Improving your interpersonal skills

On the first day of my first job, I noticed that engineers wore yellow I.D. badges while marketing and sales people wore white I.D. badges. My boss quickly educated me about the adversarial relationship in the company between technical and nontechnical employees.  

“Engineers, who wear yellow badges, refer to marketing and salespeople as ‘white-badge puke,’” Terry explained. “Sales and marketing people, who wear white badges, refer to engineers as ‘yellow-badge a--holes.’”  I soon learned two things:

• He wasn’t kidding. Employees used these terms every day. 

• Although it was done primarily in fun, the name-calling had in fact originated logically from the sometimes adversarial relationship between those who made the product and those who sold it.    

Since engineering school, you and I have known we’re a slightly different breed than the “liberal arts types” — fellow students we simultaneously looked down on for the simplici...(register to read more)