It is not at all surprising that “The Soul of a New Machine” resonates with people in Hacker News. And it is a tremendous book. But for me, his book about Paul Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, was even more meaningful. Tracy met Paul by happenstance and in a short encounter recognized the stubborn greatness that was Paul. He was an amazing character who sadly is no longer with us, but captured in a book worthy of his life. Read the book and contribute to Paul’s life work “Partners in Health”.
The Soul of a New Machine really grabbed me in college. Tracy Kidder wrote with a unique style that (to me) really drives the narrative forward while making you stop and consider the forces behind the story he's telling. The characters he writes about are real people and they seem like it.
Moutains Beyond Mountains[1], another book by Kidder, is even more compelling to me. It's a fascinating story of Paul Farmer, who dedicated his life to fighting infectious disease, especially in Haiti.
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.
(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
He always spoke more about "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than his other works, I think because of what he had to endure to write it. It caused him severe illness and health problems due to the locations he had to go to.
My favorite was actually the one about the carpenters/house builders (forget the name of it, I need to dig it out of some box in the garage and read it again)
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a pantheon read for me.
Farmer grew up incredibly poor, got into Duke and Harvard, had opportunities to make incredible money and traded it for a life of providing medical care to the third world on a shoestring budget while schooling organizations like the WHO on how to provide care along the way.
Agreed. Farmer's O for the P (provide a preferential option for the poor in health care) was clearly central to his life. I think about it often.
On top of that he was incredibly competent at navigating the combination of hostile bureaucracy, apathy, and disorganization. It's incredible what he and PIH accomplished.
I was late to the party and only read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 2024. It's a great book I think anyone involved in engineering of any kind should give it a read.
It's an especially impressive feat of writing given that it remains accessible and interesting even to people outside of the field. It's a testament to the amount of time he spent essentially embedded with the people at Data General learning about their work and about who they were.
My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late.
Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
That engineer didn't give up for very long, he designed a different 32-bit machine for Computervision fairly soon after, it is featured in the AMD PAL book from the early 80s.
I read it from a newspaper, or a magazine that the said engineer clarified that the reason given in the book is inaccurate. I couldn't find it right now, but the gist is: "I had different ideas with my manager, and the other company offered me a chance to lead the design of a new computer.".
I read this as a kid, and found it both exciting in some ways, and miserable in others, which was formative.
At age 21 (and accomplished, since I'd started working in my teens), I mentioned the book to my girlfriend, who was getting into software. As a serious English major, she immediately went and closely read the whole thing. I stupidly hadn't realized that of course she was going to that. And I'd neglected to mention that parts of it are a frustrating slog, as the reader suffers along with the characters/subjects. As a reader with empathy, she came out of the book fatigued and somber.
(But she'd said "an artist needs a craft", so she stuck with the field, was very successful, retired early, and has a second/third career doing something brilliant but much less lucrative.)
Despite learnings from the book and experience, I've had a few such unpleasant project slogs. But more projects that I was able to help make non-unpleasant, because I could anticipate and avert some of the problems.
I think the book probably contributed to my tendency to commit seriously to projects. That's been good and bad. It's good, in that you can learn and do things that you otherwise couldn't. It's bad in that it takes you longer to understand that other people are not you, and the ways that they aren't as committed to the project.
Many/most people are about putting in their hours with some standard of professionalism, such as satisfying whatever metrics (e.g., Jira tickets, sprint tasks, KPIs, OKRs, bonus/promotion criteria) they're told are their job. Those, you can work with, once you know that's their mode. You can also try to improve the company incentives that determine outcomes.
(But occasionally you'll encounter people who are misaligned with project/team/company success in a way you can't find common ground with. You have to recognize that hopelessly toxic situation before it's too late, and get them out of the way of the team of aligned people.)
This book of Tracy Kidder told story of some early computer industry engineers doing something great through brains, effort, and perseverance -- and that's a great accomplishment for a book. But an additional accomplishment I think was that a lot of us kids who read it then signed up to "play pinball", with an informed idea of what we were sometimes getting ourselves into, and we signed up anyway.
_The Soul of a New Machine_ was one of the first (among many!) tech history books I read as a precocious teen, when I hadn't even seen a VAX (or a miniframe), let alone programmed one. But the book brought alive the machine right in front of my eyes. This was years ago, when the only thing I programmed was a piddly DOS system with BASIC.
His one quote [1] remained in my imagination, and inspired me to learn management.
Context: Tom West and his team have acquired a VAX system from DEC, and are reverse-engineering it to see how it is setup.
"...Looking into the VAX, [Tom] West felt he saw the diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He found the VAX too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. The machine expressed DEC's cautious, bureaucratic style. [West was pleased with this idea.]..."
