Archive for the ‘Social’ Category

Posted on April 28, 2010 - by Denis

How To Become A CouchSurfer

You may have heard about the term “couch surfing” which simply means crashing on someone else’s couch, especially in the context of travelling.
There’s a great community of couchsurfers and the online hub I love and use to connect with them is the site CouchSurfing.org (CS). You may already be a member there or not, but if you need a few ideas on how you can get started there, i.e. build up your profile and reputation within the community and get in contact with some of the really awesome people there, here’s a starter guide that I’ve originally written via Facebook comments for a friend of mine, and I thought it may be beneficial if I shared it with all of you.

How To Get Started With CouchSurfing

You don’t really need to have reputation to get started. Fill out your profile there, make sure you enter “couch available” or “couch definitely available” if you’d like to host someone or set it to something else if you don’t feel comfortable hosting people yet, but still want to meet up for a coffee or something. Then go look for a few groups, for example: the city and area you live in and / or travel to frequently or similar, some areas of interest like yoga (that group did the trick for me, I even found my current girlfriend through that group, and this story may be worth its own blog post ) – and the “stronger” the interest, the more likely you are to find like-minded people there. Then if you feel like it join some discussions, but if not the Universe will bring you people who want to surf your couch or meet up with you anyway.
Also, make sure you join “emergency hosting” groups if you can host people spontaneously, like on the day they ask or one day or so ahead of time. Those groups are usually well visited by people really wanting to find a host, so that can improve your odds a lot for having your first CS experience soon.
And if you travel somewhere for at least one night and have a little time available make sure you find a host through the site and stay there instead of using a hotel. That also will save you money, which shouldn’t be your primary reason for doing it, but it’s definitely a nice side effect.

I would also advise you to join a regular local meeting of couchsurfers in your city, at least a few times, so you make “first contact” with some people from the CS community, that can also be a good starting point!
And then, but this is less important, add me and other people you know on CouchSurfing.org, write them a positive reference there and they’ll respond with a reference for you, too – it’s always good practice to have references both ways there. This is going to establish a base amount of credibility for your profile.

And also, there’s always many invitations to various events posted on especially the local and interest-based CS groups that you can just join. For example we have a yoga group here in Dresden that meets once a week for a free class of Hatha yoga. Then there’s a meditation evening every week. Then I know of quite a few people who’ve found buddies for climbing, salsa, … through CS.
I’m pretty sure that you’ll find quite a few people to get the ball rolling on CS in this way! Enjoy!

Be sure to let me know how your first CS experience went after you’ve gotten started with couchsurfing! More tips on getting started and all things couchsurfing are welcome in the comments as well!

Posted on November 11, 2009 - by Denis

Relating to people not as skilled or knowledgeable as you are

I used to know a guy, a fellow Software Developer, who I’ve worked with on a project of mine for quite some time. He was quite an interesting person, in multiple ways.

He joined our company at a time when we were in quite a need for skilled developers because we had a lot of stuff to get done for our business to grow and way too little people to handle all that. So we talked to a lot of people and interviewed some, including him. We instantly knew that he was a good fit technically, from what he knew about software development and what his areas of expertise were, but at the same time we also knew that he lacked some social skills. Actually you’d have to put it differently: His social skills were actually fine, he just didn’t care much about applying them to create and keep a nice atmosphere and relationships for the whole team. Specifically, he rated people on the basis of their (technical) skill and this rating then determined how much he would respect a person.

For me personally, this was not a problem because it was clear that I was going to get along fine with him as he was more or less an equal for me in terms of technical knowledge and skills. So, not having had too much experience with that kind of people on the team, I obviously voted for employing him, and other technical people did, too, we hired him and put him on the development team.

At first he did get along with everyone on the team and people got along with him. But his way of dealing with people became more evident from day to day. The other people on the team, especially the non-technical ones, including non-technical or technically lesser skilled or knowledgeable managers, got increasingly frustrated by his attitude of low respect towards them. This massively poisoned our working environment and the initial goal we were looking to achieve, speeding up development and getting more things done, actually started moving even further away from us.

So what did that guy do? How did he treat people based on his valuation of them? How can that be generalized and what lessons can be learned from it for your own behaviour towards people who may be inferior to you in some way?

#1 – Not Explaining

Whenever you communicate with another person and information, knowledge or skill is an important part or basis of that conversation and you know or assume that the other person is, in that regard, inferior to you, always be aware that you are obliged to offer additional information, explanations and sometimes pointers to resources containing (more of) those to the other person. That of course equals to some extra work for you as you cannot just ramble in your usual technical language and assume the other person to fully understand what you are saying. Try to lower the density of technical terms, explain core concepts that cannot be stated without those terms in additional ways, such as giving analogies.

But take care to not lower your language complexity too much as that may offend the other person. Personally I find it very useful to exchange a few words about the knowledge and skill levels, the depth of familiarity of all communication participants with the topic and state openly that everyone is going to do their best to communicate such that all others will be able to follow and not be offended if explanations will be given to them for things they know already, maybe even know more or more detail about than the person explaining. That sets up the stage for open communication where nobody is left out or offended regarding information, skill and knowledge.

#2: Being Impatient

In addition, it is important to be patient. Even if you take the trouble and explain concepts the other person did not know about or understand previously, it most certainly will take a few tries before the other person will grasp the information properly.

A common mistake is to explain things once and if there’s still someone asking “stupid questions” about it… well, they’re stupid, aren’t they? No, they aren’t. People learn differently, learning depends a lot on the amount and quality of contextual information they already have (or don’t have, for that matter), so it just takes time and someone who is patient and creative enough to explain it in different ways until it makes sense and sticks.

Remember that learning and teaching do take time, but nevertheless are some of the most important things you can ever do in your life. And hold your judgement on people based on how quickly they understand something you’re trying to explain to them. It may be your explanation is not a good fit for them, it may be that they’re missing a lot of contextual or adjacent information or that it just takes a little more time, for whatever reasons there might be that we don’t understand yet about learning.

And don’t forget to breathe deeply, that also helps

How The Story Ended

Continuing with the story from the beginning: Even though we did see the problems with that guy, we didn’t really see how much of a negative impact it was making on the team and the project, so we probably would have kept him on the team. But – probably luckily, in retrospect – his respect level for some of our managers had gotten so low about 4 months in that they started arguing and as he didn’t bother to listen and talk to them with the basic level of respect they expect from you if you’d like to keep your job… well, he was out of it pretty quickly and without much ado

For me, personally, it is quite important to be very respectful and supportive towards other people, so from time to time I keep remembering this story and the lessons I’ve learned from it. I’m sure you do meet people of this and of the opposite kind, whether it’s you they respect or disrespect or some other person. What observations have you make or can you make? What other lessons can you derive from those situations?

This topic can also be extended to even more severe cases where the person you’re facing is not only somewhat lesser knowledgeable or skilled than you, but is disabled mentally or physically, meaning that the difference between you and the other person is not only temporarily and on a more surface level, but is pretty much a permanent thing and stems from a deeper level. I’ve been around a lot of disabled people in the last few months as part of the compulsory civil service I’m doing (called “Zivildienst” in Germany) and there are some very helpful experiences related to todays topic that I will share with you soon, too.

Be well.

- Denis