For some reason I thought that the I.T. industry as a whole had matured enough to the point that all developers would have realised that programming with an ego has a bad affect on the software. I also thought that people would stay up to speed, work hard, and focus on producing good quality code. I am very much mistaken :)

Recently I’ve been in the unfortunate position of having to deal with some of the most appalling I.T. professionals in the industry (I used the word “professional” in its broadest possible sense!), and the software that’s oozing out of the team is a reflection of the quality of the individuals therein. I could rant for ages about the coding horrors, bad practices and lack of understanding, but that to a point has already been discussed in a previous post (see: The Day Job). Instead I’m going to focus on the one point that I feel is one of the root causes of the trouble: EGO.

These people are clearly unaware of what it means to undertake egoless programming. They don’t seem to realise the damage that they’re doing in behaving the way they do. They’re so protective of their own work, and so ignorant of everyone else’s that the result is what can only be described as a Pot Mess. ie. A pot with nothing but a huge mess in it. If you’re unaware of the general concept of egoless programming, check out this link over at Coding Horror - it covers the 10 commandments of egoless programming - and while you’re reading that, please pray to the Development Gods and sacrifice a few Cobol programmers to them to help appease them for my sake, as I fear there’s no other hope for me :)