Reading Notes: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

Part I: Manage The Human Resource

The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.

• The high tech illusion

  The researchers who made fundamental breakthroughs in those areas are in a high-tech business. The rest of us are appliers of their work.

  We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs. We are mostly in the human communication business.

  Our successes come from good human interactions.

Chapter 2: Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger

• We have to learn to do work less of the time and think about the work more.

  我们必须学会花更少的时间工作和花更多的时间思考工作本身。

Chapter 3

• People under time pressure don’t work better - they just work faster with low quality.

Chapter 4 Quality

• Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

  远远超过超过最终用户需求的质量是取得更高生产力的手段。

Chapter 5

• Organizational busy work tend to expand to fill the working day.

Chapter 6

• Lose weight while sleeping

• False Hope: Technology is moving swiftly, that you’re being passed by.

  Technology is moving swiftly, but (the High-Tech Illusion again) most of what you’re doing is not truly high-tech work.

• That is Management

  The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

Part II: The Office Environment

In Part II, we’ll look into some of the causes of lost time and propose measures that you can take to create a healthy, work-conducive environment.

Chapter 8 You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5

If you manage a team of people who need to use their brains during the workday, then the workplace environment (quite,space, and privacy) is your business.

Chapter 10 Brain Time versus Body Time

• Flow State

The phenomena of flow and immersion give us a more realistic way to model how time is applied to a development task. What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at full potential. An hour in flow really accomplishes something, but 10 six-minute work periods sandwiched between 11 interruptions won’t accomplish anything.

• The E-Factor

E-Factor = Uninterrupted Hours/Body-Present Hours

Chapter 11

Chapter 13

Design Your Workspace

• Sit Behind A wall And Make Sure At Least Eight Feet A Wall In Front

  As you work, you want to occasionally look up and rest your eyes by focusing on something farther away than the desk.

  If there is a blank wall closer than eight feet your eyes will not change focus and they get no relief.

• Windows

Part III The Right People

Chapter 16 Hiring The Juggler

When you set out to hire a programmer, the rules of common sense are often suspended. You don’t ask to see a design or a program or anything. In fact, the interview is just talk.

• Build Your Portfolio and show it off as part of each interview next time.

  How to build it then? Put everything as code.

  • document as code and render as blog post in GitHub page.
  • projects as code and deploy the projects into Cloud.
  • when learn new technology or tool, set up a running instance in the cloud to practice and demonstrate what you did.

Chapter 19 Happy To Be Here

• The Cost of Turnover
• Why People Leave
  • A just-passing-through mentality: Co-workers engender no feelings of long-term involvement in the job.
  • A feeling of disposability: Management can only think of its workers as interchangeable parts (since turnover is so high, nobody is indispensable).
  • The company move