[moreaccountspls]

"This is ego distraction. It’s about putting off uncertainty till later to buy temporary relief. To protect our ego from a perceived threat. Things like hard problems, the possibility of failing publicly, or negative feedback all become threats when they’re linked to my identity."

I disagree with this [at least for me personally]. Being a good programmer is just straight up not something that's part of my identity. There's millions of people who are much, much better at it then me, and that's totally fine.

The reason that it's hard to work on hard problems is because they're hard! Sometimes, programming can be a really difficult or a slog of an activity. It's same with mastering any skill. Learning to play guitar, becoming an Olympic athlete, whatever. You can't Zen Buddhism your way out of the fact that you're going to spending years and years practicing until your fingers bleed, or until you're completely exhausted, etc.

[mtalantikite]

> You can't Zen Buddhism your way out of the fact that you're going to spending years and years practicing until your fingers bleed, or until you're completely exhausted, etc.

Many Zen Buddhists know how long and hard practice for mastery is. Practicing meditation is in many ways skill acquisition as well, which is why it is called a practice.

You’ll of course be spending years and years practicing programming, and the insight that ego identification gets in the way and one must practice beginners mind is a simple yet deep understanding that comes from years and years of practice.

[moreaccountspls]

> You’ll of course be spending years and years practicing programming

You can't just 'of course' this! I mean, you can, but that's the whole point. If you, or anyone reading this enough cares enough about being a great programmer, you wouldn't be on this site in the first place. Which is fine, I enjoy wasting time on here as much as anyone. But the people who are actually really good at programming? They're not reading blogs about ego. They're not writing blogs about ego. They're programming.

Look at what Fabrice Bellard has accomplished in the last 20 or so years: https://bellard.org/ . QEMU, FFMPEG. I will never even be close to the level that he is. I'm much closer in relative skill to the person who just wrote their first hello world yesterday, and I've been programming for 15 years or so. And that's totally fine with me. Programming is not my only interest in life.

For the blog author, it seems that they're searching for a reason that they're not as good at programming as they think should be. I mean, he's already a Staff Engineer at Circle CI. He's not someone who's been programming for a year. It's very possible that's he pretty close to being as good as he'll ever be. Sure, he'll keep improving, but he'll never be Fabrice Bellard. If he was, he already would be and wouldn't be writing a blog about why he's not.

So what I would say to him is: that's fine! Life is not just programming. "The Second Truth is that this suffering is caused by selfish craving and personal desire." You wrote an article about how your ego gets in the way of you becoming a better programmer, but its your ego that makes you want to be a better programmer in the first place!

[mtalantikite]

You can certainly work towards a deeper ability without attaching to the outcome or to even use ego-craving to get there.

[moreaccountspls]

Your ego drives every action of your existence, so no, you really can't. What you can do is be self aware of that reality.

[mtalantikite]

That hasn’t been my experience, but ok.

[croh]

wow ! well said ! You always doing what you REALLY want for that moment. period.

[webmaven]

> It's same with mastering any skill. Learning to play guitar, becoming an Olympic athlete, whatever. You can't Zen Buddhism your way out of the fact that you're going to spending years and years practicing until your fingers bleed, or until you're completely exhausted, etc.

The point of the article isn't that there is a shortcut around having to put in the time, it is that ego sabotages your efforts to put in the time, and if you're somehow coerced into spending the time anyway can prevent you from receiving the expected benefit (eg. just staring at the code on the screen probably won't help, unless the problem is literally a typo).

[moreaccountspls]

>it is that ego sabotages your efforts to put in the time

Sure, but what I'm saying that that statement is almost meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Is not letting your ego get in the way a necessary part of getting to mastery? Absolutely. But no matter how much you change your thought process, or analyze the problem, you still need to eat the proverbial whale.

Think of all the people who've ever played basketball and have had any aspirations of joining the NBA. For the vast, vast majority of them, they just were never going to be good enough. They didn't have the talent. It didn't matter how much they practiced, how much they got their ego out of the way, how badly they wanted it. Only about 3,000 people have ever played in the NBA.

Now, I'm not saying you need to be in the NBA to be a "successful" basketball player, or whatever you want to call the equivalent of that for programming. What I'm saying is that everyone has ceilings for how good they can become at something. Maybe on the relative scale, the best you can ever be is a pretty good programmer, and that's it. No shame in that!

After all, part of Zen Budhism is accepting who you are and your limitations.

[mtalantikite]

> After all, part of Zen Budhism is accepting who you are and your limitations.

The teaching is that all beings are capable of enlightenment and outlines a path to accomplish that. The concept of "you" is part of the problem and meditation on sunyata can offer insight to that.

[moreaccountspls]

Enlightenment isn't a thing that can be accomplished. That's an oxymoron.

[staycoolboy]

> I disagree with this [at least for me personally]. Being a good programmer is just straight up not something that's part of my identity. There's millions of people who are much, much better at it then me, and that's totally fine.

Then why did you call yourself "good", why not just a programmer? ;-)

[moreaccountspls]

I didn't. I said that being a "good programmer" isn't part of my identity...

[staycoolboy]

Oh yeah, you're right. Hah! Sorry. It is part of my identity, which is problematic, but that's my sh*t I've been working on (for years...)