Peopleware

DeMarco and Lister argue that most projects fail for sociological reasons rather than technical ones, and they spend the book on the conditions that let people think. Chapters deal with office noise and interruption, the real cost of turnover, why overtime rarely buys output, and how a team gels or fails to. Their coding war games data on the relationship between workspace quality and performance is still quoted decades later. The third edition adds material on distributed working, hybrid teams and the effects of open plan layouts. Useful for anyone who controls a budget or a floor plan and wants to know where the productivity actually goes.