Editors' Rating
Published: 22 Feb 2008
If there's one thing most management books are not, it's fun to read. Filled with jargon and management-speak, they're usually either the self-justifying personal stories of ousted CEOs or they're marketing documents intended to further lucrative careers for their writers. Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager is the exception: it's fun and interesting, provocative and informative. The book's author, Michael Lopp, is a Silicon Valley veteran: in his 15-plus year career he's worked for Borland, Netscape, Apple, Symantec and an unnamed failed start-up.
Managing Humans draws on his experiences in all those places as both manager and managee. The best thing about the book is the real-life stories he uses as illustrations. Lopp fictionalises these by using several composite characters who personify various common types in software companies. He represents himself as 'Rands', a middle manager who could, at times, be Dilbert's pointy-headed boss.
The most Net-savvy may recognise the book as a collection of the best essays from his blog: Lopp began blogging in 1996 (although his early blog, The Bitsifter Digest, is gone now), which makes him one of the earliest bloggers. If Lopp had written an ordinary book on management, probably the trickle of thought that makes up the average blog entry would have been the right amount to digest at a sitting. However, Managing Humans is much more interesting and useful than that, and for efficient consumption you want a book.
What do you do when an employee freaks out? Do one-on-ones and status reports have to be boring? How can you get the best out of meetings? What does it mean when your manager peppers you with the same boring questions every week? What goes through the mind of a middle manager when he reads your CV and considers whether to call you in for an interview? (And what is he thinking during that interview?) When should you worry about your job being outsourced to India? Lopp considers all these topics, and more. It's hard to imagine anyone working in any arena — even a freelance working at home — who won't get something out of this book.
For example: you have been attending meetings for a year on the subject of migrating the company's application server because that server's support will be expiring soon. Yet nothing is happening, no decisions are being made and the deadline keeps ticking nearer. How do you escape into a new universe where progress happens? Lopp shows how to analyse the meeting's participants to figure out what the blockage is — although in the real-life, bet-the-company case that he draws upon, he finally gave up and walked out because the blockage was impossible to solve.
And then there are 'Malcolm events' — named after Jeff Goldbum's character, Ian Malcolm, who explains chaos theory in the movie Jurassic Park. Sometimes, Lopp writes, seemingly tiny missed decisions create enough havoc to ruin an entire company a year or two later. The art of identifying the significantly insignificant, Lopp writes, is the toughest part of the job and not, as folklore has it, herding software-programming cats.
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