Peopleware

Peopleware is a classic of software engineering. For whatever reason it took me fifteen years of industry experience to arrive at it, but it really spoke to me.

The first point I got is to hire smart, motivated people who care about quality. Then get out of their way. The type of work software engineers (and other "knowledge workers") do is hard to quantify, so you have to take the longer view. If the output of these teams is good, don't concern yourself with minutiae like working hours, hair color, specific paper work procedures, and the like. This is the mantra of many technology companies, Google especially.

My second take-away from the book was about teams. In short, software engineering is not an individual sport. It is a team sport. The book actually goes further and explains that isn't even a sufficient metaphor. It is a team where everyone succeeds or fails together. An individual cannot pull a whole team (i.e. no Michael Jordan). It compares instead to choirs, where everyone needs to be in sync, if a single voice is out of tune, it doesn't matter how good any one person's voice is. Luckily in teams I've worked on, everyone has been skilled enough to succeed. I instead focus my time on helping the team jell. This again is very consistent with the Google experience (See recent news articles about building teams at Google.)

 There was one other message from the book that really spoke to me, but is completely inconsistent with Google: work environment. Deeply ingrained in Google culture is the open floor plan. No one[1] has an office to themselves, instead we have large offices with desks densely arrayed, sometimes divided by low walls. This is the one facet of Google that I hate. If I could change one thing it would be to have offices. Microsoft had offices, and I could close my work and code prodigiously. These days I only get in "the flow" late in the day after all meetings, when others have mostly gone home, early before others arrive, or at home.  Actually it is worse now that I spend so much of my time on people management.  I book conference rooms to work on performance reviews, hiring and such, so that I am not distracted, and I don't have to worry about anyone reading my screen.    Tom and Tim got this right in Peopleware:

In most of the office space we encounter today, there is enough noise and interruption to make any serious thinking virtually impossible.

Hear! hear!

Books

I have always read a lot of books. Even more when I am on a hiatus from Candy Crushing (a guilty pleasure I sometimes go overboard on). I think I always take some tidbits from books, they provide the granules of sand that I use to build my world view. But I have a horrible memory for specifics. So I will shortly begin to write entries for books I read. Not full on reviews, but the things I find interesting about books. The goal is to help me retain more from the books, and externalize some of these memories, so that I can look back on my learnings. If you find any of the info useful, that is great as well.