Peopleware

Peopleware is 100% worth it still today. You’ll just get angry when writing it. We had written down solutions to problems with teams and offices in 50 years ago but just refused to follow them.

Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson (https://staffeng.com/book) Peopleware

+100 for peopleware.

Managing the Unmanageable, a second vote for Peopleware, The Mythical Man-Month, and The Conviction to Lead https://b3n.org/programming-management-leadership-books/

Peopleware Because even the best technology has people behind it.

I'm not as rigorous as you are; the idea that Demarco and Lister made up historical anecdotes in the book doesn't perturb me too much, because the value of the book isn't so much prescriptive ("break your company into tiny teams and let them each pick a far-flung cool-looking skunkworks office") --- it's more that it provides a new way of looking at how your company is organized. On the other hand, I didn't "get" Surfer Rosa for like a year after I bought it, because by the time I had (in the early 90's) almost all the music I listened to was more or less cribbed from Pixies songs. Maybe the same thing happened with Peopleware, where pretty much every blog post we read about dev teams expresses a sentiment traceable to some part of Peopleware. In my defense with GEB: I didn't read it because Joel Spolsky told me to, I read it because a girlfriend did. A similar logic had me pretending to enjoy Faulkner. My take on Hofstadter may be oddly colored. Also: I haven't read any of his other books and am not a Lisper, so he's had fewer opportunities to annoy me.

Peopleware - This isn't a programming book, but I feel that every professional programmer (and certainly every manager) should have read it. It is about the human aspect of programming. Programmers are people too!

On my desk: Getting Real (37Signals), Hardball (Chris Mathews), Prioritizing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen) Nearby shelf: The Design of Everyday Things, Maverick, Founders at work, A Brief History of Time, A Pattern Language, Peopleware, Made to stick, Web Standards Solutions, Designing Interactions, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man-Month, Oh, the Places You'll Go! Other good reads: Blink, Tipping Point, Long Tail, Freakonomics

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister Build to Last by James C. Collins , Jerry I. Porras

A few sort of random selections from my bookshelf (in no particular order): * GEB:EGB - Hofstader * The Pragmatic Programmer - Hunt / Thomas * Peopleware - DeMarco / Lister * The Mythical Man Month - Brooks * Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming - Norvig * Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - Miyazaki

some that haven't been mentioned: - the innovator's dilemma by clayton christensen - blue ocean strategy (kim and mauborgne) -- these two books give you a little bit more of a framework to evaluate where your idea adds value and give you examples of how/why some successful companies have been successful - high tech startup by nesheim -- a little dated, but lots of info - negotiation/people books: getting to yes (fisher, ury) and getting past no (ury), influence by cialdini (useful for more than just startups) - maybe some management books: peopleware (demarco and lister), the art of project management (berkun), first, break all the rules (buckingham) - founders at work (livingston) to get inspired +1 to crossing the chasm, and the godin & gladwell books, art of the start blogs: onstartups.com, fred wilson, brad feld, seth godin, etc., guy kawasaki -drew