I admit it, I’ve been that guy. You know the engineer that is so caught up in their incredible work that they are blind to the realities? This is a behavior I’ve seen all too often as an engineer.

Fundamentally, I believe this behavior revolves around a person’s ego and how sensitive they are to it being used as a punching bag. This is also something that I’ve seen affect all levels from engineers to upper level management.

Here are a few anecdotes based on real world experiences I’ve had in the software industry. The names, companies and products have been changed but the scenarios are real.

Executive New Product Ego Blindness

I was involved in a product for several years that was written in C and C++. A decision came down from management that a rewrite of the product was going to be made in Java. Now this wasn’t a bad decision as the product had to run on multiple platforms, and the existing code was a tangled mess of compile time directives specific to the platform being built.

Fundamentally, in my opinion, one aspect that seemed to be missed was: How was the new version of the product, with less features, going to avoid existing customer loss? Instead of looking at a long term migratory code path that kept existing customers happy, and allowed for the acquisition of new customers, a big bang approach was taken.

This issue was brought into focus when a proposal was put forward that would migrate the existing code to use a full commercial database instead of the homegrown solution. This approach would solve many of the issues that our customers had been complaining about that paritally prompted the product rewrite. It had the additional effect of providing a standard location of the product data that we could then build a Java product against in an incremental fashion. This proposal was killed by the senior manager in charge of the product. Ultimately the product rewrite was a failure and both the legacy product got killed, as well as the Java rewrite.

Cut to a year or two later, and I was on a business trip with the senior manager’s director. This particular product came up during our discussions, and I asked if the proposal had made sense from a business perspective as a way to gain some business insights. This directory was shocked that he had not heard of the proposal, and that it indeed would have been the correct approach.

This senior manager in charge of the product, let his ego blind him from reality. He was so focused on being able to deliver a rewrite, and WIN that he failed to see the danger.

“It’s my baby” Ego Blindness

Ok, this time the anecdote isn’t about someone else, it’s about me. Years ago, I got involved in a research project at the company I worked for. I got super involved and passionate about the project and would spend almost all of my spare time working on the code.

I was fixated on what I was building, and believed it would become a valuable asset to the company. What I didn’t know and couldn’t see at the time, was that my ego in relation to my creation had blinded me to certain realities.

This will change what and how we do things!

No one understands, and I must evangelize my work!

Reality on the other hand had different ideas.

Seriously there were a lot of really good reasons, for dropping the project and moving on. Some were technical, and some were business related. I just couldn’t see it at the time.

It was a hard but invaluable lesson to learn, and I now always try and think objectively about what I build and work on.