The Psychology of Software Teams

As a mid-manager, the last two chapters in the ToC appeal: 6. Becoming an Organization That Wants to Understand Itself 7. Fighting Dirty for Good Culture

Giant cookie banner says "Do not sell my personal information" + "switch the toggle to opt out".

Which is it? Am I switching the toggle to opt out of selling my personal information or am I switching it to opt out of NOT selling my personal information?

I shouldn't have to read a paragraph of fine print to tell if they are intentionally using a dark pattern or merely incapable of composing a simple declarative sentence.

It's a shame, because it looks like an interesting book.

For ebooks it offers some "VitalSource ebooks". Does anyone know whether it offers a regular pdf or they shitty custom closed format only?

I feel like there could be a lot of value in understanding the psychology of teams and using it to build an environment where they can thrive.

However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.

You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.

So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.

I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.

My most recent manager was exactly like this.