For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
096: Resilience Engineering with John Allspaw
John Allspaw: Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems
01:32 – John’s Superpower: Seeing connections across domains.
05:45 – All Technical Communities Run Small, the Intersection of People, Technology, and Work, and the Resilience Engineering Community
09:07 – Variety and Complexity
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer
17:51 – Understanding Cognitive Work
25:34 – Heuristics and Biases
31:01 – Strategies for Generating Context-Specific Questions
Debriefing Facilitation Guide (Morgan Evans)
35:01 – Asking “Why?” Over “What?” Questions
Todd Conklin: People screw up – and it happens all the time
Ten challenges for making automation a “team player” in joint human-agent activity
49:33 – Analyzing and Aggregating
Reflections:
Rein: How do we deal with the objective/subjective dialectic?
Janelle: The thing we focus on and pay attention to is a clear signal of what matters.
Jessica: Looking up the Knowledge Elicitation Methods.
Rein: It takes variety to match variety.
John A.: Guiding dialogue data.
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Special Guest: John Allspaw.