Robert Stackhouse

I was watching a video of the Google I/O conference. In it, one of the speakers said that, “It’s our natural instinct to try to be a genius, but we need to try to fight that.”

They were speaking specifically about the tendency of developers to try to code in isolation, to try to cover our failures, to be closed to feedback, to try to eliminate the possibility of vulnerability, and to try be heroes (a.k.a rockstar developer).

In this video, they touched on a whole host of natural tendencies: getting defensive, hiding your code away from the world, trying to exert ownership, and trying to do it all ourselves. All of these actions have very real very negative consequences for the team.

If someone points out to you that you have a piece of code that could be improved upon, your first impulse might be to say something like, “I was working from the best information available at the time.” That would be counter-productive though. It would be better to realize that the person performing the code review is trying to be helpful and take their suggestion at face value.

We as logicians have a tendency to blurt out whatever we see when we see it. People are much more likely to take criticism well one on one or via email than they are in a large room in front of hundreds of people with their code projected on a wall. Dealing with emotions is part of working with other people. Even very logical people act irrationally from time to time. Just ask my wife.

The key to becoming better at anything is behavior modification. Do what you do. Seek out feedback from others. Think about how you did it last time, and do it differently. Then, repeat. This is the basis of Scrum.