Design of Design, The: Essays from a Computer Scientist

by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

A mediocre or insecure manager can smother any designer’s creativity. Often a mediocre manager fails to recognize the jewels on his team. Sometimes he doesn’t realize the crucial nature of design to his team’s success. Sometimes he doesn’t understand his own role of enabling design magic.

I have seen potentially great designers sidetracked from design into management. They never reached their potential. The culture of our organizations, alas, encourages or even forces this. Intention, nay, determination, is required to swim against that culture.

In retrospect, most of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for much of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.

The Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed by anybody anywhere—it was designed under my management. The very concept is wrong; we did not see it as a programming language but as “a few control cards to precede the job.”