Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4500 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 245 pages

Amazon.com
Peopleware asserts that most software development projects fail because of failures within the team running them. This strikingly clear, direct book is written for software development-team leaders and managers, but it's filled with enough commonsense wisdom to appeal to anyone working in technology. Authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister include plenty of illustrative, often amusing anecdotes; their writing is light, conversational, and filled with equal portions of humor and wisdom, and there is a refreshing absence of "new age" terms and multistep programs. The advice is presented straightforwardly and ranges from simple issues of prioritization to complex ways of engendering harmony and productivity in your team. Peopleware is a short read that delivers more than many books on the subject twice its size.

Book Info
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of software development are human, not technical. Their answers aren't easy--just incredibly successful. New second edition features eight all-new chapters. Softcover. Previous edition: c1987. DLC: Management.

Customer Reviews

A must for project managers
It's hard to find at Amazon a book rated with deserved 5-stars. Even harder if it's got a good review by Joel Spolsky. Peopleware is one of them.Simple language, short chapters with plain ideas inside and a touch of psychology, altogether produces a confusing feeling. It seems as if the book tells you nothing you didn't already know but there is where its power lies: you end up thinking that you could have written this book.

I've got the second edition which is splitted in six parts. The first one, it's a general and enjoyable review of what the hell managing people is and why it's so hard. After that, we're explained how our noisy office environment sometimes makes our productivity plummet. Don't worry! Low-cost solutions are also included. Next two chapters are both about people: how to hire the best and how to bring them up within productive jelled teams. Watch out, you must keep teamicide away from teams. It also talks us about CMM and what it calls "The Big M's", explaining its influence over creativity.Last but not least, this second edition adds several chapters dedicated to topics like chaos control, organization learning, process improvement...all of them from the corporation-level perspective.

All that stuff just to conclude that people is the most valuable resource in any organization. This book doesn't taste like one of those stale books about business emotional intelligence ...it just shows plain concepts and applicable daily ideas. What turns this outstanding book into a classic is that its principles can be applied to almost any project or business (related to IT or not). My piece of advice would be "if you manage people, read this as soon as possible".

So...bosses, Peopleware is waiting for you!

Relevant 20 years later
I was surprised at how relevant this book still is more than 20 years after its initial publication. Depressingly, it seems the authors' suggestions have not been followed by many employers. I recently changed jobs and am in a cubicle for the first time. I have been struggling to think in my cubicle, and this book confirms my suspicion that it is my work space and not my brain that is causing the problem. Even when I am not being interrupted, I am always slightly on edge wondering when I will be interrupted. The down side of the book is that the solutions and suggestions for improvements are quite difficult to implement. I just finished the book tonight - I wonder if I will do anything differently tomorrow because of this book. Probably not - maybe the fun part of the book is grumbling about our common work situations.

People Matter
Great book on managing people and their space in a technical environment. A must for technical managers.