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Book: The Soul of a New Machine
Quotes of Book: The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls "the compulsion to program." He describes the afflicted as "bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes," who play out "megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence" at computer consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, "their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Because if you're going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, "I don't know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
He liked the "casual" look of the basement of Westborough. "The jeans and so on." Several talked about their "flexible hours." "No one keeps track of the hours we work," said Ken Holberger. He grinned. "That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do." Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.
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Tracy Kidder _ The Soul of a New Machine
Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, "What they call tough auditing, we call thievery.
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