> The following is a short, incomplete list of typical statements we as developers might say or hear at work. If you parse them more precisely each one is an attempt at self-justification: […]

> “We should start using this new tool in our pipeline.”

> “We should never use that new tool in our pipeline.”

I don’t get what’s “wrong” with those two. There’s no justification (self- or otherwise) whatsoever in any of those statements, not even a hint of an attempt. Justification, as I understand it, requires a “why” (possibly, only suggestively implied, but nonetheless present in some form) and I see absolutely none, just a call to action.

If someone sees it, can you please explain?

Taking into account the context before the bullet pointed "typical statements": there are developers who seemingly like to gatekeep. They get to feel like wizards in their towers with their dusty books and potions [...] My point is our egos can “leak” in so many ways that it takes diligence to catch it let alone correct it.

It's a bit of a Chesterton's Fence situation. The wholesale statements themselves don't point to having an understanding of the pipeline, only that the person making it supposedly knows better than everyone there and is self-justifying or "leaking" their ego instead of engaging in discussion about it

I think by including those, the author is saying that we tend to think that what is best for us (this tool is great/awful for my work) is also best for everyone else. It might also be a case of 'I understand this tool better/worse than others so if it's adopted I'll become more/less important' but that's a little more of a conscious thought process than what I think the article is pointing towards.

I also think the whole thing is written in a deliberately accusatory tone to provoke discussion among the target audience - rather than say that 'the ego wants to be at the center' the author could just as well have said 'our model of what other people know skews to be too similar to what we ourselves know'.

IMO team X needs or wants something and tries to get the other teams to accept it too. The other teams might not need it and in fact it might make life more complicated and difficult. If anyone objects then the last resort is "best practice" which is an incantation that appeals to leadership and everyone who doesn't really know how the sausage gets made in the various teams.

It's ego to think you know everything and that your needs are paramount - but it's not ego to try to make life better for everyone.

....and that's the problem because sometimes you ARE right and sometimes you're not.

People who make these statements may or may not be ego driven. Not: everybody who says one of these sentences is 100% ego driven.

There are valid reasons to suggest use or avoidance of a tool, but there are also ego driven reasons. And everybody who has worked in any organizational context knows that. That guy may suggest to use Excel for a job that he knows require databases, but he is a wizard in Excel and hates to work with databases for some reason. So the ego driven part here is to instead of considering the needs of the project, he considers his own needs and potentially pushes them more than would be good.

Or the guy who says we should never use $X because he had been bitten by a thing programmed with $X in a hot summer night in the late 90s and he hasn't had a look at $X ever since. While it is okay to phrase such bad experiences, insisting on it for a whole team without real rational reasons or proper research can again be ego driven.

Or the person that just wants to suggest a new tool so they look as if they contributed without even having tested the tool themselves. The reason for the suggestion isn't that it would help the project, but one of gaining social capital.

Note that many of these people wouldn't even be aware of that, to themselves they would have perfectly fine reasons why they said what they said.

even if someone IS ego driven, if the justification is scientific or evidence based then It doesnt Matter too much. Science is the antidote to ego, not morality

personally it has become clear that discussion involving good vs bad is inherently relative to personal frames of reference. in this logic , usage of 'should' degenerates an argument to a personal judgement.

a more professional and unbiased statement would be 'it seems to me that using tool X would mitigate problem Y in our pipeline, because of Z.' this amended statement maximises objectivity compared to the original.

but nobody is gonna spend their whole life delivering extended objective justifications when 'we should start using this tool' suffices for the most part. so i too don't see the value of questioning such benign conversational aspects.