My ego is only tied to my attempts to do the best job I know how, and to learn from my mistakes, not the initial result of my work. This is just one of the ideas still promoted in Weinberg's Silver Anniversary Edition . These managers think people should function as little black boxes that tasks are fed into and work comes out of, with no observation necessary, and especially no interaction. Whatever the future of programming may bring, I firmly believe it will still reward thinking over mindlessness. Sometimes, oldies are goodies.
Old books can be even better when they're revised to assess their prophecies and sage advice.
To some readers 25 years ago, it must have sounded like a fanciful programming nirvana. Good software engineering ideas will outlast specific technologies by decades, and there is no better evidence of that than the ideas contained in Psychology of Computer Programming . After reading it in high school, I discovered I didn't want to be a computer programmer. But Weinberg's portrait of what programmers did and how they did it . Now, I'm a big fan of Weinberg's work on requirements and walk-throughs, and I got a huge kick out of his extraordinarily clever books on consulting and technical leadership.