I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my copy of “Peoplewar: Productive Projects and Teams” by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, which I ordered immendiately after reading some extracts on Kevin Kelly’s excellent Cool Tools site. My favourite extract that rang a number of bells from my own experience was this one:
“In my two years at Bell Labs, we worked in two-person offices. They were spacious, quiet, and the phones could be diverted. I shared my office with Wendl Thomis who went on to build a small empire as an electronic toy maker. In those days, he was working on the ESS fault dictionary. The dictionary scheme relied upon the notion of n-space proximity, a concept that was hairy enough to challenge even Wendl’s powers of concentration. One afternoon, I was bent over a program listing while Wendl was staring into space, his feet propped up on the desk. Our boss came in and asked, “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said, “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at home?””