A review by joans
Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams by Mickey Mantle, Ron Lichty
2.0
Hard pass on this. Outdated concepts, outdated language, and all around not awesome. This book has a couple of ideas worth thinking about and bringing into our own practices of software leadership... but...
1. Every pronoun in the whole book is he. There's a preface where they defend this choice, and explain that it would have been too hard to change.
2. Despite assertions to the contrary, this isn't really a book that advocates treating everyone with respect and kindness. (which maybe should have been obvious from the title). There's a bit of lip service to treating everyone like adults, but there's also a bunch of ugly stuff about sneaky motivators and how to micromanage without seeming like micromanaging.
3. Weird bad racism about overseas work and cultural differences between programmers from different countries.
1. Every pronoun in the whole book is he. There's a preface where they defend this choice, and explain that it would have been too hard to change.
2. Despite assertions to the contrary, this isn't really a book that advocates treating everyone with respect and kindness. (which maybe should have been obvious from the title). There's a bit of lip service to treating everyone like adults, but there's also a bunch of ugly stuff about sneaky motivators and how to micromanage without seeming like micromanaging.
3. Weird bad racism about overseas work and cultural differences between programmers from different countries.