Thursday 13.00-13.50

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I don't have "the gift" for interacting well with others; I had to learn it through years of practice. Like many programmers, I found it easy to talk to other programmers about programming; but I had no talent for talking to almost anyone else, particularly managers who don’t speak Java or design or HTTP. Also, like many programmers, when I tried to read books about interpersonal communications, I felt like the authors spoke an entirely different language than I did. I needed to learn some little tricks that I could apply right away to get immediate results. Does this sound like you?

You don’t have “the gift” either, but you need to improve your working relationship with managers who don’t code. You prefer to learn by doing, rather than by reading textbooks filled with psychological jargon. Great! Join me for a short, highly practical session on that softest of soft topics: playing well with others. In this session I will show you how I learned to debug interactions that went horribly wrong, how small changes in the words I chose made a huge difference in how I thought about others, as well as how I became "the guy who asks amazing questions". You don't need to make a dramatic, life-changing shift in philosophy -- a few simple tricks will get you started, so I'll teach you my favorites. In this session, you'll learn a few simple techniques that you can start applying the moment you learn them!