MrKurtHaeusler

I thought restaurants make more money from drinks (and deserts) than actual meals.

It is a sign that you are a knowledge hoarder, happy that others are dependant on you. There is a lot of job security in that I guess. If you want to do yourself and others a favour, instead of giving your fellow co-workers fish, teach them to fish. Maybe you could learn something satisfying from them.

I stopped reading when I realised it was an ad for snake oil, but lots of people feel like Drew at work. And they are all justified, even when working together. Drew IS the smartest guy at his job, when it comes to the things he cares about. The trick is, most of his co-workers are also smarter than everyone else, when it comes to the things they care about and specialise in.

People come to me at work all the time frustrated about something. "Sometimes I am the only one who has any idea about X and is actively trying to push it at this company". And they are right. When it comes to X, they are far too clever for the company. But when it comes to Y and Z they are just like everyone else, except for the guy that really gives a shit about Y and knows its the most important thing the company should be concentrating on, and the guy that really gives a shit about Z and knows that its the most important thing the company should be focussing on.

We are all in our own little bubbles and have trouble considering that fact that maybe we aren't so smart after all. We just need to start seeing things from other peoples perspectives. Maybe X, Y AND Z are important so why not recognise how clever other people actually are work together. Those people that can manage to realise that they aren't in fact the only one who cares, and get past their egos and manage to work with others and connect all those important things are the true people who are clever enough to work anywhere.

Edit: So yeah, this smart clever things isn't really such a black and white dichotomy. Pretty much all of us are clever at some thing, yet utterly stupid at most things, that is just how things are. That is why we need to work together to get anything done.

We just set up a third gmail. Use it for all family rather than individual stuff. Typically my email clients just check it alongside all my other accounts, and my wife gets an auto-forwarded copy.

But this is just as good.

I agree that they are not sexist. However I don't think diversity needs to be an explicit goal of choosing a speaker lineup.

Having said that, being aware of the diversity in software development, if I were to organise a conference, and only managed to attract male speakers, I would think "oh shit, something has gone very wrong here", and I would not hesitate to cancel it and try and address the serious issue.

If I organised a conference, and failed to attract a single female speaker, especially in a community where sexism is a sensitive issue, I would immediately decide to cancel it of my own volition. I don't want to contribute to the type of things that make women feel excluded.

That last line is interesting. You lead up to presenting a scenario where one might rightfully expect a conference to naturally reflect a diverse speaker lineup, reflecting the diversity in the industry overall. I agree with that.

But I am not sure what you mean by the last line. Do you mean: 1: "This is the last industry where it should be necessary to criticise or cancel a conference with an all-male lineup [so the fact that this conference does in fact have an all-male lineup, in the context of this particular community having problems with sexism in the past, raises a huge red flag, and probably should be canceled]".

or do you mean: 2. "This is the last industry to have issues with sexism because we are so diverse, so when one conference comes along where this diversity is not represented, it shouldn't be an issue".

I find both reasonable I guess. Although considering the fact that this topic is already a sensitive issue, I lead more towards opinion 1.

As a white guy, I think any conference struggling to attract female speakers, probably should be canceled.

It doesn't mean the conference itself or its organisers are explicitly racist or sexist, but there has to be some reason why either the topic, or the community or whatever seems so hostile to women wanting to participate. Essentially it is a symptom of a deeper issue.

The fact that no women wanted to speak at the conference is a fairly clear indicator that something is sick in the community. It is just not normal. In Saudi Arabia maybe, but these days any healthy community in a modern western country should be able to attract a couple of female speakers.

We have known for a while now that parts of the programming community have issues with sexism, especially the ruby community, and if it takes a few conference cancellations to get the issue discussed than that is all good.

Here is an idea: The organisers should organise a Ruby Girls event or something.

Main thing is, lets not pretend there is not a serious problem here, and lets do something to address it!

It's useless in Germany. It is just the same overdubbed stuff you can see on TV, several months too late.

Hold on, people can see if you have a profile or not, but it is not like they can see any of the information you have marked as not-public or friends only.

I don't see how this is a privacy issue. People can just google a name and get straight to someones public profile as well.

Good post. For me the first 3 tips, about having management backing, the right culture and the right people made me smile a bit. An analogy would be like "Here are 3 tips for being successful in business: Have a lot of capital, have a great idea, and execute it perfectly".

Normally getting management backing, developing the right culture, and having the right people are huge, difficult topics in themselves that are much larger and more fundamental than how a team decides to develop software.

If anything it goes the other way around. In order to get management support the team should first start doing agile and proving that it works. Having the right culture is a long term thing. Agile software development is a mere step in that direction as far as developing software goes. If anything agile software development helps the right culture emerge rather than the right culture being a prerequisite for agile software development.

And if you truly have the right people you don't need to to worry about agile, you are already doing so well that agile will only slow you down. Agile is probably ideal for larger organisations who unfortunately don't have the "right" people and need a framework or something to help them along. Once people get competent enough, "agile" just starts to feel dogmatic and restrictive. I mean they will still do the practices that make sense, but they aren't going to appreciate other aspects of buying into a whole "agile" approach.

I would also caution against "passing the change baton to higher ups". I have seen all the hard work undone when a fairly agile software development department decided to combine with the product department and include them in the change management process. The idea was to spread agility outwards, but because the product department had mostly more extroverted, managerial types they took control of the decision making (I was surprised how easily the software developers ceded control and retreated into a yes boss mentality) and their command and control culture swamped over any agility we had in the dev department.

I don't think they are going for the HN type programmer market, but other types of programmers will not see anything wrong with it. I am thinking more hobbyist programmers and enterprise programmers etc. The closest they get to an online community is Facebook and they perhaps discover answers on stack-overflow after googling but have never thought of creating an account. They probably think, facebook is cool, now here is something like facebook for programmers!

Or just sign up for a distance learning course from a UK university. Aberdeen gives you a proxy, the OU as far as I know, doesn't.

I am not an enterprise thinker, but I have developed enterprise salary expectations. One of my current areas of interest is helping slow old large businesses be more effective by using e.g. Lean startup ideas.

To be honest though I am not a natural entrepreneur. Or at least I may have been while younger but I have become soft over the years. I only really started thinking about startups etc maybe 3 or 4 years ago and it's hard to break out of the comfortable employee lifestyle.

I am from an English speaking country with German ancestors, but I don't know if that background makes me more or less startup material. There seem to be roughly the same distribution if entrepreneurs here as in my home country.

But I am focused now on being founder rather than employee. Already CTO of a non-profit r&d team with my wife as CEO.