Overall 7/10 – May have been more revolutionary when first released but large parts of the book would now be common knowledge
The book has 6 parts:
- Managing the Human Resource
- The Office Environment
- The Right People
- Growing Productive Teams
- It’s supposed to be Fun to Work Here
- Son of Peopleware
On first read-through I struggled with this book, perhaps it’s not ideally suited for a straight read from start to finish. There is no single narrative or clear progression from chapter to chapter. It’s more of a , here’s rough hidings and these two software guys are going to rant and deliver wisdom in this general area. On first read the points they made seem a very mixed bag of common sense, useful, interesting and some parts..impractical. It’s like two hardcore software guys got in a room and said, oh man if we could do this perfect what, how would we run things.
It was only when I reflected back that a more coherent picture came together, that I couldn’t fault most of what they said and I had an increased if begrudged respect for the book. Maybe the world just isn’t ready to embrace as high a quality of software as they suggest nor the lovely self-chosen offices. I feel like I’d love to apply their ideas to places I’ve worked but that the distance between ideal and current standard company policies are too great. I do think I would re-read this book every few years and see if I can nudge places I work towards some of those ideals that I hope are true.
My Reading Notes:
Managing the Human Resource
We are not making burgers, mistakes will happen, in fact there should be an error quota and projects/attempts get canned. A project in steady state is dead but not all things requested should be done, think about them and if they should even be started.
ch4 Quality if Time Permits
Quality far beyond that required by the end user is a means to higher productivity. “. “Quality is free, but only to those willing to pay heavily for it.” How many projects have we seen get bogged down with technical debt, have low morale and slowly die due to porr quality. Question is knowing what level of quality where. The book proposes always letting the builders decide.
“We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce–not the quantity of the product, but the quality.” Even if the project would benefit from a huge amount of mediocre work, morale will suffer. They accept that the market does not need or want quality as much as the builders but that “Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.”
Parkinsons Lay – “Work expands to fill the time alloted”. Book claims this law is entirely wrong. That given knowledge work and high calibre employees that people want to complete stuff. Also makes a good point that bad estimates can demoralise. e.g. Didn’t make the last three sprint goals well 23 never make it so who cares. Small dataset shows builders most efficient setting goals themselves.
The Office
To me, half this chapter is obvious but useless within very large companies where avoiding cube farms is all but impossible. Some points it makes are:
- Most offices are designed by furniture police that want neat layouts, optimising most people per room
- Raises a fun meme you do hear a lot “Never get work done between 9-5″. I’ve worked with some offshore people that loved when everyone else went home.
- An employee costs X, office costs fraction of X. Attempting to save $1 of office costs risks productivity of employee.
- Data from their wargames showed quiet area with sapce essential. Space important as noice increases exponentially to volume.
ch10 – Brain vs Body Time
Consider how useless/sloppy time recording systems are. They don’t even account for what matters, FLOW. Interesting formula presented:
Efficiency-Factor = (uninterrupted hours) / (body present hours)
Books suggests some obvious but difficult things: dont answer phones, bring back small offices with doors, allow workers to organise office space.
ch13 Taking Umbrella Steps – basically says offices should be grown organiccaly and end up looking like university campuses, with many small focussed areas and lots of small offices with windows looking out at open areas. This is a far cry from most banking offices!
People
Managers unlikely to change employees personality in any major way. For short work duration, people unlikely to change. How they are at start is very similar to how they are when they leave. I personally have seen a few people change but yes it’s been the minority, this suggests hiring people is crucial step.
ch15 – Hiring a juggler .. then ask to see him juggle. Don’t just ask the theory. Favour auditions/small pieces of work with the team to see if he fits in. Rjecting people can also be a team bonding experience as it lets a good team realize how elite they are. Can you afford not to hire the best? What message would that send to your current team? This isn’t so terrifying as you’d think, you want the best for the team not necessarily smartest self centred person.
ch16 – happy to be here
What’s your annual employee turnover rate? How much does a replacement cost?
Your goal should be to instil that this is the best place to work and you would be crazy to leave. Turnover = more turnover as creates a “passing-through” mentality. If people are treated disposably, then they act like they are. You must trust people to get to know one area well and that way many will actually stay.
Self-Healing System
Methodolgies seek to enforce conformance through statute. Better to achieve convergence using:
Training – teach certain methods = they use it as they know it best
Tools – automated aids encourage use
Peer Review – Spreads training and tools people may have missed and encourages using same methods
Growing Productive Teams
ch18 Sum of the whole is greater than the parts
A jelled team works towards a SHARED COMMON GOAL. That goal may be arbitrary or boring (100% test coverage) but its essential to have. Notice that goal may not correspond to firms overall goal e.g. increased profits Q4. A jelled team will have: strong ssense of Identity and Eliteness.
Teamicide – things that Destroy Teams
Buracracy
Physical Separation
Fragmentation of Peoples Time
Defensive Management – trust your team
Quality Reduction of Product
Phoney Deadlines
Clique Control
ch23 – Chemistry for Team Formation
Cult of Quality
Provide Lots of satisfying Closure
Build a sense of Eliteness
Encourage Heterogenity
Preserve and Protect Teams
Provide Strategic not Tactical Direction
It’s supposed to be Fun to Work Here
ch24 – Chaos and Order – People crave some disorder and unexpected fun. Suggestions include: hackathons, wargames, pilot projects.
ch30 Making Change Possible
How change happens:
change
People are emotional, hate change and react in number of ways:
Blindly Loyal and follow
Believers but Questioners – Sceptics, passive, opposed due to fear
Militantly Opposed (and will undermine)
Only the “believers but Questioners” are worth trying to affect and intellectual arguments will not win out. You must celebrate “old way” as helping change happen. Point out that “You never improve, if you can’t change at all”.
Later chapters had some interesting points:
– Middlemanagement is only place where learning can happen AND change be implemented.
– Learning is limited by Orgs ability to keep its people
n support team has typically been tasked with “zero outages” whilst the developers are incentivised to develop and release as quickly as possible, with some front-office “quant-devs” not being held accountable for stability at all. With the handover method looking like throwing it over a wall:
ibilities back and forth from DEV to SRE owned. Importantly the target e.g. between 99.8% and 99.9% uptime should have an upper and lower bound, it should NOT be an absolute. If you go above it, developers should be taking more risks, below, developers should work on stability.
Ryan Hamilton 