First of all, man, it’s only been 3 days??!!
Shereef took some time today to talk to us about “empathy”: the interpersonal skill of interaction between human beings and how important it is to refine that skill as a developer. Oftentimes projects fail not because of budgets or time constraints, but because the team couldn’t get their act together to pull it off. From experience, I know this is definitely true.
Another part of the empathy concept is to learn to give and receive feedback constructively. Without feedback, we can’t learn. But in today’s world, everyone is so PC, people are afraid to give feedback or worse, don’t know how to handle it and act on it.
A fun part of the presentation was a demonstration of giving and receiving feedback. Our group (“the banana slugs”) were given the task of molding a plane out of Play-Doh, and the rest of the group was to give us feedback ranging from “kind and encouraging” to “highly critical and negative”. I’m happy to say that most of my feedback was positive! 😉
Here’s mine:
