In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Jarrod Overson of Shape Security about the reason for and the content in the Beyond Being an Individual Contributor track at QCon San Francisco, and he offers advice for current and aspirant technical leaders.

Why listen to this podcast:

• Many technologists get the opportunity to move into leadership roles but receive no training or guidance about what skills such a role needs

• Solving other people’s problems as quickly as possible is an important aspect of a leadership role – this is very different to being an individual contributor where the focus is on solving your own problems

• Advice for aspirant leaders: assume you are in the role you want and practice doing everything you think should be done in that role

• There is a bias among software developers against what is perceived as “old” knowledge – practices that have been around for decades and centuries – this is very wrong

• The problems of software engineering have not yet all been solved so there is still a lot of learning to be done, you can’t just repeat what has been done elsewhere before and expect it to work

• Software engineering is a creative, artistic skill done by creative, artistic people and a leader needs to understand how such people are motivated

• Culture and motivation comes from the top of a company and spreads all the way down

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2HXSIXF

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