I’ve just finished reading Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. The first few chapters (essays) were great. However, as I dwelled deeper in the book, I’ve encountered myself feeling less and less interested.
Now, I understand that the book might be a bit outdated (being written more than 20 years ago at the time of this post), but the extra chapters in the 2nd edition were supposed to handle that.
Instead, they felt like the writers lost a bit of their touch – the original essays are amazingly written (even those that were less relevant to me), but the new ones were just weaker.
Another thing that I felt was that I am not really the right audience for this book. Although I lead a team of several software engineers, I am not really a part of the Enterprise community/politics. Our company, being somewhat smaller, more agile, and less formal, does not fit in with the corporate image that the authors try to paint.
Some of the mental adjustments that I had to make were just not that easy to make.
All-in-all, I believe the book is a good read, and I’d recommend it to at least some of my peers, but wouldn’t insist that they read it too fanatically.