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I really enjoyed 'The Soul of a New Machine' as a work of art. But.... Having worked in semiconductors and software, I can't help but wonder if life imitated

I really enjoyed 'The Soul of a New Machine' as a work of art. But.... Having worked in semiconductors and software, I can't help but wonder if life imitated art or art imitated life. The grind and machismo around it rang so true to me, but I also disliked how it glorified something that I felt was pretty dysfunctional. I love creating things, but not everything has to be a death march, and surviving it isn't necessarily some badge of honor. While I see the glory in the engineers rising to the occasion, I also see that the management of that company was clearly to blame for the awful situation in the first place. With that type of management, it's no wonder Data General isn't around any more. Anyway, I would highly recommend reading 'The Soul of a New Machine'. Just don't take it as an instruction manual on how to run a tech business.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Perhaps it is to computing what the Fountainhead is to architecture. The feeling from the inside of a great moment or historical period that encapsulates an idea(l) can't be told factually. The space race. The Manhattan project. Cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park. We all read those boks and watch the movies, and wish we had been inside those moments. Reality was probably heat, dust, coffee, burned fingers with soldering irons, paperwork, money arguments, getting cranky working late hours... much the same as your ordinary workday.
- hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
  Yep, even for military projects such as SAGE and Bombe, I'd say the a normal day is not too different from an engineer's normal day. After all we are all humans, and bureaucracy inevitably grows within all such large projects.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I'm not sure. I've been through some interesting ones. Some pioneering work on courseware for Apple II computers, one of the first Brazilian news portals, the third-gen Brazilian voting machines (the one with Windows CE - not my fault)... All these had the feeling that we were on to something big, not that we were writing history, but that history was writing itself, as if all we could do was to surf that huge wave. And surf them we did. I understand the value of work-life balance, and I wouldn't compromise it on a normal day-to-day operation, but when you feel like you are doing something really great, it's almost like the art takes control and you need to chanel it into the world. That the thing you are building is begging to exist and you are the one who can deliver it. It's a great feeling.
AuBon320 4y ago
pinewurst 4y ago
Rereading it as an adult (1st time at end of high school), I agree. In my wanderings I've found the link below which is a less polished, perhaps more true version of DG which makes me think it wouldn't have been so fun. http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom
- ghaff 4y ago
  One of the secrecy things in that piece really resonated. I was at an executive briefing with some major customer at the briefing center. We were a couple of days away from from some new product launch that was relevant to the briefing but were under orders not to say anything. Anyway, my--I think--manager's manager decided to sketch a few TBA things out on the whiteboard or blackboard anyway when Edson walked in to say hello. She very unobstrusively managed to erase what was on the board before Edson noticed.
felixgallo 4y ago
It's an excellent, nearly perfect instruction manual on how to run a tech business -- in the situation and time that tech business was in. For context, DG was about to go obsolete, but Tom (and others) recognized this where almost nobody else would've, and managed to transform the company from a mainframe company to a minicomputer company, with a small, ragtag team of dedicated engineers, without a map or prior art, and with desultory support from the checked-out, incompetent C-suite. Tom's idiosyncratic, no-nonsense style wasn't for everyone, but I can think of very few tech leaders who could have succeeded as a manager in that situation. Source: worked directly for Tom at Data General for several years.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I'm really fascinated by everything in DG. Actually I didn't know DG until now. Is it possible for you to share a bit more? I'm sorry for being vague but I assume anything would be of interest of the HN public right now. If there is really a need for a topic, I couldn't help but Googled your name, looks like you are involved in a project called "Poppet", maybe it is possible to speak a bit about that one? Thanks!
  - felixgallo 4y ago
    Here's a piece I wrote about 13 years ago: https://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/Jessamyn-in-Valley-News#384503 https://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/Jessamyn-in-Valley-New...
    - jessamyn 4y ago
      Hi felix!
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        Hacker News is a treasure just for this kind of encounter.
    - markus_zhang 4y ago
spfzero 4y ago
I imagine a death march to be something worse than that. In this case everyone shared the goal, it wasn't a made-up deadline forced on underlings by a clueless management. This management knew they could do it, and the team knew they could do it and had done it before. That's what they were there for; the thing they hoped to be able to do. When I think of a death march, I think of an engineering task (usually a software program) with a known-impossible deadline, where the team pushes back on the deadline and is ignored. Necessary tools not provided, work hours monitored, rather than progress, etc.
