Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools list just selected a book from my recommended reading list. And it's one of my favorites, too. It's that perennial evergreen of project management, Peopleware:
Peopleware is a great book.
But it’s preaching to the converted.
Crap managers will never read it, and if they did they’d never understand it.
Agree, it’s a great book. It should be required reading for technical and HR managers of knowledge workers. I reckon also IT managers (or rather their users) could benefit immensely from the advice in that book. More here: http://girtby.net/archives/2005/10/26/the-virtual-furniture-police/ (excuse the blog pimping)
If it isn’t any better than Mythical Man Month I wouldn’t waste my time. Please tell me that it actually has some decent insights and not a bunch of dated anecdotes about the days of yore. Mythical man month was great for its time but it is all common knowledge now. We’ve learned from it and moved on. That doesn’t mean that we don’t still make the same mistakes every day. But there is a difference between knowing something and ignoring it and not knowing it in the first place. I choose to play the lotery even though I know that my odds of winning are virtually nil. It would be different if I didn’t understand the odds in the first place.
I’d like to read Peopleware but I’ve been seeing an awful lot of bad book recommendations in blogs recently so I’m a little bit skeptical.
I have similar concerns to those of matt.
I have read McConnell’s “Rapid Development” and “Code Complete 2”.
Is there anything in “Peopleware” that is not covered by McConnell’s books?
Is there anything in “Peopleware” that is not covered by McConnell’s books?
There is some overlap in very broad terms (McConnell cites Peopleware even in the original 1993 edition of Code Complete, as you might expect), but they’re quite different in tone and scope.
Please tell me that it actually has some decent insights and not a bunch of dated anecdotes about the days of yore
Don’t take my word for it – read some of it yourself and decide. Kevin Kelly’s summary post has a bunch of quotes and a picture from the book:
Peopleware is a great book. But it’s preaching to the converted.
Isn’t this always the case? The problem with FAQs is that the people who need them most have no idea a FAQ exists or how to get to it.
I look at it like this: the wider these ideas are disseminated, the more chance that someone who needs it will eventually hear about it one way or another.
I’ve been meaning to pick Peopleware up for ages, as well as Mythical man Month, so I just ordered both thanks to this reminder. Mmmmmm information.