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The book explicitly claims it's principal audience are IT project managers, given the majority of the book discusses how poor application of PM can completely derail projects and the people associated with them. No doubt a secondary audience are people above and below PMs in your typical organization's food chain; upper management and developers respectively. Yet given the principal audience, I don't know of any project managers who have proactively read this book, only developers. This is surely due to the fact that my peer group are predominantly developers, but I do know a handful of professional PMs and some were even unaware of the title 'Peopleware'!

What does this mean? Well, it's possible that I'm associating with the "bottom feeders" of the PM gene pool (maybe I've fallen in with the "wrong crowd", as my Mum was so wont to say), but I don't think so. All of the PM's I keep in contact with are very good at their jobs, to a greater or lesser degree. Which leads me to another, more fundamental question?

Where are the PM geeks?

Most of my developer friends are what I would good-naturedly call "geeks". In other words, they view development much more as a vocation than a profession. Their commitment to development entends way beyond the normal work day and their current project. They spend a considerable amount of personal time indulging in their passion for technology, with the most obvious side effect that they're all extremely capable developers. They think nothing of reading books like Peopleware to gain a better understanding of what factors influence the nature of their projects and how best to maximize the positive ones whilst minimizing the negative. These behavioural patterns contain the true essence of a geek to my mind.

They also spend non-trivial amounts of time reading other developers' blog. So if you're reading this and were in the denial stage of accepting your geek nature, it's too late now :-)

But what of our PM bretheren? Is there such a thing as a PM geek? What activities do they partake to fuel their fire for all things PM-y? Do they volunteer to PM open source projects? Do their congregate to play Risk at the PMI every Thursday night? Do they have vast collections of PM text books? Do they read development text books (or even Leading Geeks) in order to better understand the people they manage and what makes them tick?

I'm not sure whether such a thing as a PM geek exists, saving people like Demarco and Lister and their peers. Maybe the lack of a tangible nature to project management work and the ready availability of a toolset (i.e., their equivalent of the developer's PC and software) prevents such evolution from being widespread in the PM crowd.

Given this, it is no wonder that books like Peopleware are created? If a 9-5 project manager is put in charge of a team of geeks, the impedence mismatch is so large that things are bound to get rocky sooner or later. Where a high performing team normally just needs to have a path cleared for it to get the work done, so many PMs insist on applying their cumulative knowledge to the letter of the law, thus almost guaranteeing friction between the developers and the PM.

And the solution? Buggered if I know, I'm just a geek.