You often hear of Sports players as being arrogant, and typically, it is not a compliment. The phrase is "He's an arrogant, good sports player". You do not hear the line, "He is not good sports player, pity he is not arrogant."
The point I'm getting to, is that the sports players arrogance or lack thereof, does not make a material difference to his performance on the pitch. Compare two top football (soccer) players. Thierry Henry and Christiano Ronaldo. Both artists on a football pitch, the one, Ronaldo, supremely arrogant (IMO) and the other the picture of sophistication, humility and just plain decency (he's got that thing that only Frenchman can have).
But, the arrogance or lack thereof does not make a material difference to their performance. No one ever said about Henry that he needed to be more arrogant in order to improve his performance on the soccer field.
However, it is not like that in software development.
In software development, humility is a virtue that can make a good programmer into a great one.
The other day I had to make some changes to improve performance on the application I work on, and then once those changes were made I deployed them to the clustered WAS server to test them. Quite an involved process this is. I figured, it's okay, there won't be errors in them so I didn't bother to test them on my own development machine.
Well, turns out, after many tries and many days of pain when only after I got the code onto the clustered server did I discover that it did in fact have bugs, that I finally got the code to run.
So my time saver at the beginning in not testing locally turned out to be much more time wasted in the long process of getting the buggy code onto the clustered environment to test it.
I was arrogant to assume that my code changes would be bug free. I thus lost more than a day because of this. If I had been humble then I would have checked myself before deploying to the server and thus saved a lot of time.
So unlike in sports where arrogance does not make a difference to performance, in software development, being arrogant is a liability. In a sense, it's counter intuitive. Even the best make mistakes (they've said as much).
Technorati Tags: software, humility
The point I'm getting to, is that the sports players arrogance or lack thereof, does not make a material difference to his performance on the pitch. Compare two top football (soccer) players. Thierry Henry and Christiano Ronaldo. Both artists on a football pitch, the one, Ronaldo, supremely arrogant (IMO) and the other the picture of sophistication, humility and just plain decency (he's got that thing that only Frenchman can have).
But, the arrogance or lack thereof does not make a material difference to their performance. No one ever said about Henry that he needed to be more arrogant in order to improve his performance on the soccer field.
However, it is not like that in software development.
In software development, humility is a virtue that can make a good programmer into a great one.
The other day I had to make some changes to improve performance on the application I work on, and then once those changes were made I deployed them to the clustered WAS server to test them. Quite an involved process this is. I figured, it's okay, there won't be errors in them so I didn't bother to test them on my own development machine.
Well, turns out, after many tries and many days of pain when only after I got the code onto the clustered server did I discover that it did in fact have bugs, that I finally got the code to run.
So my time saver at the beginning in not testing locally turned out to be much more time wasted in the long process of getting the buggy code onto the clustered environment to test it.
I was arrogant to assume that my code changes would be bug free. I thus lost more than a day because of this. If I had been humble then I would have checked myself before deploying to the server and thus saved a lot of time.
So unlike in sports where arrogance does not make a difference to performance, in software development, being arrogant is a liability. In a sense, it's counter intuitive. Even the best make mistakes (they've said as much).
Technorati Tags: software, humility