- gorjusborg 4y ago
  Yeah, I agree, TSOANM isn't really about a death march. I am abusing the term. I worked on some death marches with guys who saw themselves as Tom West though, which is probably why I chose that phrase. A death march, to me, is a project that you know can't succeed but you are forced to go forward anyway. I once had a boss hold the team at work until a piece of work was done (and it was 2am before it was clear it wasn't going to happen). That was just one day, but that project was a death march.
andrewf 4y ago
Soul, Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and Masters of Doom are my three favorite "computer product development heroics" narratives and I think they all describe toxic workplaces by the standards of 2022 and employees who aren't monomaniacs. In their defense, a compelling book is going to select for drama, and depict it as dramatically as possible. And in the latter two books, people signed onto a new crazy-intense team knowingly and many of them made bank. I'dve happily done that at some points in time. I feel sorriest for the folks who were already Data General employees at the start of Soul.
jessamyn 4y ago
Right?! Hi I'm Tom West's daughter, librarian, owner of MetaFilter and someone who spends a LOT of time talking to people (mainly men) who take only some of the messages away from that book. The book was great. I'm in it in a single sentence. My sister isn't in it at all. My parents divorced shortly after the book came out. My father had never "let" my mother have a job (it was a different time) and so she was ill-prepared for the single life, but made it work. I hammered out a decent relationship with my dad despite the fact that he was basically married to his work, was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and had a problematic relationship with alcohol. He was a good guy but he learned interpersonal interactions somewhat by rote and in a business role where the goal was "results" he just did what he had to do. It's weird growing up when your dad's nickname is The Price of Darkness. He wound up having a decent retirement after being a company man most of his life, got to sail a lot more, had a second messy divorce, and died in 2011. At his memorial service Tracy Kidder spoke eloquently about working with my dad through the writing of that book (he basically lived with us on weekends for a while) and how he knew the book had been good for him--he won a Pulitzer, was catapulted to some level of renown, got to write more books--but he was never quite sure it had been good for my dad. I also wonder sometimes. So, yeah, when I talk to people who are reading it again or for the first time, I often ask them to reflect on what the book says about work/life balance, about gender norms (there's one woman in the entire coding team), about how project management should run, and about the weird cult of personality that can grow up around people who don't quite get along with people, and how things could be different.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >(there's one woman in the entire coding team) Certainly true. Though I will say that a female engineering friend of mine--upon seeing A Year in Development (linked elsewhere on thread) created a few years later about, well, a year in development at DG--had the immediate reaction "Look at all the women!" But maybe that's more a statement about how things haven't gotten a lot better. (And many of the women, in my experience, were in project management and engineering-adjacent roles.)
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    When I graduated (EE, 1992), in my class there were about five women. Industrial engineering had a higher proportion, about 10%. In the last few years, according to LinkedIn at least - and my admittedly unscientific counting, it seems 50/50. This makes me much happier.
rektide 4y ago
Oh man the book both glorifies but also does a good job to me of making it all look crazy, not held together, just barely going, politically isolated. That there was a cause, a mission was do much a product of the early times, when we just didn't know as much yet, weren't nearly as professional or well set yet. That's a little less apparent.
AlbertCory 4y ago
OK, I guess it's going to be some shameless self-promotion, then, sorry: I wrote a book (https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future) that's set 7-10 years after TSOANM. Unlike Kidder, I was actually part of it. One of the reviews compares it to TSOANM, so I guess that's high praise. Since there are already at least two non-fiction books about all that (Fumbling the Future and Dealers of Lightning) I wrote this like it was fiction, meaning with characters who get to do things and talk to each other, and don't know how it all turns out. Nearly all the players who are still alive helped & critiqued it, and one (Dave Smith, the inventor of icons) wrote the Foreword.
- bradneuberg 4y ago
  Thanks for the pointer! Just bought the audiobook version of your book, looks like a great read.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Thank you, sir! The narrator (Maxwell Glick) and I did about an hour of live chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU He did my second book, too.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Thank you sir! Already in my shopping cart.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Brad's already started a Twitter thread about it. AMA!

