Engineerspeak - Translation Skills Between Teams
- Format: Talk (20 min)
* Difficulty: All Levels
* Track: Community and Culture
* Additional Tags: Communication, Soft Skills, Teamwork, Organizational Culture
* Experience: Author of Hacking Linux Exposed and Building Linux VPNs; lifelong Unix/Linux security expert and Open Source advocate.
Description:
To non-engineers, technical teams often sound like a chorus of doom. When a developer describes a codebase as “complete garbage,” they may be referring to a marginal deviation from technical excellence, but to sales and marketing teams, it sounds like a catastrophic failure. This talk explores the “Engineerspeak” dialect—examining why technical brains are wired to prioritize edge cases, minutia, and fatalistic honesty.
Through humor and horror stories, this session breaks down how to bridge the gap between technical rigor and organizational communication. The goal is to optimize the most buggy stack interface of all: the one between teams, ensuring technical integrity is maintained while effectively communicating progress and risk to the rest of the organization.
Target Audience:
- Software engineers and developers
* Project managers and product owners
* Non-technical staff working alongside engineering teams
* Anyone interested in improving cross-departmental communication