A Field Guide to Developers is an article by Joel ‘on Software’ Spolsky. From reading this you can tell that Joel is a man who knows how to run a software house and how to keep staff happy. From it, I’ve also added another book to my reading list.
Last year I went to a Computer Science conference at Yale. One of the speakers, a Silicon Valley veteran who had founded or led quite an honor roll of venture-capital funded startups, held up the book Peopleware.
“You have to read this book,” he said. “This is the bible of how to run a software company. This is the most important book out there for how to run software companies.”
I had to agree with him: Peopleware is a great book.