2022 MSSE Industrial Seminar

The second seminar in our 2022 MSSE Industrial Seminar series will feature Ken Kousen, a Java Champion and Grails RockStar. Kousen will be giving a talk titled "Managing Your Manager" as a technical professional. The event is open to all MSSE students, University of Minnesota faculty, alumni, and guests.

Abstract

Conflict between technical professionals and traditional managers is inevitable, because you want different things. Worse, most employees feel that when conflicts arise, their only options are either to go along with what the manager wants, or leave. Neither option gets you what you want when you want it.

This talk discusses a third option: how to build a relationship over time that makes your boss an ally. The goal is to build a productive relationship that allows you to push back against decisions you don't like, while maintaining a constructive, loyalty-based relationship that satisfies both sides. Topics will include the two messages to keep in mind whenever you interact with the boss, how to use solutions to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem to resolve conflicts, how to structure communications in a way most likely to be heard and understood, and more.

Bio

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books "Help Your Boss Help You" and "Mockito Made Clear," the O'Reilly Media books "Kotlin Cookbook", "Modern Java Recipes", and "Gradle Recipes for Android", and the Manning book "Making Java Groovy". He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

In 2013, 2016, and 2017 he won a JavaOne Rockstar award. His academic background includes BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.