While I also heavily recommend reading PeolpleWare, you might want to start with The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management, also written by Tom DeMarco. While Peopleware [1987, 2nd ed. 1999] is a more analytical approach to dealing with humans in the software development process, The Deadline [1997] is a lot of wisdom packed into a novel which makes it a lot of fun to read. Describing several worst case scenarios during the push of Moravia, a fictional former communist country, into the top league of software producing nations, it presents all those problems that arise from the human part of software management in one large context.
[But: Boy, I hate this happy end on the last page, hope he'll never try to write a regular novel - DeMarco is not Herman Melville.]
I find these books especially important because they deal with what seem to be the largest traps for people who grow from tech jobs into management. They come with high expectations, demand they same they demand from themselves from others and try to push the limit even further to prove they can handle this. They fail to see that mainly the manager works for the techies, not the other way around. It's very dangerous to ignore this, because the techies are the people who're going to save your butt when necessary, so you'd better learn to give something back in time. The main aspect here is trust, and I have jet to find another author who gives a deeper understanding of this than DeMarco. Brooks the mythical man-month [1975, 1995] is also excellent, but doesn't focus that much on people. It would be the best book for someone entering software management not from the technical, but the suit site.
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While I also heavily recommend reading PeolpleWare, you might want to start with The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management, also written by Tom DeMarco. While Peopleware [1987, 2nd ed. 1999] is a more analytical approach to dealing with humans in the software development process, The Deadline [1997] is a lot of wisdom packed into a novel which makes it a lot of fun to read. Describing several worst case scenarios during the push of Moravia, a fictional former communist country, into the top league of software producing nations, it presents all those problems that arise from the human part of software management in one large context.
[But: Boy, I hate this happy end on the last page, hope he'll never try to write a regular novel - DeMarco is not Herman Melville.]
I find these books especially important because they deal with what seem to be the largest traps for people who grow from tech jobs into management. They come with high expectations, demand they same they demand from themselves from others and try to push the limit even further to prove they can handle this. They fail to see that mainly the manager works for the techies, not the other way around. It's very dangerous to ignore this, because the techies are the people who're going to save your butt when necessary, so you'd better learn to give something back in time. The main aspect here is trust, and I have jet to find another author who gives a deeper understanding of this than DeMarco. Brooks the mythical man-month [1975, 1995] is also excellent, but doesn't focus that much on people. It would be the best book for someone entering software management not from the technical, but the suit site.