Thoughts on hearing the talk by the head of Van Dyke

I was mainly surprised (though I really shouldn't be) by how many processes and rules the guy has to create and manage people (rather than say, technology and such).  I think as undergrads in Comp Sci, we have this impression that the hard part about this business is technical problems like programming and algorithm design.  In class on Monday, the speaker was making me think about how much of a people field software engineering really is.  If you think about it, we are in one of those areas where we often (hell, usually) don't produce a physical product, per se.  Rather, we produce an intellectual product, like a team of story writers.  When you think of it that way, you realize that software engineering management has a very different set of challenges than, say, running a paper mill.  It seems to me that a guy like Van Dyke spends his management energy almost entirely towards making sure his people are happy, productive, well-placed, and have what they need.  That sounds like the job of any manager, but a software manager appears to have less of the other normal responsibilities, like ordering inventory and raw materials or determining hours of operation and sales discounts (if one managed retail, bleh).  Van Dyke had a lot to say about ideas he cooks up or reads about and then implements with his team, like 'Bootleg Friday', a policy where every Friday his developers can work on what they feel is most important at that point (and not necessarily their main project).  His discussion of 'time buffers', which allow developers to have some room for error in their time estimates for tasks, goes to the same purpose; making his people happy and productive, yet accountable.  It seems clear that the reason Van Dyke Software is still around is because the guy who runs it understands that his most important (and in some sense, only) asset are his employees.  It's the same reason we're always hearing about the ridiculous perks employees at places like Google receive for working there.  Like Ackley always says, "software engineering is something that people do".