than everyone else, it's just friction, it's difficult to deal with it. And given the market the way it is now, now's a great time to find an organization that makes you feel comfortable and appreciated if you've got skills. As long as it's not a destructive culture. I think unfortunately, I've seen a few of those, where companies kind of get pathological and kind of don't keep their eye on the work at hand. Worrying about power building, or empire building, and things are going on, and politics turned toward the irrational at times. Those are the kind of cultures that worry me, not the youth kiddie culture or the elderly corporate culture, things like that.
Carol: I think for… One thing that I'm hearing that's kind of exciting, I think, is that in today's climate there's enough variety, and enough variety in companies that if you're not comfortable in the job you're in right now, if you've got skills, you should be able to move. And there are probably some listeners who are saying, "I just hate my job. I hate what I'm doing. I hate my project. I hate the people I work with." What would be your advice to them to find a corporate culture that they'd feel comfortable with?
Tim: I think honestly, to take a step back for awhile and say, what is it that you dislike? Try to do a little root cause analysis and say, "What's going on that makes me less than thrilled to head into work in the morning? What would make me happy to get up and get going and feel like, okay, here we go again, this is going to be fun. This is going to be exciting. This is satisfying." Because is it the work, or is it the interactions with the people that you don't maybe have great respect for them, or some subset of people are giving you a real hard time, and most people are fine. Are you feeling that you're not challenged enough?
Carol: And we'll be back. Hold that thought. We'll be back with Tim Lister.
Welcome back to Quality Plus e-Talk! I have with me Tim Lister, who is one of the co-authors, with Tom DeMarco, of a book called PeopleWare, that focuses on teams and productive teams, especially in the software industry. Welcome back, Tim.
Tim: Thanks, Carol.
Carol: There have been two editions. And you had ten years between your first edition of PeopleWare in 1989, and your second edition in 1999. And I know it's been updated. What types of things did you learn, and what has changed in the last ten years?
Tim: Well, what we did was we took the first edition, and we actually left most of it intact, because it stood up just fine. But we wrote a whole new section, and added on, which is a section of I think eight chapters. So it's kind of an enlargement. And I guess the big difference is we, I think we made a mistake, we didn't realize it or we left it out, and memory fades, and Tom and I argue about this, but when you talk about teams in a book, especially in the United States, the U.S. and Canada, the default model of a team is a sports team. And we… That wasn't the right fit for teams that are project teams for software projects. And one of the things we wanted to talk about, and we felt that people didn't catch on to, was that there's a problem with a sports team,
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