Peopleware

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book addresses the elephant in the software room, that people, not tech, are the obstacle. Tech is just there to be applied; solving the problem requires a lot of people and knowledge to go the right way. It also addresses how to solve this problem for humans.

🎨 Impressions

I liked the book as it reflects my own experiences. Gaining some insights is more than sufficient, and I think this book is an absolute must for people who are struggling to understand how to link software and people.

Moreover, this book is a refreshing take on teams, what makes teams great, and how you can enable teams to grow and outperform their expectations.

One thing that is addressed a lot is quiet time, when you work uninterrupted. This is something that is problematic and needs to be addressed. It is also intersting to understand that taking time to work on hard problems is important, and not drown in the soft problems.

I really liked - Gilb’s Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.

✍️ My Top Quotes

We observe that about 15 percent of all projects studied came to naught: They were canceled aborted or “postponed” or they delivered products that were never used.
For bigger projects, the odds are even worse. Fully 25 percent of projects that lasted 25 work-years or more failed to complete
For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.
Speaking to a group of software managers, we introduced a strategy for what we think of as iterative design. The idea is that some designs are intrinsically defect-prone; they ought to be rejected, not repaired. Such dead ends should be expected in the design activity. The lost effort of the dead end is a small price to pay for a clean, fresh start.
The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs.
Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World.
The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.
“When the schedule for a project is totally unreasonable and unrealistic, and no amount of overtime can allow it to be made, the project team becomes angry and frustrated . . . and morale drops to the bottom.”
Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.
*The Seven False Hopes of Software Management
- There is some new trick you’ve missed that could send productivity soaring. Response: You are simply not dumb enough to have missed something so fundamental. You are continually investigating new approaches and trying out the ones that make the most sense. None of the measures you’ve taken or are likely to take can actually make productivity soar. What they do, though, is to keep everybody healthy: People like to keep their minds engaged, to learn, and to improve. The line that there is some magical innovation out there that you’ve missed is a pure fear tactic, employed by those with a vested interest in selling it.
- Other managers are getting gains of 100 percent or 200 percent or more! Response: Forget it. The typical magical tool that’s touted to you is focused on the coding and testing part of the life cycle. But even if coding and testing went away entirely, you couldn’t expect a gain of 100 percent. There is still all the analysis, negotiation, specification, training, acceptance testing, conversion, and cutover to be done.
- Technology is moving so swiftly that you’re being passed by. Response: Yes, technology is moving swiftly, but (the High-Tech Illusion again) most of what you’re doing is not truly high-tech work. While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static. We still spend most of our time working on requirements and specification, the low-tech part of our work. Productivity within the software industry has improved by 3 to 5 percent a year, only marginally better than the steel or automobile industry.*
- Changing languages will give you huge gains. Response: Languages are important because they affect the way you think about a problem, but again, they can have impact only on the implementation part of the project. Because of their exaggerated claims, some of our newer languages qualify as laetrile. Sure, it may be better to implement a new feature in Java, for example, rather than PHP, but even before Java came along, there were better ways to do whatever you needed to do: niche tools that made certain classes of function pretty easy to implement. Unless you’ve been asleep at the switch for the past few decades, change of a language won’t do much for you. It might give you a 5-percent gain (nothing to sneeze at), but not more.
- Because of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately. Response: The much talked about software backlog is a myth. We all know that projects cost a lot more at the end than what we expected them to cost at the beginning. So the cost of a system that didn’t get built this year (because we didn’t have the capacity for it) is optimistically assumed to be half of what it would actually cost to build, or even less. The typical project that’s stuck in the mythical backlog is there because it has barely enough benefit to justify building it, even with the most optimistic cost assumptions. If we knew its real cost, we’d see that project for what it is: an economic loser. It shouldn’t be in the backlog, it should be in the reject pile.
- You automate everything else; isn’t it about time you automated away your software development staff? Response: This is another variation of the High-Tech Illusion: the belief that software developers do easily automatable work. Their principal work is human communication to organize the users’ expressions of needs into formal procedure. That work will be necessary no matter how we change the life cycle. And it’s not likely to be automated.
- Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure. Response: They won’t—they’ll just enjoy it less.
The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals. • 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.
While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations.
Then, without warning, open-plan seating was upon us like a plague upon the land. The advocates of the new format produced not one shred of evidence that effectiveness would not be impaired. They really couldn’t. Meaningful measurement of productivity is a complex and elusive thing.
Across the whole Coding War Games sample, 58 percent complained that their workplace was not acceptably quiet; 61 percent complained that it wasn’t sufficiently private; 54 percent reported that they had a workplace at home that was better than the workplace provided by the company.
Gilb’s Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.
Factor = Uninterrupted Hours/Body-Present Hours
E-Factor = Uninterrupted Hours/Body-Present Hours
Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music.
The creativity penalty exacted by the environment is insidious. Since creativity is a sometime thing anyway, we often don’t notice when there is less of it.
The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional.
Entropy is levelness or sameness. The more it increases, the less potential there is to generate energy or do work.
Entropy is always increasing in the organization. That’s why most elderly institutions are tighter and a lot less fun than sprightly young companies.
Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired.
The aptitude tests we’ve seen are mostly left-brain oriented. That’s because the typical things new hires do are performed largely in the left brain. The things they do later on in their career, however, are to a much greater degree right-brain activities. Management, in particular, requires holistic thinking, heuristic judgment, and intuition based upon experience.
But from the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes only after as much as ten years with the company. (This has long been true of some of the strongest organizations within IBM, for example.) The people at the lowest level have on the average at least five years’ experience. The hierarchy is low and flat.
One of our clients, a builder of network protocol analyzers and packet sniffers, estimates that it takes more than two years to bring a new worker up to speed.
The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
There is a sense of eliteness on a good team. Team members feel they’re part of something unique. They feel they’re better than the run of the mill.
Our short list of teamicide techniques is • Defensive management • Bureaucracy • Physical separation • Fragmentation of people’s time • Quality reduction of the product • Phony deadlines • Clique control Some of these techniques will look awfully familiar. They are things that companies do all the time.
Paper pushers just can’t get themselves into SWAT Team mode. They can’t see themselves hell-bent for success.
Participant at one of our seminars made this observation: “The only time our management shows any awareness of teams is when it takes specific steps to break them up.”
The team phenomenon, as we’ve described it, is something that happens only at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Most organizations don’t set out consciously to kill teams. They just act that way.
Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship.
When people talk about an organization that you’d have to be “sick” to work for, they’re not referring to physiological sickness. They mean that working in such a place would require them to disregard certain mental survival rules, rules that protect the well-being of the psychological self. The most important of these rules has to do with self-regard. A job situation that hurts your self-regard is itself “sick.”
Skunkworks implies that the project is hidden away someplace where it can be done without upper management’s knowing what’s going on.
The amusing thing is that skunkworks is really just another word for insubordination. Management says no, and the project goes on anyway.
People look out for their Open Kimono managers. They’re determined to make them look good, even though the managers may botch an occasional decision. Defensive managers are on their own.
For all the deference paid to the concept of leadership (a cult word in our industry), it just doesn’t have much place here.
In Australia, where striking uses up nearly as much labor time as working, there is a charming form of strike called work to rule. Rather than walk off the job, workers open up a fat book of procedures and announce, “Until you give us what we’re asking for, we’re going to work exactly to the rule.”
But how about the risk that you and your own team won’t meet your portion of the assigned goals? Of course, you worry about that; you may wake up at night in a sweat over it.
The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time. It sounds like this should be an easy sin to avoid, but it isn’t.
How common is it that projects are overstaffed early for such political reasons? Oh, not very. Probably no more than 90 percent of all projects suffer from early overstaffing.
Principal, The Atlantic Systems Guild
And it should be considered that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders. For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders. —Niccolò Machiavelli
Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.
What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity
Also on the plus side of the ledger is the Hawthorne Effect, the boost in energy and interest that infuses your people when they’re doing something new and different.
The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose.