e-Talk Radio: Lister, Tim, 10 October 2000

they were trying to translate American slang, and they would come back to us and ask us to explain what a term meant. If we used an American term that was very hard to explain…

Carol: Right. And it's very, very effective. I found that the first time I read PeopleWare, when I read the first edition, that it was such an easy read. It was great. I loaned it to a number of friends, and ended up not getting it back. And then I went out and bought the second edition and found it equally easy to read. And yet there's so much meat and potatoes in there for software developers, for actually any technical professional or anyone managing any type of project.

Tim: Right. Yeah. I mean, we worked very, very hard on… We had really tremendous editing from Dorset House, our publisher… on everything from writing and rewriting sections to get a human voice, is what we kept on talking to each other about, as though you were hearing it from us as we're sitting around the table after lunch talking about these things. And we worked hard on the titles and the subtitles and yeah, it's a very, very important aspect of our work. For all the talk about technology projects, they're enormously human. The work is… All the serious work, or as Howard was saying, or Canuth was saying, it's intensely human, intensely intellectual, and you can see when it goes right, it's a true joy.

Carol: And, is that happening more? Have you found that you've had an impact in, and this is probably an overstatement, have you seen an impact in the response of people to PeopleWare? I know that the personal software process that Carnegie Mellon University, and the Software Engineering Institute, has put out, and the team software process has got to be building on some of the concepts that you and Tom first introduced in PeopleWare.

Tim: And to be honest with you, Carol, our industry is so big and so sweeping, I don't think we can claim any sweeping victory at all. Previously, there were some organizations and some companies who, over time, have really become aware of how important human continuity on teams, and things like that, and giving them a chance to succeed, has become. But the industry as a whole today, I must admit, kind of worries me a little bit with this kind of speaking out of the side of the mouth all the time now. I'm sure you see it in your business, Carol, the pressure for time to market and faster, faster, faster, get this done yesterday. That's fine to say, okay? The goal is speed, let's get it over as fast as we can, I can understand that. Then don't tell me to do it when I'm understaffed. I mean, a good baseball team has a good bench. If everybody's fully booked every day, there's no give in terms of things that pop up, things that might go wrong. No one has any slack to absorb all the things that pop up on projects. And so, here you are, an understaffed project, told to go at full speed. You can't optimize all dimensions at once.

Carol: Right. And at the same time, we've got the downsizing, we've got… You've got to do more with less, we've got ….

Tim: I think that's management code, "do more with less." Come on. How are we supposed to do that? Were we really stupid and slovenly? I don't think we've ever been stupid or slovenly