Culture

Whether you want to recruit and retain better developers, improve the effectiveness of your existing team or just enjoy coming to work more, creating a compelling culture is a top priority. In this track we'll present experience reports from a range of top practitioners so we can learn what is working in other organizations that we might be able to apply.

Day of week:

Friday

Location:

Grand Ballroom - Salon C

Host:

Peter Bell

Presentations

Culture Hacking:The Prospect of Magnificence

10:20pm - 11:10pm

By: Jim McCarthy

A culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describes and shapes a group. Our era is increasingly characterized by an emergent 'software culture.' Not only is software itself creating much of our global wealth, but the unique challenges of creating our software have demanded wholly new types of engineered corporate culture from us. Various high tech development disciplines have been articulated and 'packaged up.' In response to the demands of software, we have created several seminal management 'movements' (such as Agile, Scrum, XP, etc.). These movements represent the birth of culture engineering. Culture hacking is a distinct kind of culture engineering. Culture hacks express a particular hacker ethos, an ethos originating in the world of software hacking. Good culture hacking will tend to promote freedom, extend openness, and embody rationality and design elegance. As our culture becomes increasingly and fruitfully hacked, we will grow in effectiveness and ambition and will bring more and more problems into scope. This will likely trigger an unprecedented Golden Era, an age of unparalleled magnificence.
Hiring for Hackers

4:00pm - 4:50pm

By: Pete Soderling

If you want to work on an amazing team, dont leave the job to someone else. This talk will explain from-the-trenches, battle-tested tactics an engineer can use to successfully attract the best developers to their team. Learn how to more effectively tell the story of your product & tech and create powerful talent magnets that attract the best and brightest. Develop better techniques for screening & interviewing engineers more quickly and effectively. Discover practical ways to build a unique engineering brand that will put your team at the top of the pack. If you want to get better at hiring and/or move into a position of engineering leadership, this talk will give you actionable ideas on how to build a better team.
Innovation in the Enterprise: The Intrapreneurs behind the Scenes"

5:10pm - 6:00pm

By: Debbie Madden

QCon focuses largely on innovation from a technical perspective. At the core of this innovation is people, specifically Intrapreneurs. (Wikipedia defines Intrapreneurship as 'the act of behaving like anentrepreneurwhile working within a large organization.') In an interesting survey of NYC Intrapreneurs, weve uncovered the strengths of many innovators inside our citys enterprises. What types of attributes do these individuals leading the change have in common? How can one identify as an Intrapreneur?What can we do to impact technical innovation from a human perspective?
The Game of Team Culture

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Dan Mezick

Your team at work is playing a game. Well structured games deliver happiness while poorly structured games are not fun to play. This has implications for your team.If the core requirements for happiness at work are not present, you disengage and check out. If the core requirements are there, you automatically experience fun, satisfaction and potentially, a deeply engaged sense of well-being. This session shows how to deliver happiness through the intentional design and implementation of good-game mechanics inside your team.Work is BROKEN when it is not fun to play. In this session, we provide tools for playing an all-new game of engagement and team learning. By injecting good-game mechanics into the structure of work and meetings, you can help your team rapidly learn, have fun, and be more productive.Why a genuine sense of control, progress, belonging and membership matter. Why a clear aim and sense of team purpose is essential. Why Scrum and Kanban are good games. How to use game thinking to improve the culture and morale of your team
Culture Unconference

11:30pm - 12:40pm

By: Dan Mezick

Meeting each other in the context of conversations we care about is why at QCon we are giving prime time to the unconference format; it creates a space for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity.

First we’ll father in a circle to be guided through creating an agenda using open space technology. Then there will be three three 20 minute time slots, each with 5 concurrent break out discussions that were designed by you.

Attendees often know more than the speakers! Bring your questions, ideas - be prepared to be surprised.
Do Agile Methods Contain the Seeds of Their Own Destruction? (Safety and Our Ability to Learn from Failure)

1:40pm - 2:30pm

By: Amr Elssamadisy

Some teams and organizations flourish with agile methods. However, there are teams have never been able to find their stride with agile and either struggle with it painfully or are resigned to the apparent fact that agile is just hype. Unfortunately, most of us are in the second camp. That's ok - it is not our fault - it is a built-in weakness of agile methods.

Great teams leverage agile's ability to help you fail fast and learn quickly. At the same time, *because* using agile creates a huge number of failures, it can easily shut down individuals, teams, and organizations who do not *feel* safe to fail.

Learning from failure is not easy. It does not come natural for everyone. And not all cultures invite failure and learning from failure.

Attend this session to explore this link between safety and success of agile methods. Attend this session to learn how you can do things today to make things better for yourself as an individual. Attend this session to learn how you can start to change the culture of your organization to create a base where agile methods can flourish.