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Summary: Amazing Common Sense
Review: As a long time software development manager, this book validates the common sense I knew I had. That common sense approach to developers will never come from text book management. I wish I could rate this book a 10.
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Summary: Management Info you Need
Review: If you're a software manager, and you haven't read "Peopleware," stop reading this, and go read that instead. It's that's good. If you're a developer or engineer on a team that's not getting anything done, read it. This book is filled with practical advice on teams, team building, and getting work done. "Peopleware" doesn't go in for theory. It puts into words what any contemplative manager already knows intuitively. The benefit of this book, however, is that it provides concise, powerful evidence to support each of its statements on team building and managing creative people. "Peopleware" covers it all -- why you have high turnover, why you have low productivity, and how to get your team to "jell." The design of the book is excellent. There are 34 chapters in 226 pages. The cover struck me as funny on such a thin book: "Eight all new chapters." How did they fit all that into such a thin book? Simple: each chapter is very focused and short -- an entire chapter on a concept can be read in a single sitting -- even by the busiest manager. I recommend you read a chapter first thing in the morning, keep the ideas in your mind all day, and then read that chapter again in the evening. It will help you get the most out of what the book has to offer. Part one focuses on managing people. It describes how development is different from manufacturing, what motivates people, and some of the pitfalls. It also focuses on you, the manager, and your role in the success of your project. Part 2 zeros in on environment. DeMarco and Lister single out environment as one of the biggest sources of problems in development. As such, they devote more time to this than any other subject in the book. It can get a bit repetitive, but the points they make are important, so it is easy to forgive them for focusing on it so much. Parts 3, 4, and 5 address people, teams, and work methods. These areas may be of the most immediate value to a beleaguered manager, as it is here that they have the most opportunity to make changes, and where they typically have the least training. The authors focus on how to work with individuals, move on to making teams "jell," and finally on how to make work more meaningful and dynamic to reduce turnover, which "Peopleware" labels as "a cancer." Finally, part 6 is the new stuff added to the second edition. As a result, they are a set of unrelated essays, not integrated with the rest of the text. However, they are quite a bit more timely than the earlier chapters, which sometimes feel a bit dated. It would have been nice to see these chapters more integrated with the rest of the book, but that's a minor quibble. The section on Process Improvement Programs (such as CMM) is very insightful, and will strike a chord with many people who question the value of the implementation of these programs in their organizations. "Peopleware" is simply the best management book I have read for the front line technical manager in a development organization. It is a complete course from the school of hard knocks on what works and what doesn't in the real world.
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Summary: If only...
Review: This is a book full of common-sense truisms that somehow most managers don't "get." It has made me more aware of conditions in my workplace and how they may help or hinder the work of my development team. The only downside to this book is that you may become depressed by the fact that "somewhere, out there" are managers who are doing the right thing, while your management is almost certainly not.
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Summary: Great software requires the right environment
Review: The authors have 20+ years of experience studying successful and unsuccessful software projects. With humour and charm and insight they explain all of the common mistakes and misunderstandings that occur in projects, and how to avoid them. The focus is on the people and the team and how to make them successful. When I worked on OS/2 at Microsoft, Peter Neupert (now at drugstore.com) had been newly put in charge of the OS/2 project, and he brought Tom DeMarco in to speak to us. The 1st edition of this book was published in 1987, so I think it was in 1987 or 1988. All the wisdom of DeMarco and Lister was no match for the fact that IBM and Microsoft had quite divergent goals for OS/2, so it was doomed to failure. When I read this second edition last year, I was very impressed by how closely their observations matched my experience from 14 years at Microsoft working on OS/2, MS-DOS, Windows 95, Internet Explorer, Java, and MSN. A must-read for any software development manager and any executive that manages software development efforts.
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Summary: Good read
Review: This book is a good read. It is full-choke of useful "tidbits" about the do's and do-not's of project management. It is a quick read too; I've read it in a weekend. The reason that I am giving it 4- instead of 5- starts is a really blatant error I've encountered in the 2nd-edition-added chapters: the authors mention "Perl applets!". I mean, there is no such thing: there are Java applets and Perl server-side scripts, but never "Perl Applets"! It gives me the impression that the authors are somewhat detached from recent technical developments. Overall however a very good read (especially all the talk about patters and antipatterns - "teamicide" - for team formation). Certainly recommended.
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Summary: A terrific book about software and about teams
Review: If you create software, work with people who do, or most especially if you manage people who do, PLEASE READ THIS BOOK. This is great stuff. The description of a jelled (effective) team is powerful. I've had the pleasure of working on such a team, and I hope that if you haven't, after you read about what it's like, you will get out there and work to make a team like it. This book describes how things ought to be, how they're not, and what you can do to bring them closer to the ideal so that you and your team can do quality work in a reasonable timeframe. Well worth the money.
