Peopleware (Chapter 2)

M. Asad Shah Jahan (17L-6110)

Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a
Cheeseburger
1. Squeeze out error. Make the machine (the human machine) run as
smoothly as possible.
2. Take a hard line about people goofing off on the job.
3. Treat workers as interchangeable pieces of the machine.
4. Optimize the steady state. (Don’t even think about how the operation got
up to speed, or what it would take to close it down.)
5. Standardize procedure. Do everything by the book.
6. Eliminate experimentation—that’s what the folks at headquarters are
paid for
A Quota for Errors
● Error on Job and sin
● Iterative design
● Impossible political problem
● People become defensive (decreases creativity)
● Decision making
● Encourage people
● Identifying the Dead Ends
Management: The Bozo Definition
● Insights from a senior manager
○ Management is kicking a**
● You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make
them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.
● Even if kicking people in the backside did boost their short-term
productivity, it might not be useful in the long run
The People Store
● There is no people store
● You cannot order people from a store.
● No one is irreplaceable
● You cannot call an online store and say:
○ Send me a new George Gardenhyer, but make him a little less uppity
A project in Steady State is Dead
● Project cannot be in a steady state
● Project always has dynamics
● Steady projects are “Rigor mortis”
● People are accessed by the number lines of code they write or the
amount of documentation they produce
● People are not accessed by the effort or value they can add to a project
We Haven’t Got Time to Think about This
Job, Only to Do It
● Pre-production work
○ Brainstorming
○ Avoid sub-tasks
○ Trainings
○ Investigating new methods
● Do-mode
● Time-bound project
● Reading
Thank You