Another highlight of OSCON [1]:
The release (w00t!) of Ben [2] and Fitz [3]‘s new book, Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well With Others:
Their talks on How to Handle Poisonous People [5] and The Art of Organizational Manipulation [6] 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 [4].
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.