The importance of peoples tracks at IT conferences

Let's talk about the importance of peoples tracks at IT conferences.

Some IT conferences only focuses on technical issues, but some conferences, such as the QCon conferences and the GOTO conferences always include a peoples track.

I generally go to these tracks if I have the chance, since I think they are important.

Last month, James Damore published his now infamous open letter, where he wrote a screed against diversity in Google and the tech sector as a whole. The screed was not only incredibly scientific illiterate, but also clearly demonstrated the need for people tracks at conferences.


In the upcoming GOTO Copenhagen 2017 conference, there is a people track that illustrates why I think they are important.

The track contains five talks:

• The Engineering-Manager Transition: How to take great engineers and make them great technical leaders
• Stress and depression – a taboo in our time
• Scaling Engineering Teams
• The 2D Kitten Problem
• Build the right thing: how to survive the accelerating rate of business change through experimentation

While these talks are all about people, they are quite diverse, allowing the listeners to learn from the experiences of others, and to see new perspectives.

In the above list of talks, it is especially the second and the fourth talk that I think makes the track worth my time.

The second talk,  Stress and depression – a taboo in our time by Gitte Klitgaard, raises a subject which is all too rarely discussed, and which most of us are affected by - either directly or indirectly.

The fourth talk, The 2D Kitten Problem by Laura Laugwitz, is described thus:

"Diversity" is one of those buzzwords that alternates between being supercharged and sadly hollow. While many tech companies like to boast about their diversity programs, the numbers regarding their employees don't change much. But that's no reason to give up on the concept of diversity just yet! However, we need to re-examine what actually constitutes this term in order to make it sustainable: Diversity is more than hiring a few "different" people, it's about empowering oneself and others to create positive change.

This talk will give back some meaning to the term diversity while illustrating why it's still important. There will be some interaction, some tangible examples and more than a few cats to help you through the more challenging parts of theories and self-reflection.

While it is highly unlike that James Damore would ever go to such a talk, it is talks like this that would have allowed Damore to understand the importance of diversity.

It is not possible to reach Damore and his irk, but there are other people out there who are not aware of the importance of diversity, who can be reached through such talks. This is why I think people talks are important, and why I hope conferences keep having them.

Disclosure: This blogpost mentions the GOTO Copenhagen 2017 conference. As a blogger who blogs about that conference, I get a free ticket from the organizers. The organizers don't dictate what I write about, and don't have any say about the content of the posts.

Social science and systems development

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blogpost on Agile and pseudo-science, which led to an interesting discussion on my Facebook wall about the lack of science and data in systems development.

As I wrote in my post, there is an unfortunately tendency of systems developers to rely on pseudo- or popular science, rather than proper science. A lot of decisions are made on assumptions for which there is no real evidence, but which somehow has become embedded in the world of systems development - be it project management, programming, testing, or some other aspect.

We tend to think of systems development as off shot of computer science with some cognitive psychology thrown in. While computer science and cognitive psychology certainly are important for creating systems, they are very much related to the "systems" part of systems development, while they hardly add to the processes, methods etc. that adds up to the "development" part.

A comment in the before-mentioned Facebook discussion suggested that we should look at social science when talking about science and systems development.

This seems like a good idea to me. A lot of what goes on in systems development is about humans interacting with each other, rather than about math, algorithms, cryptography or other aspects of computer science.

I once worked on a project where we had a horrible high turnover, which is definitely a well-known sign of a doomed team. Yet this team was one of the best teams you could imagine - continuously over-performing in the sense of delivering over scope, under budget and without flaws. From everything we know about team dynamics, this team should not have performed like this, but it did, and it could have been good to have had someone qualified there to analyse how this could be the case.

Equally it would be good to have someone look at the opposite type of teams - the ones which in theory should perform well, but which continuously under-perform. The ones where good developers suddenly seem unable to actually finish anything, where simple requirements turn into hideous bloated things, and where the only cure seems to be to kill of the team, never to let them work together again.

In both cases we know the anomalies relate to people, the interaction between them, and the culture of the team and the organization surrounding it. We just don't seem to be able to figure out how to create the first type of team, while avoiding the second type.

Given how many systems development projects fail, maybe it is worth looking at these things? And if we do, maybe we should try to find the proper tools?

Social science would seem like a good fit, and it would seem like a good idea for large organizations with many systems development projects, to take a look at how the research methods of social science could be applied to systems development, in order to become better at it.