Autonomy: The Right to be Wrong

Peopleware is an absolute classic. I stumbled across it when I found Joel Spolsky's Book Reviews page back in 2002:

http://new.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

If you want to be a good programmer, you'll do yourself a service by reading pretty much everything on that page.

In general there's wisdom in classic books and software development is no exception: you can learn a ton about becoming great from books written 20+ years ago.

It's honestly easier to just try to balance both perspectives - have empathy for people unless you want to destroy yourself by judging everyone that's not you until you slowly turn into everyone you think about because thinking about everything becomes all consuming in ways oneself can not control in entirety.

And, see management of work as a system of components that have some expected functionality in behavior and some mutability for changing.

Not everything is a machine or a system. People aren't machines, the workplace doesn't have to be a sterile system to be controlled with a unidirectional purpose. People need to see eye to eye sometimes, and competing egos, salaries, titles, etc can be blinding. Everyone can be smart. Everyone can be a genius. Emotional variances in pedantry.

> Compulsion transforms good advice and helpful training into commandments that make the way forward increasingly difficult for well meaning employees.

Trust is a funny word.

Being wrong is fine. Forcing someone to always be the one who is wrong because, why?

Software. Software is often focused on code working. Right, or wrong, that's what the computer says at the end of the day. There's a middle, a balance, when it comes to understanding people. Managers in technology shouldn't treat people like they are computer programs. But that's what it does. It moves.