Team Geek: A Software Developer's Guide to Working Well with Others

Brian W. Fitzpatrick · Ben Collins-Sussman

Jul 2012 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

In a perfect world, software engineers who produce the best code are the most successful. But in our perfectly messy world, success also depends on how you work with people to get your job done.

In this highly entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

Writing software is a team sport, and human factors have as much influence on the outcome as technical factors. Even if you’ve spent decades learning the technical side of programming, this book teaches you about the often-overlooked human component. By learning to collaborate and investing in the "soft skills" of software engineering, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort.

Team Geek was named as a Finalist in the 2013 Jolt Awards from Dr. Dobb's Journal. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

Ratings and reviews

This is a great book on how to build, maintain, and work in some of the best teams I've ever been in. It's also short enough to be worth reading even if you don't need the advice right away. I highly recommend it, even if you're only somewhat interested in the topic. The book is written to be practical rather than rigorous. There are a lot of places where the authors talk about how to deal with typical engineers but don't spend any time describing cases where their advice won't work. They typically state their assumptions near the beginning of each section, however, and it's easy to tell when they're leaving things out. This certainly helped make the book short, so I appreciate what they did. It may leave room for a sequel as well. There are a lot of short examples in the form of stories. These are helpful, but be warned that they're written from the point of view of a Google engineer. Both authors work at Google. I work at Google as well, so it made me feel as though they were talking about my team. I don't think this will confuse anyone since the terminology used at Google is very close to the terminology everyone else uses. However, when they talk about a "technical lead" in a

This book has a lot of helpful thoughts about working with other people. Like the authors mention, while this book is geared toward software engineers, it can be helpful for anyone working in teams. I highly recommend it.

Good but not ground breaking.

About the author

Brian Fitzpatrick leads Google's Data Liberation Front and Transparency Engineering teams and has previously led Google's Project Hosting and Google Affiliate Network teams. He cofounded Google's Chicago engineering office and serves as both thought leader and internal advisor for Google's open data efforts.

Ben Collins-Sussman, one of the founding developers of the Subversion version control system, led Google's Project Hosting team, and now manages the engineering team for the Google Affiliate Network. He cofounded Google's engineering office in Chicago and ported Subversion to Google's Bigtable platform.