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A review by hammo
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
3.0
I was surprised to learn this book had won the Pulitzer Prize. I found the story quite interesting. But I’ve been cultivating an obsession on the history of computers lately, so a deep dive on how a new computer model got developed in the 1960s was right down my alley. I’m not sure what the average Joe would get out of it.
It’s a moderately interesting management case study. If you leave talented engineers alone to work on an interesting problem on their own terms then they’ll work double time without extra pay and deliver miracles. The book described “mushroom management”: leave workers in the dark, feed them shit, and watch them grow. That is to say, insulate workers from distracting business considerations and put them in a tough environment where they’ll get scrappy.
One engineer said “We say the ultimate goal is to build a machine that can run a multiprogramming liability test. But I understand that some people do run other programs on it like Adventure and Star Trek.”
It’s a moderately interesting management case study. If you leave talented engineers alone to work on an interesting problem on their own terms then they’ll work double time without extra pay and deliver miracles. The book described “mushroom management”: leave workers in the dark, feed them shit, and watch them grow. That is to say, insulate workers from distracting business considerations and put them in a tough environment where they’ll get scrappy.
One engineer said “We say the ultimate goal is to build a machine that can run a multiprogramming liability test. But I understand that some people do run other programs on it like Adventure and Star Trek.”