- Tags:: #📚Books , [[My engineering management principles, values, and practices]], [[Work Methodology]] - Author:: [[Tom DeMarco]], and [[Timothy Lister]] - Liked:: #4/5 - Link:: [Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/peopleware-productive-projects/9780133440706/) - Source date:: [[2013-06-01]] - Read date:: [[2018-01-01]] - Cover:: ![[cover_peopleware.png|100]] Originally from 1987. ## Highlights ### We haven't got time to think about this job, only to do it: ^faf0b2 >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**. That fact is horrifying for anyone concerned about the quality of work in the field; for folks like us who write books, it is positively tragic. ^b3cebe ### Competition >You've surely heard the line that companies exist to compete with each other, so by extension, a little competition within the company is a healthy way to keep the competitive edge. (p. 155) ^b9742e It's bad... >What is the long-term effect of heightened competition among people who need to work together? One of the first victims is the easy, effective peer-coaching that is ubiquitous in healthy teams (...) The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't feel safe (p. 156) ^c68725 Incredibly, this is what [[W. Edwards Deming]] recommended: > Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means \[among other things\] **abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives**. (p. 157) ^8bb8e7 In fact, the authors here consider "teamcidal" the following actions: • Annual salary or merit reviews • Management by objectives (MBO) • Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment • Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance • Performance measurement in almost any form. ^bdd951 > Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect. (p. 157) ^17eff8 ## Other highlights > The steady-state cheeseburger mentality barely even pays lip service to the idea of thinking on the job. It's every inclination is to push the effort into 100-percent do-mode. **If an excuse is needed for the lack of think-time, the excuse is always time pressure (...)** It's when the truly Herculean effort is called for that we have to learn to do work less of the time and think about the work more. (p. 11). ^dad6ba >...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 impared. [[Incremental design]]: >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. (p. 8) [[The thinker - doer model]]: >nuance was lost on one senior manager we encountered at a professional society meeting in London. He summed up his entire view of the subject with this statement: "Management is kicking ass." This equates to the view that managers provide all the thinking and the people underneath them just carry out their bidding (p. 9)