Golden Nuggest from the book - PeopleWare (By Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister)

Summed up in one sentence, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)
say: Give smart people physical space, intellectual responsibility and strategic direction


DeMarco and Lister advocate: 

• private offices and windows. 
• creating teams with aligned goals and limited non-team work. 
• managers finding good staff and putting their fate in the hands of those staff
• The manager's function is not to make people work but to make it possible for people to work
• managers should help programmers, designers, writers and other brainworkers to reach a state that psychologists call "flow" - an almost meditative condition where people can achieve important leaps towards solving complex problems

The best way to describe this book would be as an Anti-Dilbert Manifesto

DeMarco and Lister attack cubicles, dress codes, telephones, hiring policies, and company core hours and demonstrate how managers who are not insecure about their positions, who shelter their employees from corporate politics, who, in short, make it possible for people to work are the ones who complete projects and whose employees have fun doing so.

Programming languages come and go with an occasional paradigm shift thrown in. However, the thought processes and the mental gyrations needed to complete large software projects remain largely unchanged