canspice.org

People For Geeks, the Tuesday afternoon tutorial I’m attending, is being presented by Michael Schwern, Selena Deckelmann, Brian Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman, Andy Lester, and Kirrily Robert.

First thing, from an editorial point of view, I typically don’t like these types of tutorials because the speakers don’t all have microphones and you end up missing what people say, or they’re passing around one microphone between everybody and it kills the energy and synergy you get between a bunch of speakers. However, it looks like they’re just going to be talking one at a time, giving a pack of mini-tutorials.

Anyways, to the tutorial. Slides will be on Slideshare, tagged with ‘peopleforgeeks’.

Kirrily Robert (aka Skud) is up first, talking about geek etiquette. Cell phones off, try not to pay too close attention to your laptops, please. Ptah-Hotep wrote the first etiquette book, and it’s surprisingly accessible. One of the first modern etiquette authors was Castiglione, who started the idea of a Renaissance Man. And one of the big populizers of etiquette was William Caxton. One of the most popular purveyors of etiquette is Emily Post.

Why spend any time worrying about etiquette? There’s a group benefit to it. When interacting with other people, etiquette benefits the other people. It helps the group function better together. There’s also a personal benefit to it. People are going to judge you on how you behave, and if you behave well, they’ll judge you positively. And some people say that behaving well towards other people is some sort of fundamental ethic. Major religions have some sort of Golden Rule; it’s almost universal across religions, philosophies, etc.

So how can we be good to other people? That’s what all the etiquette books are about, but there are so many rules that it’s hard to tell which ones are actually important. There’s an 80/20 rule that says that in many situations, 80% of the benefit is achieved by doing 20% of the work, and vice versa. Here are the rules that make up the 20% of the work: respect, listen, and shower daily. Mostly, it’s not rocket science.

Schwern is up next, talking about how not to be a jackass. So, why shouldn’t you be a jackass? Some people think that being a jackass is fun. It is, but only for you. Some people think that being a jackass makes you feel superior. Are you really, though? Ultimately most reasons for being a jackass are selfish and don’t get you anywhere. If you know someone’s going to misinterpret what you’re saying, you’re doing them a disservice (you’re “lying by jackholery”). There’s a mode Schwern calls “Literal Fuckhead Mode” that (obviously) isn’t nice either.

Oblique Strategies For Miscommunications: Say “please” and “thank you”. Apply tact filters to your output. Not everything that comes to mind needs to come out the mouth. Stop and count to five. Are you just repeating louder? Bitching is not doing (bug reports are doing). Start the solution. Why does it matter to you? Remember the goal. Are you having fun? How do you both win? There is no best. Don’t get even. Give an out. Praise in public; critique in private. Acknowledge the problem. Is the problem a bad solution? Give them power to solve their problem. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know.” “Tell me about that.” Shut up and listen. Don’t claim to be an expert. Talk about them. What makes them happy? Find the lost information.

Next up is Andy Lester, talking about “how to speak Manager”. Andy’s started a blog about geeks in the workplace. There are many reasons to speak Manager, and many of them benefit you.

Principles to think about: Your relationship with your boss is a relationship. If you’re doing a regular 9-to-5 job, you’re spending more waking hours with co-workers than you are with your spouse. Your boss is not an enemy, nor is he incompetent. If any of these are false, you need a new job. Life is too short to work for a boss who is an enemy or who is incompetent, and it’s too short to work at any company that would allow such a boss to manage people.

How do we improve communication? It’s hard, and no one else thinks like you do. You may be the only one working on improving communication. You need to think like the boss. After all, your number one job is making the boss look good. You and your boss share one goal: you both want to get your jobs done. The less time spent with your boss, the better, because if you’re going to see your boss, you’re not working on your project.

What is unnecessary interaction for the boss? Anything that doesn’t get results, people problems, arguments, dealing with your personal problems, whining, things you can solve yourself.

What is unnecessary interaction for you? Micromanagement, anything that doesn’t let you do cool stuff.

How to speak Manager? Business speaks in two currencies: money and time. Your job is to translate the techie details to money and time. This is what you do when you work on your résum&eactue;. It is always better to give bad news about yourself than to have your boss discover it through some other means.

No competent boss has ever OKed “a week to clean up the code.” You have to explain what you want, the costs, and the benefits.

Selena Deckelmann is up now (after coffee break) with a talk titled “Leading without being in charge”. So you’ve got an idea for a user group. You’re looking for people to join. How do you do this? You want them to come to meetings, to participate, to give talks, to take over someday. What is leadership? You’re not a dictator, you can’t demand that people participate. You’re a facilitator, a moderator, and a guide. That’s what leading without being in charge is all about.

Five-step program to lead well, develop new leaders, and have enthusiastic followers:

1. get people to the meeting
2. start the meeting
3. make people feel good
4. set the tone
5. take questions

Step one: get people to the meeting. Start with your friends. Find other similar user groups and invite people from them. Use free advertising: email, blog, talk to people. Use non-free advertising: trade mags, newspapers.

Step two: start the meeting. Share the agenda before the meeting. Make announcements. Make introductions — go around the room and ask questions: why did you come today? what do you want to learn? what’s your favourite…? Introduce the speaker.

Step three: make people feel good. Rituals make people more comfortable. Remember names. Make yourself feel good. Eat and drink together.

Step four: set the tone. Be an active leader. Ask for help. This takes the load off of you and makes the other people in the organization feel like they belong and they’ll come back to help. Give people real work, not just make-work. Allow them to fail. Every user group has That Guy, he’s sitting in the front row, asking distracting questions, disrupting the flow. Deal with these people before they happen: have an agenda, save questions for last, and help the speaker out. Structure user groups for socializing, and make time for you to socialize.

Step five: take questions. In addition to taking questions, you should also ask people what they think. Then write that information down so you don’t forget it. Take their feedback, and change things (or not).

Next up is Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian W. Fitzpatrick with a talk titled “Everything That Everyone Else Said Was Wrong”. Actually it’s titled “How to Protect Your Software Project From Poisonous People”. How do you deal with people who aren’t behaving well? You first have to comprehend the threat. Attention and focus are you scarcest resources. You must protect them. Poisonous people can distract, emotionally drain your community, and cause needless infighting. You need to avoid paralysis — perfectionists and people obsessed with process are good at derailing forward progress.

How do you fortify against the threat? Build a strong community based on politeness, respect, trust, and humility. Build a mission by picking a direction and limiting your scope. Document your design decisions, your bug fixes, your mistakes, and your code changes. Have healthy code-collaboration policies: send commit emails, encourage email review, do big changes on branches for easier review, be generous with branches, increase your project’s “bus-factor” (the number of people that need to get hit by a bus before your project is screwed), don’t allow names in files. Have well-defined processes when releasing software, accepting and reviewing patches, and admitting new committers.

How do you identify poisonous people? They have communication annoyances: uses silly nicknames, overuses capital letters, uses excessive punctuation. They’re clueless: unable to pick up on the “mood”, don’t understand common goals of the community, ask incessant RTFM questions. They’re hostile: insult the status quo, angrily demand help, attempt to blackmail, make accusations of conspiracy. They don’t co-operate: willing to complain but not help fix anything, unwilling to discuss design, too insecure to take criticism.

How do you disinfect poisonous people? Assess the damage. Is this person draining attention and focus? Is this person paralyzing the project? Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t get emotional. Look for the fact under the emotion. Extract a real bug report, if possible. Know when to give up and ignore them and when to forcibly boot them from the community. Repel trolls with niceness. Address the behaviour, not the person.