 off our second talk. The talk will be People Patterns by Joe O'Brien. So please welcome Joe to the stage. We made a comment in the last talk about scaring you with a bunch of code and things. So I'm actually here to scare the hell out of you because I'm going to talk to a bunch of introverts about people. So this should be fun. Four or five years ago maybe, I was just talking to Andy earlier. We couldn't figure out exactly what it was. It was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we got to hear Andy give his talk, Paramedic Thinking and Learning and Refactoring the Wetwear. And at the time he claimed not to be writing a book. I'm so thankful he did. And where he basically took brain learning, brain science, a lot of stuff that had been written and distilled it out for geeks. And so he came up with a guide to the brain for geeks. One of the best books out there that I've read that really helped a lot of teams, a lot of people I know. So this is not a suggestion. This is a command. You have to go out and buy this book. And just to let you know, I'm not doing this because Andy is actually here. I've done this in every topic of the year. I figured out a way to wind it up. But in doing, in reading this book, it really inspired me to start looking and thinking about that just went out. Is this a range problem? Probably. I haven't come back. Yeah, it's been happy. Testing the edge cases. It goes in and out a little bit. But I've been taking what I've learned over the years about people and trying to apply it to a way that people with the geeks would understand. Because I've come from a sales background. I've had an intergeek for a long time that I kept trying to run away from. It finally caught up with me. Well, my first couple technical interviews, they started talking to my feet. They started showing me cubicles back in the back buried behind boxes where people really weren't there that I would be working in. I'd get excited when I saw a phone in there like, yeah, but that never goes off. I'm kind of that weird geek where I need to be around people. I need to talk to people. But this has also got me where I am and has helped me move forward, which is great for me personally. Then about seven years ago, I started with a company called ThoughtWorks. It was fascinating for me because I got in there thinking I'm going to learn all this technical stuff. It's going to be fantastic. The best thing I learned there and the lessons I continually learned while I was there were people-based, how to deal with teams, how to deal with people. When you're pairing all the time, when you're really in agile environments, except pressure cooker scenario, things boil up to the top. When you go and try to hire the smartest people you possibly can, you run into a lot of personality conflicts. So how do you deal with those? What happens? What are things you have that you can tools at your disposal? And they were great, but nobody's really written a lot of these. Well, people have written these down for decades, for centuries, but nobody's really written them down for geeks. So what I'm trying to do here is call people patterns. Namings of some of them are still rough. This is all still in draft form, but really starts getting you to a place where you can understand them. And the other thing I'm trying to do is really test Coby's patience as far as the camera's concerned. So we'll see how he really keeps up with that. The first one I'm going to tell you is people are interesting. I saw somebody tweet about coming to this conference and it was something to the effect of I'm coming to a strange city, traveling out of my comfort zone, going to be by myself, this should be interesting. Something paraphrased, of course, and probably poetically licensed there. But the idea was funny to me because I've never been more comfortable than when I go to a geek conference. It doesn't matter how many people I don't know there, I'm going to a room full of people who all have the same interests that I do. I can strike up a conversation with any random person there and know that we have a lot in common already. And so to me, it's incredibly comforting. Take me to the airport, it's a much different scenario. You're going to be with just as many people around you at times, but you can't just strike up a conversation with random people and expect to have something in common. So people are interesting. If you're at a technical conference, like you are now, especially if you go to one in a different city, don't take the time between to hack on something. Don't take the time afterwards to sit down with a bunch of laptop, sit down and start talking to people. One of my favorite trends in the Ruby community for a while was the fact that they would play werewolf because you'd get into a room and you would play a game, which every kid plays a game, right? But it required you to actually talk to people. I know really scary. But it was a lot of fun. What this does is give you practice at your craft. Nobody likes to admit it. But people are an essential part of what you do in a day to day life. I don't care if you're agile or not. I don't care what happens. Getting to know personality types is one of those critical things you can do. So Andy and Dave tell you to learn a new programming language every year. This year, do not take the time you dedicate to a new programming language, start off by reading pragmatic thinking and learning. Go out and get another book, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's a lot less cynical than the title says. I actually think the title is poorly named in some regards. But go out and practice working with people, practice talking to them, take some of the things I'm going to tell you here today and try to implement them. Because it's going to tell you how to get better ahead in your job. It's going to tell you how to get better along with sometimes get along with your spouse. Now soon as I figure that out, I'll let you know, but you know, just working on that. But it's going to really enable your career to be what it is. Because what do we do? We like to think that we sling code, but not