One of the things I do when starting a job, especially when it’s different enough from the previous job, is read up. As the current job at Speurders.nl is more a people job than a technology job, one of the books I’m re-reading is Peopleware by Tom DiMarco and Timothy Lister.

Peopleware is in its second edition - they largely used the original camera copy of the first edition of 1987 and just added some stuff and edited in a couple of places. This makes some of the specific examples and stories seem dated, but the overall point they make firmly stands, in my not so humble opinion: 99% of the software built out there is not, I repeat not high-tech stuff which means that the real issues in most software projects revolve around people, not around bits and bytes.

The authors do an excellent job of telling you how to deal with this astonishing fact - you need to manage people, and most importantly, manage people working together (so-called “teams”). Apart from lots of experience, you probably need to know more about psychology, sociology (throw in complexity theory, as far as I’m concerned) than about technology, to be succesful as either a manager or a team lead. The basic idea is to give teams clear goals, help them to create a good work environment, and then get out of their way . They mix theory, facts (lots of real data they collected) with war stories in a very readable fashion, so even if you don’t believe all this huggy-feely crap about making people happy so they make themselves productive, it still is a nice read.

As usual, I’m not going to write a detailed review. I’m too lazy for that and there is a long list of (rave) reviews on Amazon.com, and in fact I dearly hope you already posess it. If not - click the link above and buy it, on my authority. I promise you won’t regret it.

One issue that struck me when I read the chapter on work environment (which they base on Chris Alexander’s work, so how could I not agree with them?), is that workplace laws are akin to the laws that prescribe how cattle should be treated - well enough to not make them sick. If you’re aiming for supermarket-quality meat, that’s exactly how high you need to aim; I figure the same goes for the work environment…

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Software Development, Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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