Our industry, technological in nature, has far more sociological problems and challenges. The tar pit swallows yet another project, not because we couldn't figure out the technical parts, but because the people-oriented aspects had the lowest priority. Peopleware is about teams and individuals, about the people of the office - the "white collars". It's about bosses and employees, leaders and managers. It's about how, why, where, and what are our daily working activities about, how every bit of surrounding environment affects them.

As the year 2023 was coming to an end, I finally had some time to recap "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering" by Fred Brooks. The book talks about software development fallacies from software engineering and project management perspectives. However this is not "yet another book". It was first published in 1975, nearly fifty years ago! So much changed since 1975, and yet, so little! It's unbelievable that today we are still struggling with the problems that haunted us in the age of mainframes.

You smile a lot as you read the book. Programming with punch cards? A big fat machine with only 2 MB of RAM? Software documented on paper? Sure, things were different back then. But there are so many similarities! Instead of reviewing the book, I'd prefer to study these similarities, draw parallels, and find out whether things have changed for the better.