I’ve read a lot of books about software engineering. More than I care to count.
The Phoenix Project. The Unicorn Project. Dozens of others with subtitles promising to transform your organisation, revolutionise your delivery, or unlock the secrets of high-performing teams.
Some of them are genuinely good. Most of them made me feel seen, briefly. That rare recognition of yes, this is what it’s actually like before arriving at the same tidy conclusions. Follow these principles. Apply this framework. Measure these metrics and you’re done.
And I’d put the book down thinking: but that’s not really how it ends, is it?
Because in my experience, it doesn’t end with the organisation transformed and the teams humming with psychological safety. It ends with the project cancelled, the team restructured, the framework quietly abandoned, and everyone back to keeping the lights on at 3am while pretending the last eighteen months didn’t happen.
I spent thirty years in that gap. Between how the books said it should work and how it actually felt to be inside it. In fact, this was why I didn’t read any business books for about fifteen years and yet I still survived. Between the confident expert voice on the page and the messy, exhausting, human reality underneath where we do our work.
At some point, I stopped wanting to write about the gap and started wanting to write about the reality.
Human Software is what came out of that. Not a manual. Not a framework or a book with a solution at the end. Just a story about people trying to do their jobs well in a world that keeps making that harder, and what it costs them when the system decides it doesn’t need them anymore.
I wanted to write the book I’d always wanted to read. The one that didn’t flinch from how hard it actually is, didn’t arrive at a tidy conclusion, and trusted the reader to sit with that.
I hope it makes you wince with recognition. And then keep turning pages anyway.
This is HUMAN SOFTWARE.