It inspired me to become a better manager precisely because I was tearing down bureaucracies in my own work.
Every now and then when I mull over product failures (or successes), I see the product architectures reflect the organizational messes they are born in.
Its one of the books I include in my 'desk library' at the office.. I'm an old graybeard, but it's an amazing book for folks to understand the joy and shortcommings and pressures a project can put on you
I hoovered up all the hardcover copies I could and for many years gave them as gifts to my teammates after our projects shipped. Mostly as thanks for a job well done, and just a tiny bit as an apology for what they'd just been through.
Did your team work similar jobs as described in the book? That must be fantastic! Yeah I know most of work is 80% chore, but at least the other 20% part is fantastic.
A book certainly worth reading for anyone who hasn't. It's interesting to see how little common (modern) project and management pitfalls and tricks have changed in 50 years!
Found this book in a little free library a few months ago and read it cover-to-cover in one night. It's crazy what Data General was able to accomplish with its little side project.
Fun fact: Data General was purchased by EMC, which used the name until 2012.
I kept a copy of the book at hand and read it from time to time whenever I need a boost of morale. It is very inspiring -- although the reality was probably more gruesome and less glorious. I keep roleplaying the roles in the books in my side projects, to a certain degree. Fake it until make it, they said so.
He was extremely proud of the other work he did, like "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but I'll always remember the bookcase where he kept every edition of "The Soul of a New Machine" in every language it was printed in. I think seeing that his work was worth being translated into so many languages was for him the biggest achievement of all.
Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.
Soul of a New Machine was one of the first books that got me interested in the tech industry, computers, etc. Reading it as a teen probably contributed substantially to the direction of my career up to the present day.
It is not at all surprising that “The Soul of a New Machine” resonates with people in Hacker News. And it is a tremendous book. But for me, his book about Paul Farmer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains”, was even more meaningful. Tracy met Paul by happenstance and in a short encounter recognized the stubborn greatness that was Paul. He was an amazing character who sadly is no longer with us, but captured in a book worthy of his life. Read the book and contribute to Paul’s life work “Partners in Health”.
The Soul of a New Machine really grabbed me in college. Tracy Kidder wrote with a unique style that (to me) really drives the narrative forward while making you stop and consider the forces behind the story he's telling. The characters he writes about are real people and they seem like it.
Moutains Beyond Mountains[1], another book by Kidder, is even more compelling to me. It's a fascinating story of Paul Farmer, who dedicated his life to fighting infectious disease, especially in Haiti.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_Beyond_Mountains
Mountains Beyond Mountains was an incredible recruiting tool for health equity work, inspiring a huge number of people (including my partner) to try to follow in Paul Farmer's footsteps.
(Farmer himself died a few years ago, at only 62, of a sudden heart attack in his sleep, but he seems to have put in about 100 lifetimes worth of work. One wonders if his legendary overwork contributed to an early death.)
He always spoke more about "Mountains Beyond Mountains" than his other works, I think because of what he had to endure to write it. It caused him severe illness and health problems due to the locations he had to go to.
My favorite was actually the one about the carpenters/house builders (forget the name of it, I need to dig it out of some box in the garage and read it again)
That book is just called House, although I always confuse the title with J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a pantheon read for me.
Farmer grew up incredibly poor, got into Duke and Harvard, had opportunities to make incredible money and traded it for a life of providing medical care to the third world on a shoestring budget while schooling organizations like the WHO on how to provide care along the way.
Truly one of one.
Agreed. Farmer's O for the P (provide a preferential option for the poor in health care) was clearly central to his life. I think about it often.
On top of that he was incredibly competent at navigating the combination of hostile bureaucracy, apathy, and disorganization. It's incredible what he and PIH accomplished.
RIP Tracy.
I was late to the party and only read “The Soul of a New Machine” in 2024. It's a great book I think anyone involved in engineering of any kind should give it a read.
It's an especially impressive feat of writing given that it remains accessible and interesting even to people outside of the field. It's a testament to the amount of time he spent essentially embedded with the people at Data General learning about their work and about who they were.
My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late.
Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."
That engineer didn't give up for very long, he designed a different 32-bit machine for Computervision fairly soon after, it is featured in the AMD PAL book from the early 80s.
indeed: B. Joshua Rosen https://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/Resume.html
I read it from a newspaper, or a magazine that the said engineer clarified that the reason given in the book is inaccurate. I couldn't find it right now, but the gist is: "I had different ideas with my manager, and the other company offered me a chance to lead the design of a new computer.".
I read this as a kid, and found it both exciting in some ways, and miserable in others, which was formative.