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Perhaps it is to computing what the Fountainhead is to architecture. The feeling from the inside of a great moment or historical period that encapsulates an idea(l) can't be told factually. The space race. The Manhattan project. Cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park. We all read those boks and watch the movies, and wish we had been inside those moments. Reality was probably heat, dust, coffee, burned fingers with soldering irons, paperwork, money arguments, getting cranky working late hours... much the same as your ordinary workday.

hnthrowaway0328 4y ago
Yep, even for military projects such as SAGE and Bombe, I'd say the a normal day is not too different from an engineer's normal day. After all we are all humans, and bureaucracy inevitably grows within all such large projects.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I'm not sure. I've been through some interesting ones. Some pioneering work on courseware for Apple II computers, one of the first Brazilian news portals, the third-gen Brazilian voting machines (the one with Windows CE - not my fault)... All these had the feeling that we were on to something big, not that we were writing history, but that history was writing itself, as if all we could do was to surf that huge wave. And surf them we did. I understand the value of work-life balance, and I wouldn't compromise it on a normal day-to-day operation, but when you feel like you are doing something really great, it's almost like the art takes control and you need to chanel it into the world. That the thing you are building is begging to exist and you are the one who can deliver it. It's a great feeling.

AuBon320 4y ago

pinewurst 4y ago

Rereading it as an adult (1st time at end of high school), I agree. In my wanderings I've found the link below which is a less polished, perhaps more true version of DG which makes me think it wouldn't have been so fun. http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom

ghaff 4y ago
One of the secrecy things in that piece really resonated. I was at an executive briefing with some major customer at the briefing center. We were a couple of days away from from some new product launch that was relevant to the briefing but were under orders not to say anything. Anyway, my--I think--manager's manager decided to sketch a few TBA things out on the whiteboard or blackboard anyway when Edson walked in to say hello. She very unobstrusively managed to erase what was on the board before Edson noticed.

felixgallo 4y ago

It's an excellent, nearly perfect instruction manual on how to run a tech business -- in the situation and time that tech business was in. For context, DG was about to go obsolete, but Tom (and others) recognized this where almost nobody else would've, and managed to transform the company from a mainframe company to a minicomputer company, with a small, ragtag team of dedicated engineers, without a map or prior art, and with desultory support from the checked-out, incompetent C-suite. Tom's idiosyncratic, no-nonsense style wasn't for everyone, but I can think of very few tech leaders who could have succeeded as a manager in that situation. Source: worked directly for Tom at Data General for several years.

markus_zhang 4y ago
Thanks for sharing. I'm really fascinated by everything in DG. Actually I didn't know DG until now. Is it possible for you to share a bit more? I'm sorry for being vague but I assume anything would be of interest of the HN public right now. If there is really a need for a topic, I couldn't help but Googled your name, looks like you are involved in a project called "Poppet", maybe it is possible to speak a bit about that one? Thanks!
- felixgallo 4y ago
  Here's a piece I wrote about 13 years ago: https://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/Jessamyn-in-Valley-News#384503 https://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/Jessamyn-in-Valley-New...
  - jessamyn 4y ago
    Hi felix!
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      Hacker News is a treasure just for this kind of encounter.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago

spfzero 4y ago

I imagine a death march to be something worse than that. In this case everyone shared the goal, it wasn't a made-up deadline forced on underlings by a clueless management. This management knew they could do it, and the team knew they could do it and had done it before. That's what they were there for; the thing they hoped to be able to do. When I think of a death march, I think of an engineering task (usually a software program) with a known-impossible deadline, where the team pushes back on the deadline and is ignored. Necessary tools not provided, work hours monitored, rather than progress, etc.

