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This is by far my favorite book about managing software development.
No silver bullets, no technical trivia, just good sense and insight.
Every programming manager should read and understand it.
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| page | Selected excerpts |
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| 4 | The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. |
| 7 | Development is inherently different from production.... The [production] mentality ... will be directly at odds with the work. |
| 78 | If you [have a noisy workplace or drown out the noise with piped-in music], you should expect to incur an invisible penalty in one aspect of workers' performance: They will be less creative. |
| 82 | Imagine that your organization is about to build a complex of new space. What is the first step in this process? Almost certainly, it is development of a master plan. In most cases, this is a first and fatal deviation from the Timeless Way of Building [promoted by architect Christopher Alexander]. Vital, exciting, and harmonious spaces are never developed this way. |
| 96-8 |
... getting the right people in the first place is all-important.
Everyone knows that [you can't hire based on appearance], but oddly enough most hiring mistakes result from too much attention to appearances and not enough to capabilities. ... when the [institutional] culture is unhealthy, it's difficult or impossible to hire the one person who matters most, the one who doesn't think like all the rest. When [companies impose dress codes], the effect is devastating. ... All useful work stops dead. The most valuable people begin to realize that they aren't appreciatetd for their real worth... Eventually they leave. |
| 109 | The more egocentric the manager, the more intense the fondness for the company move. |
| 114-6 |
The maddening thing about most of our organizations is that they are
only as good as the people who staff them.
George ... said we should trust in the Methodology, and it would all work out in the end.Of course it didn't.... If a given direction doesn't make sense to [the project workers], it doesn't make sense at all.... Methodologies can do grievous damage to efforts in which the people are fully competent. Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution. |
| 133 | You can't protect yourself against your own people's incompetence.... once you've decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. |
| 154 | If you could effect some change in the people you manage and make them much more productive and goal-directed but also less controllable, would you do it? The answer to this question distinguishes the great managers from the merely mediocre. |
| 187-8 | ... the great triumph of standards in the modern world is almost entirely the success of standard interfaces. ... To extrapolate from the success of interface standards to the need for process standards is a bit of a stretch. |
| 204 | ... suppose you send [a] worker off to a training seminar for a week. ... If you've spent your training money wisely, it is an investment, perhaps a very good one. But, by accounting convention, we expense it anyway. |
| 218 | For a two-year project, the bulk of the staff would not come onboard until the project is six months to a year under way. ... [Possibly] ninety percent of all projects suffer from early overstaffing. |