Handling Pessimism - Douchebag Coexistence

I tend to have what I call a douchebag coexistence problem; meaning when I perceive someone as a douchebag, all I seem to think about is their douchebagginess instead of listening to anything they have to say. They could just have created an awesome framework that builds enterprise applications in less than 10 lines of code AND makes me toast in the morning but the second they start talking to me this little voice in my head just starts repeating "douchebaggity doo douchebaggity doo...". Needless to say, this is not a healthy response to what is probably just a pessimistic person. It's something I'm working on.

So I read books like The No-Asshole Rule, Managing Humans and How to Win Friends and Influence People... and I still hear the voices. Honestly, the "How To Win Friends..." book is great for dealing with people in general and I recommend it to anyone who has to talk to people on a regular basis. Yes, anyone who has to talk to people in any capacity, at all, should read that book.

I also just read an interesting article on the Harvard Business Review website about How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team. I recommend reading the full article, but I'll paraphrase shortly three approaches that are described:

1. Create awareness. This is best done by pulling the team member aside and explaining how his comments are received.

2. Reposition negative statements. Don't let negative comments linger; ask for clarification and maybe even require a follow up "But..." statement.

3. Involve the whole team. Set team norms and ask that everyone observe them.

So anyway, the first step is admitting you have a problem, right? Like I said, I'm working on it.

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Dare Obasanjo Makes Me Want To Work At Microsoft

I've been reading a lot of Dare Obasanjo's Blog (aka Carnage4Life) over at 25hoursaday.com. I came across the blog through some posts on the CodingHorror blog a while back and have been a subscriber since setting up my Google Reader about a month ago. I've read about the drama before and the previous hiatus on postings, I'm glad he is still around for me to find.

There are a couple of things I have to say about the blog. The first is that I like the content because it provides a good mix of technical information and programming/software commentary. Sometimes the technical details (especially when talking about different protocol RFC's) get a bit above my head, but that is probably a good thing because I end up learning more because of the helpful links that he supplies.

I like that someone like Dare is still getting excited about new language features even though he obviously has a lot of things on his plate. My earlier posts on functional programming (including my "Sexy" Aggregate function in Leveraging the DNN Event Logging API) came out about the time that his posts did, but I was just recently looking through the archives and came across them.

The other thing about the blog that I like, which may or may not be a good thing for Dare, is that it makes me want to work for Microsoft. If a person like Dare is having a good time there, at least most of the time, then it probably is an okay place. For Microsoft recruiters, it's kind of like what Shaq called Homeboy Marketing:

'Homeboy Marketing’

Marketers refer to it as guerrilla marketing, but O’Neal calls it “homeboy marketing… . Most people spend $2 million, $3 million for a commercial. With homeboy marketing, it’s all for free. When these TV stations want to interview me, I wear a FreeInternet hat. When consumers see me on TV, they also see all this stuff.”

Dare gets to do "Slam Dunk" technical posts about topics that interest him, and along the way readers (probably pretty technical readers) find out that Dare works for Microsoft. In this instance, it's me, a 26 year-old programmer on the come up. Maybe somewhere else it's the genius that gives Microsoft a winning search solution that takes out the feet of one of their competitors.

Anyway, this blog was originally started as a way to indirectly market the super-cool company I work at and I'm not currently looking for a job. But if I were...

P.S. I gotta make me some kind of blogspot widget that does that "Now Playing" thing at the bottom of Dare's Blog Posts. Maybe something that can pull information from Amazon and link there (I'm not a big fan of Apple right now, don't get me wrong I'm not one of those guys with a stick yelling "Get Off My Lawn" because all the cool kids are using Macs, I'll have to elaborate in another post). For now, I'm totally ripping it off, sorry:

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