It’s too soon, for instance, for you to write, “The other side of the lake was hidden in the fucking mist.” That will come later. You are setting your scene. You don’t want to make a point as yet.’”
— from The Finishing School. Muriel Spark, 1918-2006 This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Saturday, April 15, 2006 Link

A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women.
And he sits down to spin code.
And what code it is. Flawless, artistic, elegant, bug free. The user interface so perfectly mimics a users' thought process that the people he shows it to at the Programmer's Cafe hardly notice that there is a user interface. It's a brilliant piece of work.
The Development Abstraction Layer By Joel Spolsky Tuesday, April 11, 2006
...Why did he fail? He's pretty sure he knows. "Marketing," he says. Like many young technicians, he is apt to say things like, "Microsoft has worse products but better marketing."

Which gets me to the most important point of this essay:Your first priority as the manager of a software team is building the development abstraction layer.
Most new software managers miss this point. They keep thinking of the traditional, command-hierarchy system of management that they learned from Hollywood movies.
Some businesses actually run this way. You can always tell when you are dealing with such a business, because the person you are talking to is doing something infuriating and senseless, and they know it, and they might even care, but there's nothing they can do about it. It's the airline that loses a million mile customer forever because they refuse to change his non-refundable ticket so he can fly home for a family emergency. It's the ISP whose service is down more often than it's up, and when you cancel your account, they keep billing you, and billing you, and billing you, but when you call to complain, you have to call a toll number and wait on hold for an hour, and then they still refuse to refund you, until you start a blog about how badly they suck.

A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that's so comfortable you don't feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can't see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. huh.well but it is somehow upsetting to me, what aspect of the world (or civilization?) does it [= INFRASTRUCTURE] accomodate? Modern armies probably run 7:1.
Nobody expects Dolly Parton to know how to plug in a microphone. There's an incredible infrastructure of managers, musicians, recording technicians, record companies, roadies, hairdressers, and publicists behind her who exist ~to create the abstraction that when she sings, that's all it takes for millions of people to hear her song ~ eh am not sure. When you're listening to her on your iPod, there's a huge infrastructure that makes that possible, but the very best thing that infrastructure can do is disappear completely. ~but I like transparency?
Think of your development abstraction layer as a big, beautiful yacht with insanely powerful motors. It's impeccably maintained. Gourmet meals are served like clockwork. The staterooms have twice-daily maid service. The navigation maps are always up to date. The GPS and the radar always work and if they break there's a spare below deck. Standing on the bridge, you have programmers who really only think about speed, direction, and whether to have Tuna or Salmon for lunch. Meanwhile a large team of professionals in starched white uniforms tiptoes around quietly below deck, keeping everything running, filling the gas tanks, scraping off barnacles, ironing the napkins for lunch. The support staff knows what to do but they take their cues from a salty old fart who nods ever so slightly in certain directions to coordinate the whole symphony so that the programmers can abstract away everything about the yacht except speed, direction, and what they want for lunch.
Microsoft does such a good job at creating this abstraction that Microsoft alumni have a notoriously hard time starting companies. They simply can't believe how much went on below decks and they have no idea how to reproduce it.