Culture is an agreed-upon set of values and norms that we accept and embrace. In organizations, if these aren't intentional and established, the company is not likely to operate at its best.

Ben and Fitz came to some remarkable conclusions about Culture in the collective time at Google causing them to write their book, Debugging Teams.

Their goal is to ensure teams operate at their best by being intentional about how they work together and for each other.

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Brian (Fitz) is the Founder and CTO of Tock, and he started Google's Chicago engineering office in 2005. An open-source contributor for over 13 years, Brian was the engineering manager for several Google products, and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation, a former engineer at Apple and CollabNet, and a Subversion developer,

Ben is a co-founder & author of Subversion, a popular version-control tool to help programmers collaborate. He also co-authored the central O'Reilly manual for the software. He is currently the engineering Site Lead for Google's Chicago office, having joined Google in 2005 as one of the first two engineers in Chicago. He manages multiple teams working on Google's Search-serving infrastructure.

Together they have collaborated on multiple talks and books regarding the social challenges of software development. They have given dozens of talks at conferences (many viewable on youtube), and authored a popular O'Reilly book on the subject: Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration.

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Topics we discuss:

• Learning when to speak
  • Using a 20 sided die as a tool
  • Learning to listen
• Finding Common Ground
• Taking a break
  • H.A.L.T.
  • When it's not possible
• Ending Phone Notifications
• Moral Imperative of fixing Culture
  • Their growth to seeing the importance
  • Observations of the pandemic
  • Earn Trust

References:

• ORD Camp
• Crucial Conversations
• H.A.L.T. - Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired
• Free Book - Debugging Teams
• Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison
• Peter Principle

Credits:

Music:

Main Theme: "Eaze Does It" by Shye Eaze and DJ Rufbeats, a More In Common Podcast Exclusive.

All music created by DJ Rufbeats