Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, 2nd Edition

2. Understanding Programmers

Programmers are very Different from one another across many dimensions, something that you must be close to programming to fully appreciate. In most companies, the executive management views all programmers as being alike, which is a terrible mistake. Executives such as Bill Gates at Microsoft, John Warnock at Adobe Systems, and Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook seemingly avoided falling into this trap, since they were programmers at heart.

Why does it matter? Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. After years of managing programmers, we still marvel at the substantial differences among them and how we must approach problems and motivation differently. To us, one thing is clear: In order to successfully manage programmers, you ...