really. And if I try to grab somebody else's drink, please let me know. What we actually try to do is develop things. We create things for who? For people. Sometimes it's one computer to another, but there's a business reason that is there. Your boss might be the biggest jerk in the world. If you look at him through your eyes, what about looking at him through his eyes? So when you have a conversation, the next pattern is, listen without agenda. I have a real problem with this. I have a lot of exciting things that I've done that I love to tell people about. It's not an arrogance thing. I've met a lot of amazing people. It's not a name dropping problem. It's just a problem I have in my brain. I want to share these things with you because I think they're cool. Just like when I first discovered Ruby, I kept going to my wife, going, look, this is so neat. She go, what? Right? She had no idea she's not technical. So I started a Ruby user group just like you get people in the same room. So I could look, isn't this cool? Right? But I get excited about this one. What ends up happening is I'll have conversations with people occasionally. And they'll say something and my brain goes, oh, man, I want to tell that story. And it starts playing in my head. And so I start listening to their listening to what they're saying, thinking, what can I say? What can I contribute? But doing that will kill a conversation. And it'll kill the interesting things you discover about somebody. So don't have a conversation in order to get your point across, have a conversation and ask questions in order to hear what they're saying. And listen without agenda. Which brings up another interesting pattern, which I called the three realities. This came from two sources, one from a book by Scott Birdland, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which if you've never spoken before, for some reason I've got way more adrenaline than usual. So shaking is weird. Where he talks about giving a talk. He gave a 10 minute talk and I think it was web 2.0, some large O'Reilly stage he was there, get exactly 10 minutes to give this talk. So he rehearsed it, he rehearsed it again, he rehearsed it again, got it down to exactly nine minutes and 57 seconds. It's perfect. So it gets up onto the stage, there's a timer there. And the guy introduces him. He's like, you know, gives us history. Ladies and gentlemen, Scott Birdland, thank you very much. He starts walking up to the stage. And he turns around the remote and there's a timer in front of him and it says nine minutes and 48 seconds. There's, oh, God, I didn't take into account walking. I didn't take into account. He starts giving us first night and people applaud and laugh. And then he starts speaking and he goes, oh, God, I didn't take into account timing of applause. Oh my God, what am I going to do? Oh my God, I'm behind now. So then he starts rushing and then he gets ahead. Oh my God, what am I going to do now? And then he gets a little bit behind and he steps off stage. He's sweating. He's like, oh my God, it's the worst talk I've ever given. Couple minutes later, somebody comes up to him and shakes his hand and goes, that was one of the best talks I've ever seen and gives a personal reason behind it. They're all excited. And he's looking at this person going, how can this be the best talk you've ever, you've got to be kidding me. Right? But it really spoke to them. And he steps back. And he didn't really say it, but another story from that week had come in and where I was sitting in with a counselor with my wife and I. And we were having a lot of problems and discussions about certain things. And there was a one particular event we were arguing about. And it was absolutely comical how far off we were viewing this. And it took me back to when studying political science, I took a comparative political, it was basically political ideologies. And our task at the very end was one statement. Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed a self care. And you had to state what the historical context of that was from four different points of view. And it's amazing how one sentence and one event can be described from very different views. My wife and I are looking at one particular fight we had had and we're talking about it. And we were so far off it was comical. She was mad about being because of something completely else. I assume she was mad about being about completely something else. So there are always three realities. One one person sees. One the other person sees. And then there's that one in the middle that's actually the events that occurred. And so Scott talks about his book. He says, you know what? It wasn't the worst talk I'd ever given. I was nervous. I was terrible because of my timing. But the actual reality was not that it was the best talk I'd ever given. But that person I connected with on a certain level they heard something they wanted to hear. So to them it's the most amazing thing in the world. But the reality was somewhere in between. So if you're nervous to get up on a stage and you stand up and give a talk and you walk off and go, oh my god that was so terrible. It really wasn't. It was it the best event you ever had? Probably not. But it probably wasn't the worst either. Next pattern. Tell bad news quickly. Bad news like stress like anything else. Some bad event that you've got to relate to somebody is an acid that will eat your brain alive. It will eat your body away. It'll take you as far as wanting to throw up and not being able to eat a meal. It will have physical ramifications. It will have mental ramifications. Because it's a weight you're carrying. It's a secret. I would be terrible in military intelligence just let you know. Not for the intelligence part. No jokes there. I can't keep secrets. I can't keep these things in me. They eat away. Especially if it's bad news. So you have something that's happened. A project's going to get canceled or better yet you've discovered a technical problem on your on your project that's going to delay this thing. It's inevitable. You've discovered a technical smell you get or a new part of the technology