At age 21 (and accomplished, since I'd started working in my teens), I mentioned the book to my girlfriend, who was getting into software. As a serious English major, she immediately went and closely read the whole thing. I stupidly hadn't realized that of course she was going to that. And I'd neglected to mention that parts of it are a frustrating slog, as the reader suffers along with the characters/subjects. As a reader with empathy, she came out of the book fatigued and somber.
(But she'd said "an artist needs a craft", so she stuck with the field, was very successful, retired early, and has a second/third career doing something brilliant but much less lucrative.)
Despite learnings from the book and experience, I've had a few such unpleasant project slogs. But more projects that I was able to help make non-unpleasant, because I could anticipate and avert some of the problems.
I think the book probably contributed to my tendency to commit seriously to projects. That's been good and bad. It's good, in that you can learn and do things that you otherwise couldn't. It's bad in that it takes you longer to understand that other people are not you, and the ways that they aren't as committed to the project.
Many/most people are about putting in their hours with some standard of professionalism, such as satisfying whatever metrics (e.g., Jira tickets, sprint tasks, KPIs, OKRs, bonus/promotion criteria) they're told are their job. Those, you can work with, once you know that's their mode. You can also try to improve the company incentives that determine outcomes.
(But occasionally you'll encounter people who are misaligned with project/team/company success in a way you can't find common ground with. You have to recognize that hopelessly toxic situation before it's too late, and get them out of the way of the team of aligned people.)
This book of Tracy Kidder told story of some early computer industry engineers doing something great through brains, effort, and perseverance -- and that's a great accomplishment for a book. But an additional accomplishment I think was that a lot of us kids who read it then signed up to "play pinball", with an informed idea of what we were sometimes getting ourselves into, and we signed up anyway.
_The Soul of a New Machine_ was one of the first (among many!) tech history books I read as a precocious teen, when I hadn't even seen a VAX (or a miniframe), let alone programmed one. But the book brought alive the machine right in front of my eyes. This was years ago, when the only thing I programmed was a piddly DOS system with BASIC.
His one quote [1] remained in my imagination, and inspired me to learn management. Context: Tom West and his team have acquired a VAX system from DEC, and are reverse-engineering it to see how it is setup.
"...Looking into the VAX, [Tom] West felt he saw the diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He found the VAX too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. The machine expressed DEC's cautious, bureaucratic style. [West was pleased with this idea.]..."
It inspired me to become a better manager precisely because I was tearing down bureaucracies in my own work.
Every now and then when I mull over product failures (or successes), I see the product architectures reflect the organizational messes they are born in.
RIP Tracy Kidder.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/882178766/Tracy-Kidder-Flyin...
Its one of the books I include in my 'desk library' at the office.. I'm an old graybeard, but it's an amazing book for folks to understand the joy and shortcommings and pressures a project can put on you
I hoovered up all the hardcover copies I could and for many years gave them as gifts to my teammates after our projects shipped. Mostly as thanks for a job well done, and just a tiny bit as an apology for what they'd just been through.
Did your team work similar jobs as described in the book? That must be fantastic! Yeah I know most of work is 80% chore, but at least the other 20% part is fantastic.
A book certainly worth reading for anyone who hasn't. It's interesting to see how little common (modern) project and management pitfalls and tricks have changed in 50 years!
I found this book in a $2 bin at one of my (now long gone) used bookstores. It was a fantastic read. Thank you Mr Kidder for the fantastic story.
Found this book in a little free library a few months ago and read it cover-to-cover in one night. It's crazy what Data General was able to accomplish with its little side project.
Fun fact: Data General was purchased by EMC, which used the name until 2012.
Their old internet domain, dg.com, was sold to Dollar General in 2009.
RIP.
I kept a copy of the book at hand and read it from time to time whenever I need a boost of morale. It is very inspiring -- although the reality was probably more gruesome and less glorious. I keep roleplaying the roles in the books in my side projects, to a certain degree. Fake it until make it, they said so.
He was extremely proud of the other work he did, like "Mountains Beyond Mountains," but I'll always remember the bookcase where he kept every edition of "The Soul of a New Machine" in every language it was printed in. I think seeing that his work was worth being translated into so many languages was for him the biggest achievement of all.
I know Bryan Cantrill was a fan - I bought her book because of his talks.
OK, but Tracy Kidder was a dude.
Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.
https://archive.ph/2026.03.25-161254/https://www.nytimes.com...
Soul of a New Machine was one of the first books that got me interested in the tech industry, computers, etc. Reading it as a teen probably contributed substantially to the direction of my career up to the present day.
RIP Mr. Kidder.
Black bar?
Another of his books is A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest to Recover from Great Success, about Paul English, founder of Kayak.
https://www.tracykidder.com/a-truck-full-of-money.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Kidder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL20167A
https://www.tracykidder.com/