Myth of the Genius Programmer

From the Google I/O 2009 conference:
“A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We’ll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.”

Despite being almost an hour long this is a very insightful video that I’d recommend any Software Engineer watches. I find it fascinating that so many programmers want to erase their perceived (or actual) mistakes in source control systems. I guess everyone secretly wants to be the perfect super programmer. However I typically learn more from my failures than my successes: perhaps it is natural to be more introspective about failure than success?

If you find the title or video too pretentious then the question and answers session (around 42:40) is still quite interesting as the presenters get grilled by the audience.