As a software engineer, you're great with computer languages, compilers, debuggers, and algorithms. And in a perfect world, those 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. It's valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular video series, "Working with Poisonous People", has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers. You'll learn how to deal with imperfect people - those irrational and unpredictable beings - in the course of your work. And you'll discover why playing well with others is at least as important as having great technical skills. By internalizing the techniques in this book, you'll get more software written, be more influential, be happier in your career.

Brian Fitzpatrick co-founded Google's Chicago engineering office in 2005, and currently leads several of Google's Chicago engineering efforts, including the Google Affiliate Network. He also started and leads Google's Data Liberation Front, a team that systematically works to make it easy for users to move their data both to and from Google. Lastly, he serves as internal advisor for Google's open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple's largest corporate customers. Brian has been an active open source contributor for over twelve years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF's VP of Public Relations. He is also a member of the Open Web Foundation. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing "Version Control with Subversion" (now in its second edition) as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell." Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California. Ben Collins-Sussman is one of the founding developers of the Subversion version control system, co-authored O'Reilly's "Version Control with Subversion" book as well as chapters for "Unix in a Nutshell" and "Linux in a Nutshell." Ben co-founded Google's engineering office in Chicago, ported Subversion to Google's Bigtable platform, and now leads Google's Project Hosting team. Prior to joining Google, Ben was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet. He has been an active open source contributor for over twelve years, contributing to numerous open source projects, mostly revolving around version control and online gaming. Ben collects hobbies which tend to explore the tension between art and science. He has given numerous talks about the social challenges of software development and Subversion. He writes interactive fiction games and tools, and was the co-winner of the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. He has co-authored at least five original musicals and received multiple Jeff Awards for musical theater composition. He has an Extra class FCC license for amateur radio, and also spends time learning DSLR photography and playing bluegrass banjo. Ben is a proud native of Chicago, and holds Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Chicago with a major in Mathematics and minor in Linguistics. He still lives in Chicago with his wife, kids, and cats.