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Summary: Common Sense Explained and Proved
Review: Quite a lot of what's in this book are assertions that can be referred to as "Common Sense". Yes, well, I then remember the statement made in another book that "Common Sense is neither". So much of the information in _PeopleWare_ speaks to things that software developers have been saying for years, but management continues to not listen. Or worse, they listen and miss the point. Weekly socials aren't what motivate programmers, but it's no accident that programmers who socialize together make good teams. Most of the other reviews have focused on noise and offices issues, but there are a lot of other good things in here. The "Black Shirts" story is particularly effective as a parable. The ideas about who makes the estimates. The emphasis on perceived noise as opposed to actual noise. You won't get any cookbook approaches out of this book. You might get insights that help you deal with your particular situation. You will get insights into what makes teams work and what doesn't.
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Summary: Hits the Mark
Review: I was asked to read this book for a Master's degree class. Like many textbooks, I approached it with caution, but was pleasantly surprised by what I found within. Though this book was written primarily for software developers who are often backed against the wall to produce, the content is really universal to most business situations. We usually have to work with people, and we usually have to produce in our various fields. Peopleware is a book you should read if you desire your business team to reach its full potential regardless of the industry you are in. Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister cover a lot of territory that is totally missed by other leader/manager books. They cover topics such as the workplace environment, the value of fun, and developing a chemistry with your team that is highly productive. While reading the book it was obvious that they had served in the trenches of American businesses. The universal mistakes that companies continue to make over and over have been catalogued and brought to light in this volume. But they not only highlight the common mistakes, they offer proven techniques to help you avoid these same mistakes. If you are in the process of forming or leading individuals or a team of people, the ideas found in this book will help you take them the top. You will enjoy the writing style, the humor, and the information contained in this volume.
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Summary: Demarco and Lister Hold the Keys to Real Productivity
Review: In Peopleware, the authors share menaingful research, and insightful observations about effectiveness, working environments, and teambuilding. While the context of most of what they say is the software industry, the principles that they advocate can be easily translated to any industry. Their basic premise is that drastic increases in productivity are not achieved through the use of trickery, false deadlines, and crowded "workgroup" space. Rather, they are achieved through attention to people's needs to focus on their work, honest communication, and working environments that support personal productivity. I would recomment this book to anyone, whether you are a worker, a middle manager, or a top administrator. If you are a boss, this is a must read. If you aren't a boss, you should buy a copy for your boss, and their boss if they have one.
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Summary: Hard numbers on good work environments
Review: Summed up in one sentence, Peopleware says this: give smart people physical space, intellectual responsibility and strategic direction. DeMarco and Lister advocate private offices and windows. They advocate creating teams with aligned goals and limited non-team work. They advocate managers finding good staff and putting their fate in the hands of those staff. The manager's function, they write, is not to make people work but to make it possible for people to work. Why is Peopleware so important to Microsoft and a handful of other successful companies? Why does it inspire such intense devotion amongst the elite group of people who think about software project management for a living? Its direct writing and its amusing anecdotes win it friends. So does its fundamental belief that people will behave decently given the right conditions. Then again, lots of books read easily, contain funny stories and exude goodwill. Peopleware's persuasiveness comes from its numbers - from its simple, cold, numerical demonstration that improving programmers' environments will make them more productive. The numbers in Peopleware come from DeMarco and Lister's Coding War Games, a series of competitions to complete given coding and testing tasks in minimal time and with minimal defects. The Games have consistently confirmed various known facts of the software game. For instance, the best coders outperform the ten-to-one, but their pay seems only weakly linked to their performance. But DeMarco and Lister also found that the best-performing coders had larger, quieter, more private workspaces. It is for this one empirical finding that Peopleware is best known. (As an aside, it's worth knowing that DeMarco and Lister tried to track down the research showing that open-plan offices make people more productive. It didn't exist. Cubicle makers just kept saying it, without evidence - a technique Peopleware describes as "proof by repeated assertion".) Around their Coding Wars data, DeMarco and Lister assembled a theory: that managers should help programmers, designers, writers and other brainworkers to reach a state that psychologists call "flow" - an almost meditative condition where people can achieve important leaps towards solving complex problems. It's the state where you start work, look up, and notice that three hours have passed. But it takes time - perhaps fifteen minutes on average - to get into this state. And DeMarco and Lister that today's typical noisy, cubicled, Dilbertesque office rarely allows people 15 minutes of uninterrupted work. In other words, the world is full of places where a highly-paid and dedicated programmer or creative artist can spend a full day without ever getting any hard-core work. Put another way, the world is full of cheap opportunities for people to make their co-workers more productive, just by building their offices a bit smarter. A decade and a half after Peopleware was written, and after the arrival of a new young breed of IT companies called Web development firms, it would be nice to think DeMarco and Lister's ideas have been widely adopted. Instead, they remain widely ignored. In an economy where smart employees can increasingly pick and choose, it will be interesting to see how much longer this ignorance can continue.
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