Now reading: Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (2013).

Today at work I was talking—remotely, as ever—with an experienced software engineer. By "experienced", I mean that he said he's been working in software development for 50 years, which is both unbelievable and astounding. For all the magic that we see conjured by software, it seems like it could never be more than five or ten years old, even though we know better.

Fifty years? All of the funny lines and analogies seem insulting, and they get away from the underlying feeling: anyone with that much experience should be drawn from like a well. A deep, deep, deep well. Even if you decide later that you don't want or agree with what you get from that well, the direct and personal experience is worth the trouble.

Anyway, he recommended a few books to me while we were chatting on IM. One of them was this one. He suggested this one, out of the various suggestions, should be first because it deals with the human element of organizing projects with software and, most importantly, people. Somehow, people get treated like objects in projects, to the detriment of all.