“We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural.” — Marcus Aurelius
It’s pretty incredible what we, humans, have achieved in the time we spent living in this immeasurable rock in the middle of the Universe. We learned to control fire, how grow plants to feed us, invented the printing press, discovered electricity, and connected the whole world with a network of networks. That’s only in less than 503,000 years! Many of these discoverings may not be possible without profound knowledge sharing between people.
We are social animals, is written in our DNA and we can’t escape that fact. Actually, there is a lot of research showing isolating ourselves is associated with a shorter and poor lifetime. It’s our nature: we need each other. Doing otherwise is to let ourselves be carried away by fear; fear about others’ comments, fear about losing our job, fear about getting hurt, fear about failing… And we know fear is not real sometimes.
Our brain is not adapted to the modern lifestyle we embrace nowadays, triggering the fight-fly reaction when it is not necessary. An example of this behavior is the time when tech companies didn’t share any code at all. Every brand used to implement its own SVC, its own server OS, its own web explorer from ground to top, its own programming language, and so forth. And if they discovered a new way to do things, they kept silent about that because they had an unjustified fear about other companies taking advantage of that new knowledge.
The FOSS movement was a decisive pound on the table, allowing us to share code with other peers, learning and improving the solutions in the process. There is still a lot of proprietary software, of course, but we are not in the same situation as many years ago.
Projects like Stable Difussion is the current best example of that. There are proprietary projects doing the same but, thanks to the community, we have a free better alternative. We have free OS people can use to run their machines, projects where people are preserving the history of video games, projects where people bring clarity to social networks, and frameworks that let developers improve their productivity. All of those could not be achieved individually.
We can take back all of this ethereal discourse to a more tangible situation: our current work and our relationship with our teammates. I’m not talking about being polite or disrespectful, but about where our responsibility starts and ends.
Every person must contribute to the company's good operation. The vast majority of the time we are going to work with another person, directly or indirectly. We must think about others when we are typing the next line of code or defining the next requirement to be implemented, and the common good between projects must be present in the company’s culture, reducing the probability of building silos between partners of the same department.
Not working for the common good is the same as weighing down humanity. And maybe you are thinking that you only are one person and doing the good thing alone may not have too much impact but one must do what is correct without taking care of the rest.