The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer

is an excellent book by Edward Yourdon (isbn 0-13-191958-X). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages

world class organizations are devoting significant effort today to the issue of building effective, harmonious, well-balanced teams.

The most common reason in professional programming for resignation is dissatisfaction with management.

One V.P. of systems I know ordered his people to take one afternoon a week and play with their computers.

Basically I think senior management in most companies really doesn't know what it is doing. Seriously.

We put a man on the moon in 1969 with 2nd generation IBM 7094 technology.

Your enemies are your best critics.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

In the words of the immortal baseball manager, Casey Stengel, "I just know I'm a better manager when I have Joe DiMaggio in center field."

They must think the people who work for them are mushrooms, since they keep them in the dark and feed them.

I think the biggest problems are to be found in management. In particular, managers who have no experience as a programmer. You can't manage a process that you don't understand.

At the heart of software metrics is the desire to improve.