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 with nearly everyone else involved in the high-tech endeavors, were convinced that technology was all, that whatever your problems were, there had to be a better technology solution to them. But if what you were up against was inherently sociological, better technology seemed unlikely to be much help. If a group of people who had to work together didn’t trust each other, for example, no nifty software package or gizmo was going to make a difference.
Description:
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 with nearly everyone else involved in the high-tech endeavors, were convinced that technology was all, that whatever your problems were, there had to be a better technology solution to them. But if what you were up against was inherently sociological, better technology seemed unlikely to be much help. If a group of people who had to work together didn’t trust each other, for example, no nifty software package or gizmo was going to make a difference.