Another highlight of OSCON:
The release (w00t!) of Ben and Fitz‘s new book, Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well With Others:
Their talks on How to Handle Poisonous People and The Art of Organizational Manipulation are already famous. In fact, I tried to attend the latter at OSCON, but was turned away at the door because the room was already too crowded and was in danger of violating fire regulations — which gives you a sense of much people want to learn what they have to teach.
Now they’ve written a whole book on “people for geeks”. Things I’m going to start paying more attention to:
- Avoid the “compliment sandwich” (pp. 74-75). (I guess for metaphorical consistency it should be called a “criticism sandwich”, since a “roast beef” sandwich is not a slice of bread between two pieces of roast beef. Whatever. Just read about it.)
- Track happiness (p. 76).
- Look for facts in the bile (p. 96) — particularly useful in technical projects.
- “Offensive” vs “defensive” work (p. 117).
- Leave time for learning (p. 20).
- Why you can’t ignore marketing (pp. 130-133).
Order it directly from O’Reilly Media here.
And Fitz, I’m sorry for being such a clod when we were working on cvs2svn (pp. 20-21, though you didn’t say it that way of course). I got better, I promise.
Very funny. You were hardly a clod–that was just the perfect example of two mightily different working styles colliding, and if we hadn’t been such good friends to start, I fear that we’d be mortal enemies today. 🙂
Heh, well, you’re very forgiving. What I meant by “clod” was: of the two of us, the first one to notice that the different working styles were a problem, and to take a step back and talk about it so we could solve it, was you. Now it’s something I watch out for all the time, of course!
Btw, have you noticed how the page number is missing on page 20? Weird omission — I’m baffled trying to think what bug could lead to that result.
We also left out one closing paren in the book.
Dude. Do NOT do that to me.
I’ve followed Re Bean a little which is how I know about both Fitz, and Ben’s blog ibanjo, thanks to this blog rants I’m now aware they have written a book, I’m over the moon about this release and I’m going to purchase it today 🙂 What’s even more interesting its an O’Reilly publication, this company release books written by the finest sources I will also encourage Mr Ben Collins to write a book about his amateur radio adventures which influenced me to purchase his yaesu radio setup. I would also suggest to Fitz to update his blog as people like me pay regular visits to their site and the information never changes. I wish this book the sale of One Million copies at least!”