Book Review: Peopleware

I think by now I’ve recommended this book to all my friends in the software industry. My only regret about Peopleware is that I haven’t read it sooner.

This is not a coding handbook. There’s no code there. It’s all about managing knowledge workers. I haven’t seen a single book that nails the little nuances and shows such deep understanding of what it’s like to manage people who possess knowledge capital. The authors, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, even dedicated a small chapter to reasonable furniture arrangement at a software shop. :)

I was too quick to shelve Peopleware in the project management section, but I’m sure every developer would find it insightful too. If you understand what gives you grief and frustrates you in the workplace, you can better control it.

Two of my favorite discussions in this book are: people under stress don’t think faster; and adding more people to a late project drags it out ever longer. Some great arguments there along with charts and graphs for the unbelievers.

A particularly painful subject for me was that of overtime. The authors state that there’s no such thing as overtime, and if you subject people to prolonged periods of overtime, they will reclaim their lives with “undertime.” I agree with them on all accounts. I just wish people I worked for in my “previous life” understood it too.

Come to think of it, Peopleware is a catalog of big red flags you should watch out for when you’re on a job hunt. Basically, it teaches you to thin-slice bad managers you wouldn’t want to entrust yourself to. I think Eric Sink nailed it on the head:

Next time you’re interviewing for a job, pretend that the power structure is reversed. The hiring manager is trying to figure out if there is any chance you are worthy of the job. Ignore that. Instead, spend your time trying to figure out if there is any chance that guy is worthy of being your manager.

Happy thin-slicin’!