gorjusborg 4y ago
Yeah, I agree, TSOANM isn't really about a death march. I am abusing the term. I worked on some death marches with guys who saw themselves as Tom West though, which is probably why I chose that phrase. A death march, to me, is a project that you know can't succeed but you are forced to go forward anyway. I once had a boss hold the team at work until a piece of work was done (and it was 2am before it was clear it wasn't going to happen). That was just one day, but that project was a death march.

andrewf 4y ago

Soul, Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and Masters of Doom are my three favorite "computer product development heroics" narratives and I think they all describe toxic workplaces by the standards of 2022 and employees who aren't monomaniacs. In their defense, a compelling book is going to select for drama, and depict it as dramatically as possible. And in the latter two books, people signed onto a new crazy-intense team knowingly and many of them made bank. I'dve happily done that at some points in time. I feel sorriest for the folks who were already Data General employees at the start of Soul.

jessamyn 4y ago

Right?! Hi I'm Tom West's daughter, librarian, owner of MetaFilter and someone who spends a LOT of time talking to people (mainly men) who take only some of the messages away from that book. The book was great. I'm in it in a single sentence. My sister isn't in it at all. My parents divorced shortly after the book came out. My father had never "let" my mother have a job (it was a different time) and so she was ill-prepared for the single life, but made it work. I hammered out a decent relationship with my dad despite the fact that he was basically married to his work, was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and had a problematic relationship with alcohol. He was a good guy but he learned interpersonal interactions somewhat by rote and in a business role where the goal was "results" he just did what he had to do. It's weird growing up when your dad's nickname is The Price of Darkness. He wound up having a decent retirement after being a company man most of his life, got to sail a lot more, had a second messy divorce, and died in 2011. At his memorial service Tracy Kidder spoke eloquently about working with my dad through the writing of that book (he basically lived with us on weekends for a while) and how he knew the book had been good for him--he won a Pulitzer, was catapulted to some level of renown, got to write more books--but he was never quite sure it had been good for my dad. I also wonder sometimes. So, yeah, when I talk to people who are reading it again or for the first time, I often ask them to reflect on what the book says about work/life balance, about gender norms (there's one woman in the entire coding team), about how project management should run, and about the weird cult of personality that can grow up around people who don't quite get along with people, and how things could be different.

ghaff 4y ago
>(there's one woman in the entire coding team) Certainly true. Though I will say that a female engineering friend of mine--upon seeing A Year in Development (linked elsewhere on thread) created a few years later about, well, a year in development at DG--had the immediate reaction "Look at all the women!" But maybe that's more a statement about how things haven't gotten a lot better. (And many of the women, in my experience, were in project management and engineering-adjacent roles.)
- rbanffy 4y ago
  When I graduated (EE, 1992), in my class there were about five women. Industrial engineering had a higher proportion, about 10%. In the last few years, according to LinkedIn at least - and my admittedly unscientific counting, it seems 50/50. This makes me much happier.

rektide 4y ago

Oh man the book both glorifies but also does a good job to me of making it all look crazy, not held together, just barely going, politically isolated. That there was a cause, a mission was do much a product of the early times, when we just didn't know as much yet, weren't nearly as professional or well set yet. That's a little less apparent.

AlbertCory 4y ago

OK, I guess it's going to be some shameless self-promotion, then, sorry: I wrote a book (https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future) that's set 7-10 years after TSOANM. Unlike Kidder, I was actually part of it. One of the reviews compares it to TSOANM, so I guess that's high praise. Since there are already at least two non-fiction books about all that (Fumbling the Future and Dealers of Lightning) I wrote this like it was fiction, meaning with characters who get to do things and talk to each other, and don't know how it all turns out. Nearly all the players who are still alive helped & critiqued it, and one (Dave Smith, the inventor of icons) wrote the Foreword.

bradneuberg 4y ago
Thanks for the pointer! Just bought the audiobook version of your book, looks like a great read.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Thank you, sir! The narrator (Maxwell Glick) and I did about an hour of live chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGchbES0DhU He did my second book, too.
markus_zhang 4y ago
Thank you sir! Already in my shopping cart.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Brad's already started a Twitter thread about it. AMA!