you didn't think of before. You're a consulting and somebody's paying you to build this. You're in a big company and there's a budget on the way and you want to get a promotion after this is done. Whatever it may be. You've discovered something that has to be told. It's going to start eating in you. The longer you let it eat you the worst shape you're going to be in. Number two, the people you're talking to are more concerned about you hiding that than they are about the bad news itself. I don't care who the person is. I don't care how much of a prick this person is that you work for. They're more concerned about your reactions to something than they are about the news itself. They guarantee you it happened 100% of the time for me. And I've seen it happen to people over and over again. The faster you relay the information the better. Now that yeah so I'll lead into another part which is so these are going to kind of intertwine but the next one is brutal honesty and it's a terrible naming for it. I want to work on that. But the other part of it is if it is bad news don't sugar coat it. Because sugarcoating it and waiting says two things. It says you're trying to be deceitful. It says you're trying to know more than you do. By hiding something you're sending a signal that they can't trust you when things go wrong. Your job as a developer and especially a manager's job, quote unquote traditional manager, is to react to these things and to adjust. If you're in an agile environment the reason you're doing agile is because you want to find out the bad news as fast as possible. It's the very simplest part the most distilled version of agile delivered here. It's measured feedback whether in small scale or large scale. It's the entire existence of the agile development nature. So you want to know bad news as quickly as possible. Get it out there. Get it in front of people. Understand what is wrong. Bring it to somebody. Here's what we discovered. Here's what's happening. Here are the things that I'm doing right now to try to measure this and figure it out more. I'll update you again at next time. And then please God update it at next time because that's even worse. But get it out there. It's going to eat at you. Their reaction is always going to be way less than you think it is. The brutal honesty don't sugarcoat it because if you try to again you're trying to hide something. And brutal honesty is bad because brutal says you're really not paying attention to somebody's feelings. But if you're in a team environment, an agile environment, giving positive feedback when it's really not deserved is not benefiting somebody. Now a lot of people here from the Midwest. I come from Ohio. We consider ourselves the Midwest too. We can fight it out later. But we tend to be really really polite. So somebody come up to me after one of my talk. Oh my god that was a wonderful talk. Thank you so much. And that's really appreciated. But there are times people feel like they have to say that. And that's not. It's not that I'm unappreciative. That doesn't help. Especially if there's something I did wrong. So I've got certain friends of mine who are speakers and every time I talk to them, I always tell them, if you watch me give a talk, give me feedback, please. You're not going to hurt my feelings. You should have done this. You should pace less. Anything like that, right? I'm going to take it. I know how to digest feedback. I'm going to go, yeah, I would love to pace less if you can figure out how to get rid of energy while I'm on stage. I will but for now, suck it up. But I know how to deal with this. I've got to think of skin. But I'm never going to improve if I don't hear the negatives. So if you're in a team environment, absolute honesty is much better than sugar coated goodness. Always is every time. This goes back to the three realities thing. But the next one is, what do they see? Is it a meeting one time? And all of us at edge case have gotten to know our own personalities really well. Some in some ways thanks to Andy's book, been diagnosed with ADD, not a surprise to anybody really. But I know how my brain works and I know certain things and tricks I need to keep myself going. We have meetings at edge case and hardly anybody will look up from their laptop. Some people will play with toys. Some people sit there and stare and try to concentrate on what's going on. Everybody knows what they need to do to get the most out of the meeting and the discussion we're having. Right. But we know that. Taking back two months ago, sat in a meeting, we had a client there. I had three developers of myself. It was absolutely disgusted because one developer was looking at the client the entire meeting. Now, the other ones were contributing. They weren't off playing solitaire in their laptops, right? But they were listening and they digested every bit of what was said, but the client didn't know that. The client was up there thinking that the entire room is not, does not give a rib about what's going on. Everybody is so concerned about their own brain and about digesting that they don't think, what is the impression I'm giving off? There are times, like right now, yesterday I traveled from Tokyo all the way here. I'm extremely exhausted. And if I came up here and was like, yeah, so there's this other thing, right? It might be what my body wants to do, but does that give you guys the impression that I really want to be here? That I'm really having fun, that I'm excited about it? Yes, part of it's the energy surge of adrenaline. But realistically, thank you, I've got one up front too, appreciate that. Realistically, I mean to say again, what are people looking at me? What are people seeing that I'm giving off? If I'm having a conversation with my wife, and she's really excited about something, the last thing I need to do is go, uh-huh. That's got to piss her off faster than anything. You know what, what me too? Because, yes, she wants to roll her eyes as soon as I say anything tactical. But if I say it like this, she just knows, okay, just humor him, right? Pay attention to what they see, physically see, pay attention once you're