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A review by precise
Think Black: A Memoir of Sacrifice, Success, and Self-Loathing in Corporate America by Clyde W. Ford
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Biography of John Ford, the first black software engineer at IBM, written by his son Clyde Ford, who also worked for a time as a SWE at IBM.
I was particularly interested in this because my own father, before "retiring" into a second career as a CS professor, worked at IBM from 3 years before I was born until I was in my senior year of college. I also interned at IBM for two summers + one fall semester of undergrad, at the same office my dad worked at. So I was really curious about whether the author's 2nd-gen IBMer experience was different from mine in important ways due to racism.
What I found was that the technical references in the book were more shaped by being significantly earlier in the history of computing than my own experience - John Ford worked on computers right when they were switching from being tabulating machines to actually being computers in a modern sense, in the 60s and overlapping his son at IBM in the 80s - and my own father worked at IBM in the 90s and we overlapped there in the 2010s. There were some parts that did feel familiar to me in the way that the parent/child dynamic played out, in particular around how the benefits of having a parent who encouraged you to work in tech play out when you are actually working in tech.
The discussion of personally experienced racism was still interesting to me, though not technical in any way and spent a bit too long on his parents' divorce imo.
Overall it was an interesting historical piece, if a bit superficial. It left me wondering if I should've read IBM and the Holocaust myself instead of just reading the chapter that cites it.
I was particularly interested in this because my own father, before "retiring" into a second career as a CS professor, worked at IBM from 3 years before I was born until I was in my senior year of college. I also interned at IBM for two summers + one fall semester of undergrad, at the same office my dad worked at. So I was really curious about whether the author's 2nd-gen IBMer experience was different from mine in important ways due to racism.
What I found was that the technical references in the book were more shaped by being significantly earlier in the history of computing than my own experience - John Ford worked on computers right when they were switching from being tabulating machines to actually being computers in a modern sense, in the 60s and overlapping his son at IBM in the 80s - and my own father worked at IBM in the 90s and we overlapped there in the 2010s. There were some parts that did feel familiar to me in the way that the parent/child dynamic played out, in particular around how the benefits of having a parent who encouraged you to work in tech play out when you are actually working in tech.
The discussion of personally experienced racism was still interesting to me, though not technical in any way and spent a bit too long on his parents' divorce imo.
Overall it was an interesting historical piece, if a bit superficial. It left me wondering if I should've read IBM and the Holocaust myself instead of just reading the chapter that cites it.