Culture

Toxic Positivity and Whitewashing in Tech

What I’ve been noticing and disliking more and more lately:

All the whitewashing and toxic positivity!

Love it, Change it or Leave it

The picture shows a CleanUpBag from LOWA GmbH that I once won in a promo from LOWA including the litter that I found (and collected) on a mountain hike. The reactions on social media were either “thank you” or anger at the people who leave the litter on the trails.

And I can understand those who feel anger! I used to feel the same way!

Why we need Feedback on the Feedback

“Feedback is important!” – We’ve all heard this before. It’s an old adage.

I guess we also agree that feedback without any following actions is not only useless but demotivating. People will learn very quickly that “giving Feedback” is obviously useless and thus will not give feedback anymore. – End of Feedback culture.

The most important things about dailies …

… and what you’ve never read about them:

So, one of the most important reasons (besides the buzzword stuff), for me, is that I hear my colleagues. Not just WHAT they say, but HOW they say it.

Making the Best of a Bad Presentation Experience

Recently, I attended a conference and sat through a particularly bad presentation. I was tempted to leave, but my colleague insisted we stay until the end. So I somehow had to make the best out of it. This gave me the opportunity to analyze what made the presentation so ineffective and “bad” for me (maybe it was interesting for other people, I just didn’t like it.

So I regarded it as a case study to probably improve my own presentations.

An advantage of remote interviews

There have been plenty of articles and comments about the (dis)advantages of home office vs in-office scenarios over the past two years. One critical aspect of home-office is definitely about creating a personal relationship with people that you never meet in person.

One situation where a personal relationship is quite important is an interview with candidates (be it internal or external). Besides the technical expertise you also want to know whether or not the candidate is a fit for the team. In the past 2+ years, we interviewed dozens of people for positions in the team. I say “we” because we usually are 2-3 internals holding different positions in the team (dev, ops, product owner, …) interviewing the new candidate. And in the past 2+ years we did all those interviews remotely via video-conferencing.