Office Hours – Professional Communication with Elizabeth Woolf

Developing software requires a lot of communication with other developers, with other teams and divisions, with managers or less experienced developers. Carl Vitullo is joined by Elizabeth Woolf to talk about feedback, team conflicts, salary negotiation, and more.

Elizabeth has worked at the intersection of tech and communication for years, getting her start in 2016 helping professors and students prepare talks and presentations. She’s just launched a new coaching business, Woolf Communication, in January after seeing a gap between what was expected of engineers in the workplace and what training is made available to them.

Links mentioned:

• ⁠https://softskills.audio/
• ⁠⁠https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Timestamps:

• [00:00:45] “Soft skills”
• [00:04:08] Fear of feedback
• [00:06:47] Deciding whether to give feedback
• [00:08:21] Trusting your gut
• [00:09:29] Building feedback into team culture
• [00:10:43] Giving upward feedback
• [00:13:20] Communication as personal improvement
• [00:14:53] Importance of listening
• [00:17:43] Separating tone and content
• [00:23:51] Negotiations
• [00:29:03] Information gathering
• [00:30:25] Different dimensions of value to negotiate
• [00:34:02] Information asymmetry in negotiating
• [00:36:17] Finding and knowing your worth
• [00:37:52] Value of a genuine mentor figure
• [00:38:51] Finding a mentor
• [00:40:03] Asking good questions to a mentor
• [00:42:29] Mentors and genuine networking
• [00:45:27] Networking effectively
• [00:46:57] The power of showing up consistently
• [00:50:02] Learning to trust your gut
• [00:51:02] Looking backwards to find what gives you joy
• [00:56:19] What if your no could have taught you more than yes?
• [00:59:32] Handling being underleveled when hired
• [01:01:49] What if your manager under-leveled you?