Peopleware Quotes

“The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“Although your staff may be exposed to the message “work longer and harder” while they’re at the office, they’re getting a very different message at home. The message at home is, “Life is passing you by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the brass ring. And if you use your life up on C++ . . .”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“we don’t work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn’t get done on time.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Whether you call it a “team” or an “ensemble” or a “harmonious work group” is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out. They book the conference rooms or head for the library or wander off for coffee and just don’t come back. No, they are not meeting for secret romance or plotting political coups; they are hiding out to work. The good news here is that your people really do need to feel the accomplishment of work completed. They will go to great extremes to make that happen.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies (“My people are too dumb to build systems without them” ) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“in the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being best. And that’s a long-term concept.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams

“The uniqueness of every worker is a continued annoyance to the manager who has blindly adopted a management style from the production world. The natural people manager, on the other hand, realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It’s something to be cultivated.”
― DeMarco Tom, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“It’s perfectly reasonable not to manage a risk for which the probability of occurrence is extremely low. It’s not reasonable to leave unmanaged the risk for which the consequences are “just too awful to think about.”
― DeMarco Tom, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence. A market-derived quality standard seems to make good sense only as long as you ignore the effect on the builder’s attitude and effectiveness.”
― DeMarco Tom, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The amazing thing is not that it's so often impossible to work in the workplace; the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody ever does anything about it.”
― Tim Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”
― Tim Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“In my years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl Thomis, who went on to build a small empire as an electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on the Electronic Switching System fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied upon the notion of n-space proximity, a concept that was hairy enough to challenge even Wendl’s powers of concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program listing while Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said, “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at home?”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

“The purpose of a team is not goal attainment, but goal alignment”
― Tom DeMarco, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams