Roasting Marshmallows FourScouts

Are you very sensitive to even constructive criticism?
Do you agonize over even the smallest mistakes or flaws in your work?
Do you downplay your own expertise, even in areas where you are genuinely more skilled than others?

The game “Among Us” is all about finding the imposter and throwing it out of the spaceship. When you play as imposter, your job is to sabotage the ship and kill the crew mates. Playing as either role is pretty fun, but it is always a little bit more exciting when you get to play as the imposter.

While being an imposter in a video game is good fun, in real life many people feel like an imposter at their job. They fear that others will find out about them, that they are incompetent, that they achieved their success through sheer luck and that voice in their head saying that one day everyone will find out they are useless.

As consultant being hired for our expertise, we also sometimes experience imposter syndrome. Can we help this client? What our my help isn’t good enough?

Today, we are roasting marshmallows around the campfire, sharing stories of imposter syndrome and how we cope with it.

Way back in episode 13, we discussed mobbing, or ensemble programming, with Woody Zuill. While we think this topic deserves more widespread recognition and adoption, there’s no denying that pair programming is more well known, and is being done more.

Of course, pairing is not limited to just programming. For example, studies have shown that kindergarteners sharing an iPad enables them to learn more and score better on certain tests, most likely due to forcing them to collaborate, which in turn emphasises communication and sharing alternative viewpoints.

Collaboration and communication are the key words here, and increasing that will eventually yield  significant benefits, such as increased quality, widespread knowledge and improved morale. These things will all contribute to a higher productivity.

So today we are discussing these benefits, but also drawbacks, of pairing!

Nowadays, everyone wants to make an impact. Nobody wants to do meaningless work. What it means to make an impact is different for everyone, but it is the driving motivation why people do the work that they do, be it helping senior citizens out of their beds, or maximizing profit for multinationals.

Indeed, some of the low points of my career as a software engineer is being part of a project that ends up in the bin. Sure, sometimes a project might fail, which in itself is ok, but if you spend a lot of time on something that ultimately did not even get a chance to make an impact is demotivating at best. If you base an entire business on something like that, you are in big trouble.

That is why Tim O’Reilly has been urging people to work on stuff that matters for over 10 years now. He talks about working on something that matters more to you than money, creating more value than you capture and taking the long view.

This does not mean everyone should do non-profit work, but it does mean the social value of businesses to be done right.

How can you apply these guidelines to your organization? What does working on stuff that matters mean to us? That is the topic of the show today!

Is your startup interesting enough to find investors?
What kind of effort does it take to have a startup?

Start ups are usually considered pretty sexy. They bring about cool new apps that your friends insist you just have to get. They disrupt the market with innovative new goods and services. They display their awesome company culture in such a way that working there becomes a goal in itself.

But what about the Business to Business startup? You don't hear a lot about those being the next hottest startup. Maybe not, but, because they cater to the needs of other businesses, they are really good at making money.

Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Alex Cojocaru, one of the co-founders of Licenseware, an open ecosystem of Software Asset Management applications that contains the collective work of thousands of experts, enabling businesses to make the most out of their licenses.

Alex started his career as an Analyst in 2011, and has had various roles with a focus on software asset management, data analytics, and software development.

In 2020 he co-founded licenseware, with the mission of commoditizing software license management.

https://licenseware.io/

Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-cojocaru/

How to stay engaged while working remote?
What can offshoring teach us when working remote? 
What are Rini's laws?

We are, when recording this podcast, in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The omikron variant is running rampant, so this means most of us are working from the kitchen table, or if you have the room, the home office again.

So, entire teams are working remote again, not physically meeting each other for an extended period of time. How do you make sure everything keeps running smooth? How do you make sure communication, coordination and control do not degrade due to increased distance of the team members?

Luckily, the software engineering industry has had decades of experience working with remote teams: near- and offshoring has been pretty common, and the lessons learnt from that can be applied to working from home.

To help us pin-point the takeaways from these lessons, we are roasting marshmallows with Rini van Solingen, speaker & author on speed and agility of people & organizations. Rini is a professor at Delft University of Technology, and he investigates how to make global teams hyper-productive and how to decrease the impact of distance in global software engineering.

Rini wrote several books, on topics about changing leadership, accelerating organizations, agile transformations and scrum.



Rini's website: https://rinivansolingen.com/

Rini on twitter: @solingen

Rini on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solingen/

Does the thought of doing a presentation make your stomach churn?
Are you comfortable speaking up in front of a group of people?
How do you deal with being the center of attention?

Fear. We all know the feeling from a terrifying experience at some point in our lives. However, 75% of the people get fearful when having to speak in front of a group of people. Even the idea of doing it is sometimes enough for many people to get fearful.

Yes, most of us — even those at the top — struggle with public-speaking anxiety. When people think about what makes them nervous, they usually come up with the same answers:


I don’t like being in the spotlight
I don’t like being watched
I don’t like the eyes on me

Some might say the fear will go away as you do more and more talks. This is not always true: our guest today, Thierry de Pauw, has done many talks: about Continuous Delivery, Agile transformations, Trunk based development and so on. However, Thierry has publicly shared about his struggle to start public talks.

Thierry is a Senior IT Engineer at the fintech startup PaxFamilia.

On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm in the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

He is an occasional speaker at international conferences about everything Continuous Delivery.



Thierry's website: https://thinkinglabs.io/

Thierry on twitter: @tdpauw

Thierry on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdpauw/