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May 2, 2005
Peopleware by Tom Demarco & Timothy Lister
- The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. ( pg. 4 )
- The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of work is not because it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do. ( pg. 5 )
- Bad estimates, hopelessly tight estimates, sap the builders’ energy. ( pg. 28 )
- Coding War Games ( pg. 44 )
- A pair of programmers from the same organization didn’t work together, each person given the same work, designing, coding, and testing a medium-sized program to our fixed specifications.
- Benefit to individual – learning how he or she compares with the rest of the competitors.
- Benefit to company – learning how well it does against other companies in the sample
- Benefit to us – learning a lot about what factors affect productivity
- Results:
- Best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1
- Best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median
- Half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1.
- Years of experience was a productivity non-factor. People who had ten years of experience did not outperform those with two years of experience. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much for our experiment to consider experts people who’ve had 5 years of experience?
- It mattered a lot who your pairmate was. Even though the pairs didn’t work together, the two members of the pair came from the same organization. They worked in the same physical environment and shared the same corporate culture. Best performers are clustering in some organizations while the worst performers are clustering in others. We should keep this in mind when looking for expert candidates.
- Flow – a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement. Unfortunately, you can’t turn on flow like a switch. It takes about 15 minutes or more of concentration before the state is locked in. During this immersion period, you are particularly sensitive to noise and interruption. Not really doing work during immersion. We might want to rethink having the subjects think aloud. ( pg. 63 )
- Jelled teams - a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically.( pg. 123 )
Posted by John at May 2, 2005 7:15 AM
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