Well, no, he was not a pleasant person. Back in the day he was a management consultant, best known for an essay which rustled many programmer jimmies at the time: "Theory P: The Philosophy of Managing Programmers" (2005):

https://web.archive.org/web/20190416200125/https://it.toolbo...

Theory P advances the thesis that because programmers are lazy pseudointellectuals who chafe at discipline and use their arcane technical knowledge to gain power and leverage in the workplace, they need to be tightly managed, their small roles within the company clearly delineated, and discipline and organization strictly enforced.

A more recent (2018) essay of his is much more blunt and to the point, shows that he hadn't changed his mind at all, and concludes with "Is it any wonder why I despise programmers?":

https://patch.com/florida/palmharbor/amp/28237018/the-proble...

The, ahem, problem with Tim Bryce is twofold:

a) for good or ill, he said what your boss—or at least top management at your company—was thinking

b) he was right about many things. He was an exponent of PRIDE, the first widely available commercial software development methodology created by his father, Milt Bryce. Unlike Scrum or even SAFe, which are more like loose frameworks, PRIDE is a complete soup-to-nuts instruction manual on how to develop, implement, and integrate business information systems (including, but not limited to, those which operate via computer). As Bryce himself said: "PRIDE answers the 5 W's of information systems: WHO is to perform WHAT task, WHERE, WHEN, and WHY." PRIDE is pretty much Spec-Driven Development writ large; in PRIDE, the majority of the work and the source of nearly all the value is in systems analysis, not programming: determining how the business operates and what information systems need to be in place to support the business. This is stepwise-refined into a series of more and more detailed specifications, which are only then handed off to programmers to code. Doing it this way saves time and money and leads to more correct software on the first go. It's also pretty close to the state of the art in AI agentic workflows.

Tim Bryce would be giddy with glee had he lived to see today, because finally all those lazy programmers would be put out of work! Since under PRIDE, programming is mere translation of requirements into code, that can now be automated and asymptotically approaches requiring no human effort at all! The fact that you and I dislike his personality doesn't change the fact that what he advocated for is exactly what's happening now, and that business has for centuries and will continue to operate as if what he believed were true—including the bits about procrastination being simple laziness, correctable with stricter discipline, rather than some sort of complex psychological phenomenon.

Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination