Over the years I’ve noticed a few habits that make engineers hard to work with. Some I’ve only watched from the outside. Others I’ve caught in myself, and I’m writing them down mostly as a reminder.

1. Arrogance

This one shows up in every profession, and I think it comes down to a lack of self-cultivation. I’ve worked with people who like to show off. They assume the other person knows nothing, start lecturing, ignore any feedback, and keep talking to themselves. That left me with a bad impression, and I tried to avoid working with them, let alone being friends. But I’m not sure I’m immune. Whenever I catch myself explaining something before I’ve asked what the other person already knows, I try to stop and listen first.

2. Going down rabbit holes

Setting aside deeply technical work, I’m talking about ordinary business development. When I had just graduated, I did this a lot. Given a simple requirement, I would fall into the trap of optimizing it. I never asked whether it was worth doing from the business side, and I burned precious time on unnecessary “research”. I lost some trust because of it, and eventually I left the job. What I took from it: we may be technical people, but our job is to solve problems and ship features, not to indulge ourselves with tech. If I want to scratch that itch, I can spend the time contributing to open source instead.

3. Poor communication

At work, communication is mostly about exchanging information. Good communication saves both sides time and makes the day more pleasant, yet many of us in technical roles don’t take it seriously. Poor communication looks like speaking without a beginning or an end, or giving no context, so the other person has to struggle to understand. Still, I think this is the easiest one to fix. If you care enough, you can improve quickly.

4. Letting emotions take over

Managing your emotions is one of the more advanced things humans can do. Someone who can’t is frightening and hard to be around, because you never know when they’ll blow up. I’ve seen people slam the desk when they hit a problem, and people lose their temper when a conversation with a colleague went nowhere. None of that was necessary. Working with a lot of emotion is bad for your health, and it does nothing to solve the problem.