Quotes from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Although your staff may be exposed to the message “work longer and harder” while they’re at the office, they’re getting a very different message at home. The message at home is, “Life is passing you by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the brass ring. And if you use your life up on C++ . . .”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“we don’t work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn’t get done on time.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies (“My people are too dumb to build systems without them” ) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“in the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being best. And that’s a long-term concept.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out. They book the conference rooms or head for the library or wander off for coffee and just don’t come back. No, they are not meeting for secret romance or plotting political coups; they are hiding out to work. The good news here is that your people really do need to feel the accomplishment of work completed. They will go to great extremes to make that happen.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“a friend even went so far as to work in the crypt below the American Library—yes, the crypt, complete with the remains of the woman who had endowed the building. It was cool, it was marble, and as my friend reported, it was quiet, very quiet.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Whether you call it a “team” or an “ensemble” or a “harmonious work group” is not what matters;”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Whether you call it a “team” or an “ensemble” or a “harmonious work group” is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management. Strong managers don’t care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff’s accomplishments”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1. • Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer. • Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Think about cuisine: Most probably, your great-grandparents never encountered a market offering Chinese dumplings, Bombay lime pickle, lemongrass curry, tiramisu, and gnocci, but these foods are now an integral part of the modern world.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible.”
― Tom DeMarco, quote from Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

About the author

Popular quotes

“...there being a god, that god must be worshiped. Worship means raising the god above the individual, and liturgies often make the point that the individual is less than nothing compared to the deity. If this be done, then, when the god is invoked, the individual has so little worth that he or she may be sacrificed for the needs of the god....
And who speaks for the god? If all people do, then no one does, and there is no god. If the people accept a priesthood, or the equivalent, then those priests exercise whatever power that god's believers grant that god over them, and that elite may cause an individual to be worth less, to be exiled, or even to die or to be killed. Yet such powers do not come from a deity.
In modern history and science, never has there been a verified occasion of a god appearing or demonstrating the powers ascribed throughout history to deities. Always, there is a prophet who speaks for the god. Why cannot the god speak? If a god is omnipotent, then the god can speak. If he cannot, then that god is not omnipotent. Often the prophets say that a god will only speak to the chosen, the worthy.
Should a people accept a god who is either too powerless to speak, or too devious and skeptical to appear? Or a god who will only accept those who swallow a faith laid out by a prophet who merely claims that deity exists—without proof? Yet people have done so, and have granted enormous powers to those who speak for god.”
― L.E. Modesitt Jr., quote from The Parafaith War

“Oh, I leave it to your imagination, Mr. Latimer. I would not presume to give you advice, you know. The advice of such elderly fogeys as myself is invariably treated with scorn. Rightly so, perhaps, who knows? But we old buffers like to think that experience has taught us something. We have noticed a good deal, you know, in the course of a lifetime.” A”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Towards Zero

“Then I noticed it. Red and oval-shaped with a white oval in the center, like the giant eye of a jinni. It sizzled and hissed, the white part expanding, moving closer. It horrified me to my very core. Must get out of here! I thought. Now! It sees me! But I didn’t know how to move. Move with what? I had no body. The red was bitter venom. The white was like the sun’s worst heat. I started screaming and crying again. Then I was opening my eyes to a cup of water. Everyone’s face broke into a smile. “Oh, praise Ani,” the Ada said. I felt the pain and jumped, about to get up and run. I had to run. From that eye. I was so mixed up that for a moment, I was sure that what I’d just seen was causing the pain. “Don’t”
― Nnedi Okorafor, quote from Who Fears Death

“He found himself grinning at her. His nervousness had disappeared, and suddenly he had a sense of his own size, his physical strength, his own brains and being. Four years, he had earned his own bread and keep, fended for himself, had not only remained alive and well but had put together a small fishing fleet of his own, and kept it alive and functioning and fought the wind and the weather and met a payroll of eleven men in his crews-and be damned with the lot of them if he'd go into a funk over which spoon or knife to use.”
― Howard Fast, quote from The Immigrants

“روحك تحكم جسدك، مثل ديكتاتور صارم”
― Ernesto Sabato, quote from On Heroes and Tombs

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.