giving off. Yes, this is recipe to create the most self conscious people you've ever met in your life. Again, I'll figure out how to deal with that one. But it still plays into my head when I'm talking to people. Again, part of the problem with ADD is you think on many levels all at once. You can't sort and prioritize information as it comes in. So you have tricks and things that go on. Part of it's like having a multithreaded brain. Okay? Of course, go read Andy's book, you'll know that you really do. But I need to adjust to the fact that I'm always running on two different threats. When I'm speaking, I have one coming out, I've got another one going, okay, what's coming next? How's my pace going? How are the reactions around the room? Are people going, hmm, are people like, oh God, I'm falling asleep? Are people laughing? Thank God. Right? But I need to know what it is that I'm projecting when those threads are going on. And so a lot of times when we talk to somebody, I'll think of something happened to me earlier, I was talking to somebody, I really wanted to know a story. This guy was telling me I had to stop him and I felt really bad. So he's Marty, because I was like they occurred to me, I needed index cards, I hadn't gotten them yet. And it just, you know, it stops and I'm trying to concentrate. So understand what it is you're giving out, understand what people are seeing. It will go a long way to helping you in your communication. Because if they see these negative things, if your boss sees this boredom, it's amazing what happens. I was in a company that we helped, they called us for Rails 911, they'd gotten to the inevitable, they'd gotten to the ten yard line, which is really close to the scoring points for all of you that don't know anything about sports. I always need to remember to put that in there. But we got really close and they just couldn't get the last little bit done. So I walk in there, we start talking, within three minutes of the meeting I can see exactly what's going on. The developer hates the boss, the boss hates the developer. All this would be fun. The boss is sitting there, everybody in the office is pretty dressed up. It's just started up. But everybody there, you know, yeah, pretty nice business casual. Developer comes walking in, he has it shaven in about, I don't know, three and a half years. Has his Birkin stocks on, shorts that are ripped, come strolling in about 9.30, carrying his laptop, looking like he's just gotten high, he probably just hasn't slept, but impressions are impressions. And we sit down in this meeting and you can instantly see the boss tense up because he's five or ten minutes late. Now, I knew the guy. I actually recommended him into this job. I've known Gary for a long time and I can guarantee you he was up till two or three in the morning working on the problem that was going on right then. But what's the impression he's giving off? Now, isn't the boss's job to understand that as well? Yeah, probably. Can you control that? No. You can control you. Okay. Am I saying you always have to dress up or come in early? No. But understand that for some people, this is what they see. This is what they take in. This is the impression of the problem they're getting from you. How much you care, how much you don't care? Do I have a magical answer on how to get over that? No. But if you understand it, you know, knowledge is power, right? If you understand it, you can start correcting for it or you can start compensating for it or you can start communicating. It's part of the brutal honesty. Tell what's going on. Look, I don't get up early. I never have. Some people that have worked in a bank for 10, 15 years get a great idea and come out and start a startup, which I've seen happen time and time again, have never experienced what it's like to get real work done between the hours of 10 and midnight, to get real work done from a coffee shop, to get just as excited about somebody else, but there's no physical way for them to get their butt out of bed at 10 30 in the morning. It just doesn't happen, right? Some people don't understand that. Just because you had a very lucky person or lucky time street, you know, something that works really well for you. Does that mean you should start getting in earlier? Not necessarily. Because if your energy levels are not up there in the mornings, it's a bad thing. Now, should you go into consulting for the enterprise? God no. But maybe you should sit down and have a brutally honest conversation with your boss that says, look, I can't do this. I never have. Here's my entire history laid out. Here's what I've done in my life and here's how this works. The brutal honesty can go back to what they see. Because I have stopped conversations with people and said, you know what? It looks like you're really pissed at me. What happened? What did I do? Now, it's really hard for some people to hear, okay? Granted, it's not an easy conversation to hear anything because it does put somebody back on their heels. So be sure to present it in a nice way. You know what I don't, what the hell do I do? You just look pissed, right? But just, look, I'm detecting something. Did I make a mistake? A good friend, a really close friend of mine has this internally kind of tired and ticked off look. And he's usually just thinking, but every now and then, it does keep bothering me. I can't continue the conversation because I'm constantly thinking, okay, I really pissed him off, but I'm not sure at what point I did. And so I will stop him and he's like, oh, God, no, no, no. Actually, sorry, I was not paying attention to that part. I was just pissed at my girlfriend because of the, right? And you can keep going off with the conversation. But you can make sure that information is getting across. Now, again, I don't do this with a client that understands, but in a team setting is again what this thought works taught me really well is you're in a small environment, small agile team with a lot of pressures around you. You're traveling a lot. You've got a lot of things going on. That is the definition of a pressure cooker. Little things build up very