Studies on group effectiveness

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 05:23:25AM -0800, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html
>
> The studies find that smart teams are distinguished by three characteristics,
> sharing time evenly between members, being good at reading each other's
> emotional states, and having more women.  On-line groups are distinguished
> by the /same/ three characteristics.

Eliot,

Thanks for sharing this link. As we were discussing in the Squeak
oversight board meeting last week, getting more women involved in the
community, as well as promoting an overall feeling of inclusiveness,
is really important.  It is not just a matter of being fair with
people, it is very much a matter of having a more effective and
productive community.

I am probably older than most of the folks on this list. I am not, and
never have been, a software engineer. But I do have a lot of experience
leading and participating in technical teams in industry. The conclusions
in this article are 100% consistent with my personal experience.

If I could advise an aspiring young software engineer to read just
one paper to improve their chances of success in business and industry,
this would be it.

Dave

On 17-01-2015, at 6:43 AM, David T. Lewis <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 05:23:25AM -0800, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html
>

[snip]
>
> If I could advise an aspiring young software engineer to read just
> one paper to improve their chances of success in business and industry,
> this would be it.

I’d also suggest reading
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-diversity/fulltext


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: PHP: Put Hackers into Privileged mode

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 10:56:18AM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
Thanks, that's good reading also.

Dave
 

The hardest thing is even seeing the problem. I like to think of myself as being non-sexist, non-racist, etc. but until recently (*) I wasn't even aware of my own blindness.

Leslie Hawthorn just gave an excellent talk on how to see privilege:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuK45hDRlaE

(if you don't have 45 minutes, watch this one instead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWRCQYRZJzo )

I want Squeak to be a place welcoming all humans. Please help remove obstacles to that, especially those we cannot even see.

- Bert -

(*) I don't recall when I realized I had been privileged all along, but I do remember this nerdy piece being helpful for explaining it:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/