This is the first in a new series of podcasts from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences - the Engineering Culture Podcast.

In this podcast, Wes Reisz, chair of the QCon conferences in San Francisco, London and New York talks to Phil Haack, an Engineering Director at GitHub focused on software pushed mostly to the desktop. He’s shipping software like GitHub Desktop, GitHub Extensions for Visual Studio and the Atom text editor. Haack joined GitHub in 2011 and is a prominent member of the .Net community. At Microsoft Phil was core to shipping NewGit and ASP.NET, MVC.NET.

Why listen to this podcast:

• There is often too much focus on the nitty-gritty details of software development practices but as you scale out to larger projects and teams the challenges are not technological- they are sociological.
• Research shows that teams which are more diverse are more effective.
• Engineers shifting to management should consider it a discipline like any other technical field; it’s not something that you should “just wing”.
• Building an effective team requires trust and that allows candid discussions and healthy debates without disrupting the relationships. One-on-ones can be an effective way to do that.
• To be an effective coach for engineers, a manager needs to be seen as a strong technical leader. Someone without technical credibility is generally not received well.

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3

5m 10s The big problems we have are sociological, and frequently companies and engineers don’t pay enough attention to these problems because they try to focus on the technical practices instead; but the root cause is how people interact with each other and how they are working together.

5m 40s The talk covers some personal lessons learned and the research that backs those personal lessons. There is validated research that shows certain things make for more effective teams.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/2L7Irg3 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

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Here is Phil Haack's talk on Social Coding for Effective Teams and Products recorded at QCon San Francisco 2016: https://bit.ly/2QPEU9D