Talk proposal for September

[Alex P]

After listening what Robert was talking about (how difficult it is to convince people to make good tech choices and to find good people), I thought of how much I disagree with our inability to influence these things. 

Talk title would be "How to win developers and influence technology decisions". 

Many things that influence personnel retention, initial hiring are often related to either company policies (which are often unacceptable for developers), to work ethics, company positioning and picture, working environment, currently present talent (and their activity/development). I strongly believe that an outstanding developer can outperform average one in a factor of 5 or sometimes even 10 times, which may be not visible in a scale of day or week, but rather in a scale of year of several years.

How to make your company more attractive to talent, how to advocate your fancy new tech before old-school management, how to make choices that last, make team stronger, people happier and improve product at the same time. Open source, freedom of choice, loosing restrictions, improving internal and external communication, encouraging learning and self improvement, turning 8to5 workers into top-performers, motivating your team, setting goals and priorities in a way that doesn't set their hair on fire, and many more tips and tricks from my experience of working with local and distributed teams, building products, customer projects and consultancy.

What do you think? Which subjects are mostly interesting for you?

[Patrick Mulder]

-- 

I sympathize with some of your thoughts here; the question I ask myself sometimes: Why is it that so few software companies 'give back' to open-source projects?

I think 37signals and documentcloud are just 2 great examples of companies that make great use _and_ contributions to the open-source (Ruby) ecosystem.

My 2 cts.

Cheers,

Patrick

 

[Alex P]

As for me, the answer is quite simple and falls in one of three following categories:

  * people do not know _what_ to open source

  * people do not know _how_ to open source

  * people do not know how to _maintain_ project

Examples: 

  - you'd like to open source something, but you do know what

  - you've found what to open source, but it's too hard to make it generic enough

  - you have open sourced it, but there're no docs, so everyone walks by

  - your project got recognition and documentation but you alienate other contributions by not accepting their patches, being to strict, or not answering them at all.

How many _people_ contribute to open source? Not many. Everyone has a github account, but how many projects / contributions are there?.. That's also easy to change :) 

Also in many cases problem is how people develop software: they develop features, not tools to solve problem, which leads to _lots_ and _lots_ and _lots_ of code that's not generic enough to opensource because it's all AD-hoc.

lg, 

Alex

http//twitter.com/ifesdjeen

http://clojurewerkz.org/

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RubyShift, Ruby User Group Munich" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyshift-muenc...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to rubyshift...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyshift-muenchen/CAEx2pdfxz3cpei4fLBMW8W3xhaM2%2B1PDDbVmUciJzm0YL1iyMQ%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Philipp Fehre]

Sounds really interessting Alex, also because I think I will probably agree with almost 100% of your points ;). 

Also to your point "[...] believe that an outstanding developer can outperform average one in a factor of 5 or sometimes even 10 times", I think the other way around is even worse, an uninterested an unmotivated developer can easily drag down the team. 

Interested to hear your thoughts, in the talk.

Greetings Phil

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyshift-muenchen/etPan.51decd1e.6b8b4567.20de%40noname.

[robertj]

I sympathize with some of your thoughts here; the question I ask myself sometimes: Why is it that so few software companies 'give back' to open-source projects?

I think 37signals and documentcloud are just 2 great examples of companies that make great use _and_ contributions to the open-source (Ruby) ecosystem.

This one is really easy to answer: Lack of time, high pressure, ROI too far in the future.

[Patrick Mulder]

How consultants say: "It depends" ... ;-) 

Maybe it would give a nice talk on the business models of Ruby/Rails shops. If there is interest, I will think if I can gather some thoughts for a talk on this (probably later than September).

Now, I am on holidays.... have a nice time!

Patrick