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purely technical positions. Hierarchical organizations and CPTs did not
offer them an attractive model of professionalization.
The adaptive team approach, in comparison, offered promising career
opportunities to a wide range of software workers. The goal of the adap-
tive team was to foster a family atmosphere in which every member's
contributions were important. Team members were anything but inter-
changeable units. Programmers could cultivate their technical skills and
advance their careers without feeling pressure to transfer into administra-
tion. As one knowledgeable observer suggested, in the adaptive team
approach “a good programmer does not get further and further away
from programmers, as occurs in a hierarchical structure when he moves
up the management ladder. Instead, he stays with programming and
gravitates toward what he does best.”
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Judging from the response it received in the industry literature,
The
Psychology of Computer Programming
appealed to a broad popular
audience.
63
Weinberg's anecdotes about the real-life work habits of pro-
grammers rang true to many practitioners. His descriptions of the mis-
chievous pranks that programmers played on their managers, for example,
or the social signifi cance of a strategically located Coca-Cola dispenser,
captured for many of his readers the essential character of the program-
ming profession. The topic has remained in continuous publication since
1969, and was widely celebrated as one of the few classic texts in the
programming literature.
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Weinberg presented a romantic portrait of
software development that emphasized the quiet professionalism of
skilled, dedicated programmer-craftspeople. Of the many models for
software engineering that were proposed in the late 1960s and early
1970s, the egoless programmer was by far the most attractive to the
average practitioner.
Yet the popularity of egoless programming extended beyond the com-
munity of practitioners. Weinberg's theories about the effi ciency of small
family work groups and bottom-up, consensus decision making reso-
nated with certain popular contemporary management theories. In 1971,
Antony Jay's
Corporation Man
provided an ethological analysis of
“tribal behavior” in modern corporations that reinforced Weinberg's
conclusion that six- to ten-member teams were a “natural” organiza-
tional unit.
65
Douglas McGregor's
The Human Side of Enterprise
dis-
criminated between the Theory X approach to management, which
assumed that because of their innate distaste for regimented labor, most
employees must be controlled and threatened before they would work
hard enough, and the Theory Y belief that the expenditure of physical
