Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

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++ . . .

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.

Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.

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.

You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated.

While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations

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

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.

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible.