Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister

The biggest blockers to knowledge work aren't technical — they're noise, interruptions, and management that treats people as interchangeable. Fix the environment and the team, and output takes care of itself.

The classic argument that the major problems of software work are human, not technical: productivity comes from letting good people work in quiet, uninterrupted conditions and from growing "jelled" teams — and most management practice actively prevents both.