Peopleware
authors and lecturers return with a new edition of the software management book that started a revolution.With humor and wisdom drawn from years of management and consulting experience, DeMarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of software development are human, not technical -- and that managers ignore them at their peril.Now, with a new Preface and eight new chapters, the authors enlarge upon their previous ideas and add fresh insights, examples, and anecdotes.Discover dozens of helpful tips on- putting more quality into a product- loosening up formal methodologies- fighting corporate entropy- making it acceptable to be uninterruptiblePeopleware, 2nd ed. shows you how to cultivate teams that are healthy and productive. The answers aren't easy -- just incredibly successful.
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What Hacker News says
- > I reckon the focus on speed (and shipping to prod) over quality has also led to the increasing number of bugs. The mindset shift from shipping quality products (not just software) to shipping something that is good enough has been the mantra of management in recent years.
I wonder how much of that is just what management always wanted. Peopleware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...), a VERY GOOD book about software development written in the 80s, talks about managers wanting to sacrifice quality an how corrosive that is. It's just that in the past technology forced them to pursue quality: Software shipped on disk needed to be bug-free, because it made bug-fixes almost impossible. Software written by a human needed a human that understands it, who might have some pride in his work.
But now, with the internet and LLMs, we get to live in the slop-world the management has always dreamed of. More tickets, closing faster! Less headcount, less talk! Artificial workers that don't talk back! Who cares about all the rest?
- Management Science? Only management science I read so far (with actual measured outputs and ideas) was Peopleware. Everything else was more like philosophy. Has anyone ever measured, long term results from multiple management methods? What I saw when I looked into it was simple - the Toyota Way was the model for a lot of successful companies, including Pixar.
- Peopleware is an excellent book built on this premise.
https://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Tom-De...
- A similar hypothetical was in the classic book "Peopleware" from 1987, if I recall correctly, imaging the reaction if the phone was a new invention and the phone company salesman wanted your company to put a phone on every engineer's desk which would allow anyone else in the world with a phone to at any time interrupt your engineers with no warning.
They had an anecdote about one company they consulted at which illustrated how normalized interrupting engineers had become. The engineers were putting their phones on "do not disturb" (DND) to stop all the interruptions so they could get their work done, and management sent around a memo saying that the engineers needed to stop putting their phones on DND because that caused the calls to forward to the secretary, and all the calls were making it hard for the secretary to get any work done.
- Not off the top of my head right now, but pick up any classic book on managing software teams and you will find heaps of such scientific references, for example "Peopleware" comes to mind.
- The book mentioned, "Peopleware" is probably your best resource, it's short. But sibling comment is also right on.
