"Human Capital" (1998), published in IEEE Software and co-authored with timothy-lister, extends the peopleware-thesis into the language of investment and organizational assets. The column argues that the people in a software organization are its primary capital asset — not an expense to be minimized but an investment to be cultivated.
This framing connects the peopleware argument to broader debates about knowledge work economics and anticipates the slack argument DeMarco would develop in slack: that treating human capacity as a resource to be maximized (the spanish-theory-of-management) destroys the very capital it claims to exploit.