quickly. So you get rid of them quickly. You have those conversations. Don't hesitate to. You're all there trying to get something done. If something's bothering them, it's eating at them as well. Very quickly, talk to them then or take them out and hallway. Okay, let's go get a coffee. As soon as you get out, okay, this is when I'm seeing what did I do, right? Listen between the lines. This one's really tricky. Everybody went to school at some point. Well, some of us longer than others. I got kicked out, but while we're in school, at some point, we probably read a story about a guy going around chasing a white whale with a big stick, right? Some people read a book that talks all about life and what it meant and the beginning and the pursuit to the end. But they kept talking about this damn whale with it too and I couldn't figure that part out. You study American literature, there's always two parts. Okay, any literature. There's usually two things that are going on. There's the actual story and there's what the point of what they're trying to get across. Animal Farm is not a story about a bunch of farm animals. I know, amazing, isn't it? When people ask questions, there's usually something underneath them. Just two days ago, God, believe it or not, I'm sitting in Tokyo, giving a talk at a conference on Agile. And the guy talks and he's like, so, when you're doing this Agile thing, and you're going along, how do you deal with the fact that, you know, all of a sudden something changes and now you need to get a release out, you know, a little faster or, you know, a new priorities come out and now you really need to buckle down and get something done. How do you get back on the Agile train after that's done? I can answer the question. Or I can go, what I hear is that you don't work hard enough during Agile sprints. And so there's times you have to actually get some real work done and then get back to this nice easy lifestyle. Right? Now, I'm dramatically paraphrasing what he said because, you know, I want to make a point, so I can do that out of the microphone. But when people ask questions, why are they asking that question? Customer recently asked us a question about what we were doing and how we were billing or actually what we were doing project management wise. But all I could hear is, I don't understand the billing model still. We've been with them for three or four months. We don't sell by hour, we sell by iteration. We sell two, there it goes again. Okay, is it back? Okay, that's just weird. We sell two people in part-time project management for two weeks at a fixed price and we teach you how we're going to work and we work it. We focus on working together not with you, not for you. But at some point, at some point he missed what we were doing and he missed the point of what we're doing. He's asking this question. Now I can very easily answer his question or I can say, wait a minute, something's uneasy about that. So when people ask questions, try to listen between lines and listen to what they're actually asking. And the last one I'm going to leave you on, because I'm going to leave you on a high note, is one I've tried to get across to my business partner for five years now and I still struggle with this to this day because he's the world's most pessimistic individual I've ever met. Assume positives. We are one of the most cynical crowds I've ever met in my life. This is also the smartest group of people I've ever met in my life. Developers are constantly questioning rules, which is great because nine times out of ten, they are smarter than the person sitting next to them, which is a recipe for disaster when it comes to people, let me tell you. But the one thing we always do is we know in our heads what the worst possible outcome of something could be. So we automatically cycle there and hardly ever have I seen a developer get me correct. Oh, this guy's trying to do this because he can make a lot of money off of it and he's going to go run out and he wants to buy a jet and he's just using me as a slave. Really? It's easy to assume the negative. Why? Because we hate to be let down. Again, go read Hennie's book. There's psychological reasons for it, but we hate to be let down. So if we put a guard up and somebody comes and surprises us and is good, fantastic. But if we put up a guard and they need that guard and it's a negative scenario, well, I was justified. And just like the lottery and slots, the one time you were burned in your life is going to cause you to be negative for the rest of your life because it happened once, but it's going to happen again. It's a same psychological thing that makes people pump quarters into slot machines quite often. Assume positives. Assumption of negative, assumption of another agenda, assumption of something else can kill the ability to listen to what they're saying, to sit there and look at their perspective, to hear what they're really trying to tell you. Somebody comes to you and says, I want to put a button up here. Listen between the lines. Why are they asking you to do that? Well, if you understand your history, they've worked at three different companies where they would go to the client and say, I'm trying to get this done. How would I do it? And they're always going, I don't know. Just tell me what to do. I don't know. I'm not a designer. Or even worse, can I do this though? We're in computers for Christ's sake. We really can't do this. Well, no, because we're engineers and we hear, can I do this particular thing? You go down the narrow field, go dope. Expand your field of vision. Oh look, I can go around that really quickly easily. They've been told this for years. Have you told them this? Maybe not. Is it your fault? No. Do I care? No. Because you can work with it now, understand why they're asking something. But don't assume she's there saying, put this button up here and she's mean about it that she's doing it because she's just meanest person ever and she absolutely hates me. Maybe there's other things to it. Maybe there are very simple things. Maybe there's a very simple signal that you've sent. But please assume a positive. Thank you.