Email the Author
You can use this page to email Tom Howlett about The Programmers Guide To People.
About the Book
The Beginning
"My first real job was as an Engineer in the Merchant Navy. At sea we felt fear of fire, rocks, drowning (and being found naked trying to climb into fridge), but it was no comparison to the fear I felt sat in a cubicle in my first office job. This Kafkaesque fear radiated from the people around me. There were rules to be followed, confusion as to why they existed, yet a fear of breaking them. I rarely spoke to my comrades around me, we kept our heads down, built a bubble around ourselves, and dutifully soldiered on."
The End
"I'm done with fear. Letting go, fellowship, openness, courage and reflection replace it, and like fear they slowly spread. We change our life, maybe our teams, perhaps our organisations. This is not a fad, a methodology, a process or tool. This change is a slow, deep, cultural one. At times it seems impossible, armour seems impenetrable, the weight of hierarchy constraining us. This isn't a program, these are networks of real people, relationships, egos, more complex than we can hope to understand. Making work better takes persistence, enquiry, empathy and continual learning."
The Rest
This book is about making sense of the senseless; understanding why people behave the way they do at work, and how it's possible to change that by building supportive relationships, rather than competitive ones. By removing the problems that hold us back we can find time for creativity and reflection and bring joy back to our work lives.
About the Author
For as long as I can remember I've felt like an outsider observing and trying to make sense of peoples behaviours and interactions. My working life began with 5 years at sea followed by more years of monotony in an office where I began developing software. A New York startup and discovering the Agile movement turned me on to trying to create better ways of working. Becoming part of a software team with a degree of self-organisation made that a reality. Writing this book has been a process of trying to join the dots of these observations with theory and practice from, amongst others, Daniel Kahneman, Chris Argyris, Marshall Rosenberg and Nancy Kline. I hope it can help you work out the problems you face at work and discover better ways of working together and creating great software.