Tracy Kidder, Author of 'The Soul of a New Machine,' Dies at 80

[reACTIONary]

8. Required reading in my Software Engineering class, and it was....

.... on the test. But instead of asking some technical or insightful thematic questions, in the spirit of the book, the Prof asked some relatively simple "story telling" questions. Like what was so-and-so's job title. If you had actually read the book it was very easy to answer. If you had not, you couldn't bullshit an answer.

It really pissed off all of the bullshiters. I was like, smirking.

One of the insightful lessons I learned from this book came from the passage where one of the General Data engineers reverse engineers a DEC chip. As he examines the circuitry, he imagines he can discern the organizational structure of Digital. Bloated. Bureaucratic. This stayed with me - it is often the case that the technical system structure is influence, or even determined, by the organizational structure of the engineering team. More so than us engineers would like to admit.