing impostor syndrome or advocating for intellectual gatekeeping here 😁. You can be an excellent developer, but you still need to be mindful of your limitations. In fact, healthy humility can help you go from being a good programmer to a great one.

The best way to learn to live with our limitations is to know them. By the time that we are sufficiently modest to try factored solutions only, because the other efforts escape our intellectual grip, we shall do our utmost best to avoid all those interfaces impairing our ability to factor the system in a helpful way. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

The best advice to apply humility in your developer career is to write simple code.

Egoism (or The fine line between confidence and arrogance)

The ego can be defined as the part of us that drives us to continually compare ourselves with others. It causes us to compete with our co-workers and to seek to have more than our neighbors. Our ego is the driving force of our personality.

Are You Ego Driven?

According to Srinivas Rao, author of How to Manage Your Ego So You Can Reach Your Full Potential, there are six signs that indicate you may be ego-driven:

• Concern about the approval of others

• Fear of asking for help

• Comparing and competing

• The constant need for more

• Lack of presence (focusing on the past or the future but never on the present time)

• The need to always be right

  
  

These descriptions may not be true for every project manager, but there is a strong need for work performed and results achieved by project managers to be approved, especially by key stakeholders.

Many project managers are also conditioned to avoid asking for help because it may mistakenly indicate a lack of ability. Competition with other project managers for highly visible and challenging projects, comparing results with other projects, the need for higher quality at lower costs, reviewing lessons learned and then preparing for the risks yet to come, and a desire to be seen as in control at all times are all parts of the project manager’s daily life. It would appear that we are, for the most part, ego-driven.

Ego & Leadership

We can not talk about Egoism without leadership, as its effectiveness will be shown or tested the most when you become a leader.

There has been much research on this topic, and the effects are well documented. It could be argued that some organizations have seen significant failure as a result of employing leaders with large egos.

Jim Collins suggests that the most successful leaders are ‘Level 5’ leaders. These leaders are paradoxical in that they have extreme personal humility and yet have a steely, intense professional will. They have an unwavering resolve based on understanding the truth about their organization; they are rigorous, not ruthless; they inspire through standards, are ambitious for the organization, not for themselves, and they build momentum over time.

They are modest, never boastful, calm, avoid the limelight, and accept blame but attribute success to others. They set up success for their successors.

In contrast, leaders with over-inflated egos tend to believe that success naturally follows them; they love fads, often re-structure and make redundancies, are ambitious for themselves, and seek a quick fix.

They gain validation and self-esteem through being seen as a great leader, inspire through charisma, blame others for mistakes, take credit for success, and set up their successors to fail.

Having leaders with large egos is also seen as a sign of future ethical collapse, as identified by Marianne Jennings.

She suggests that these leaders apply high levels of pressure to meet the numbers, instigate a culture of fear and silence, promote young, inexperienced people in order to manipulate them, promote weak governance, have many conflicts of interest, innovate to the extreme, and use ‘good works’ to cover up and atone for wrongdoing. The ethical collapse follows and is closely followed by organizational failure.

Ego & Teams

The significant question for any team is:

“Can each individual put aside their ego for the sake of the team ?”

People with large egos rarely can. Teamwork flies in the face of autocratic leadership and shouts loud of collaboration, unity, and being a place where everyone has a voice and is heard.

If you wish to be a great organization, Look for level 5 leaders. They are often already working for your organization; they know the organization well but are often overlooked. Go seek them out and employ people like that in your teams.

Leaders often do not see the true value of their charges, especially “lower-level” workers. But when leaders are humble, show respect, and ask how they can serve employees as they improve the organization, the outcomes can be outstanding.

Is your Ego taking control?

You know your ego is not in control when:

• You see others, especially other project managers, as rivals and attempt to find ways to show your superior abilities

• You become competitive over the smallest issue or detail

• You take on additional assignments just to show you can handle more work than others

• You deliberately find fault in another person’s ideas

• You must establish and maintain control of all meetings

• You insist on approving almost all communication generated during the project life cycle

  
  

Do any of these seem familiar? Are you displaying any of these behaviors, even just slightly? Your ego may be beginning to create challenges before you actually see evidence of a problem.

Who said Ego is bad?

Now that we have seen some of the more negative characteristics of ego, what are the positives?

Egos drive us to go to school, learn new skills, and find ways to help others. Our egos are involved in our need to receive acknowledgment and to seek promotions and more challenging work. Most of the world’s successful leaders have used their egos to achieve their personal goals. It becomes a matter of balance and self-awareness.

Conclusion

Every developer needs to be mindful of both the complexities of software development and the limitations of his abilities.

Being humble most of the time is a good thing, but having too much of it could make you ignorant of your true value. Sometimes, ego is not the enemy, or let me say, do not let him become your enemy.

Use both humility and ego to find the balance.

Sources:

The Importance of Humility in Software Development

The Humble Programmer by Edsger W. Dijkstra

https://www.fusionbusiness.org.uk/team-dynamics-and-ego-how-to-manage-both/

https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/leadership-techniques-ego-driven-project-environment-6256

• Jim Collins (2001) “From Good to Great”
• Marianne Jennings (2006) “The 7 signs of ethical collapse”
• Patrick Lencioni (20020 “The five dysfunctions of teams.”

Also published here.