Imminent Death of BayLISA / July Board Meeting Invitation

Tue Jun 15 15:54:07 PDT 2004

On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 03:05:40PM -0700, richard childers / kg6hac wrote:
> It would be nice to give these people an opportunity to speak. A little 
> public exposure and a little experience at public speaking never hurt 
> anyone.
> 
> It could be in response to a call for anyone who thinks they are an 
> expert in topic T ... or it could be a queue of people who would like to 
> address their fellow geeks on some subject which they believe is of 
> interest to their peers; let the cheers, or jeers, decide, as a natural 
> feedback mechanism that needs no improvement.
> 
> In response to David's specific comments, it might, for instance, be 
> someone who wishes to test their lesson plan, before offering a small 
> class at the local community college in some small technical topic. 
> 'Introduction to JavaScript', say, or 'Installing FreeBSD for Dummies'.

The only concern I've got with this -- and it's a damn good idea, Richard
-- is that us geeks are historically not very good at offering good
feedback.

I saw a similar problem at a previous workplace -- at some point, a
colleague and I became pretty much the best Python programmers there.  I
had no problem having him look at my code and just instinctively go "that
class structure sucks! You should totally do it this way ... " but we found
that his ability to impart useful information to more junior people was
somewhat hurt by his ... exuberance.

One of the most useful things my boss ever did for me is to send me to a
phenomenal class on leadership and communication where I got a whole bunch
of people giving me feedback about my feedback in an environment where
there were no real consequences for screwing up -- nobody was going to talk
to my boss about how I interacted with people.  I found it invaluable in
helping me structure how I talk to people, especially people with whom I
have something of a power imbalance (people who work for me, junior people,
etc).  I don't think most geeks have had that sort of training, and it runs
counter to our digital nature.

(Actually, funny story:  Before I took this class, I actually had a
situation where I was calling an engineer who had been telecommuting.  He
had worked for us for about three months at this point and I was calling to
offer him a promotion to management of his group.  The conversation started
with "So, you've been working for us for about three months now.  How's it
been?" and progressed to him doing a monologue about the (minor) things he'd done
wrong and ... well, it was a painful conversation watching him verbally
self-destruct and wondering if I should violate my own rule about
interrupting people.  Turned out he was expecting me to fire him*)

-roy

* Well, it's funny in hindsight