Discussion on: How to Be Really Awesome at Your Job and Not Be A Complete Jerk

I learned this one the hard way:

If you’re amazed at some terrible code, think about all the crap code that you’ve written.

I was in my first year of my first software engineering gig, and I ran into some code that I disapproved of. In my next one-on-one meeting with my manager, I ranted about how gross it was and how it needed the fix I implemented so badly. He asked me which part of the codebase I was talking about, and then his face fell - "Oh... yeah, sorry, that was me a few years ago."

I felt awful - from that point on, I've tried to start from a place of understanding. Every time something similar happens to me, I look back on that moment and remember where I was then.