people side of software

I was listening to a Changelog interview with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas which focused on the lessons they’ve learned in the twenty years since they published The Pragmatic Programmer.

In the middle of the conversation Andy, speaking about why the Pragmatic Programmer and Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month remain relevant, dropped this nugget that I’ve been chewing over ever since:

Because again, it’s people problems, and we haven’t changed. These are still the things that we’re facing.

In focusing as heavily as I have over the past year on learning the technical side of programming, I’ve spent less time thinking about the interpersonal.

Andy’s comment was a reminder that there’s so much more to engineering than simply being able to write a program and I’ve been diving back into the people side of the problem more recently.

More to come, but for now, it’s just interesting to note how easy it is to forget that behind all of our software and technology are people. People that need to figure out how to work together. And solving that problem doesn’t have a simple solution.