Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Third Edition

Preface

What we have come to think of as the Peopleware project began for us during the course of a long night flight over the Pacific more than thirty years ago. We were flying together from L.A. to Sydney to teach our Software Engineering Lectures series. Unable to sleep, we gabbed through the night about the deep complexities we were encountering in systems projects of our own and the ones related to us by our clients. One of us—neither one can remember which it was—reflected back over what we’d been discussing and offered this summing up: “Maybe . . . the major problems of systems work are not so much technological as sociological.”

It took a while for that to sink in because it was so contrary to what had been our thinking before. We, along ...