Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

đź“– Peopleware 3rd Edition

3 min read

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.

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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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).

…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)

✍️ La tiranía del Thinker:

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)

There is literally a chapter titled: “You Never Get Anything Done around Here between 9 and 5.”

A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality. (p. 41)

Graph View

Backlinks