Nebraska.Code() Sessions tagged teamwork

How To Not Strangle Your Coworkers: Resolving Conflict with Collaboration

Conflict at work is as inevitable as the tides - like the old joke says, if you put five software engineers in a room, you’ll have seven opinions. Whether the conflict is over what language to use, what frameworks are the new hotness, or even just tabs vs spaces, conflict can get ugly. Tempers flare, positions are staked out in absolute terms, feelings are hurt, working relationships are destroyed… if only there were a way to avoid the negative consequences.

What if I told you that there is? Let’s take a journey together towards a wholly different approach to conflict - a collaborative one. In this talk, you’ll learn how to use conflict to fuel better software, better teams, and better companies. You’ll learn how to structure your team’s environment to draw out good conflict, to squelch the bad conflict, and to handle conflict when it becomes personal. We’ll discuss how to manage different confrontational styles, avoid self-sealing prophecies, and even how to deal with conflict when you lack control. Conflict should fuel your progress, not hinder it - and after this talk, you can make that happen.

Speaker

Arthur Doler

Arthur Doler

Senior Software Engineer, Community & Culture Steward, Aviture

Fighting The Saboteur in Your Relationships: Dealing with Cognitive Biases

Modern software requires the efforts of a coordinated, dedicated team of individuals. We need to work with other people, and in order to do that, we have to maintain relationships with them. But no matter how polite, conscientious, or amiable you are, there’s still something that’s always working against you - your own brain, and its host of cognitive biases. For the last several years, books and podcasts and presentations have warned of the danger of cognitive biases, but we just haven’t had the ammunition to fight against them effectively… until now.

A new wave of cutting-edge psychological research is showing us how to fight back against our cognitive biases, and you can make use of it! You’ll learn how to diminish attribution errors, how to grapple with tribalism, and how to jump the empathy gap. Find out how to knock illusory superiority down to size, and how to extinguish the halo effect. And the best part is that the only piece of hardware you’ll need to do it is the thing you already have between your ears - your own brain.

Speaker

Arthur Doler

Arthur Doler

Senior Software Engineer, Community & Culture Steward, Aviture