Egoless engineering - by Noah Hall - The Tech Enabler

I often ask questions I already know the answer to. I'll start discussions for things I already have a pretty good idea of the solution for. I trust others with tasks that I'm sure I could do a great job on.

At the start of my career, my ego was absolutely my worst quality. I had to be right, every time. I had to “win” every disagreement. I suspect it was big-fish-small-pond syndrome. Through learning to disagree with my peers and friends in healthy ways, I've mostly ditched that. No longer do I care about being right. I instead care that things are done in a way that improves the organisation, the code, and employee happiness 1 .

Facilitators guide groups. They might be experts in the field, they might know nothing about the field that the first paragraph on Wikipedia couldn't tell you. Whenever there's a group of people with diverse experiences and interests, there will be disagreements. Different ideas on how to solve problems, or different levels of concern for problems. Facilitators aim to take this collective knowledge and experience and turn them into something productive.

As an engineer facilitator, most of the discussions end up being quite technical. Sometimes there’s disagreements on what libraries or practices the teams align on, sometimes there’s disagreements on how things should be implemented and who is responsible.

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