The soul of a new machine

When I posted a status saying that I am gonna read the book, my boss – the CEO of Kloon, my company I worked before going to Ireland, commented – “Now that I  feel old because you’re reading a book I read 25 years ago”. His comments triggers great deal of curiosity – The book that my former boss read must be something special. The guy was very nice and brilliant, and now he is a CEO of a software company, so reading a book he read 25 years ago is somewhat interesting.

 

The book begins by describing West – a manager work in Data General. What the author did well in this part is that he didn’t tell the reader West’s job at the beginning. He described him purely as a strong man, somewhat like a leader, a hero in a boat struggling in a storm. The way he begin the story make readers unable to leave the book from the first pages.

The way of narration, the use of languages.. I will not comment much about it. What I want to focus, and also what I will talk now, is about what this book talks about, what I think about it and what we can learn from this book.

This book talks about the process a new machine called Eagle was born. Talking about machine, but the story is not boring at all. The author tell the story in a very detailed way: He introduced Data General – in which company the Eagle was born, then describe the team who did the great work – create a 32 bit CPU machine without bit mode. This is a huge project, but the author give us sufficient amount of information – not too much, not too less, but moderate, and especially, he presents it in very appealing way.

West, de Castrol, Wallach and Alsing.. are the men the author described. What he emphasizes here is that: To make such a machine demands a lot. They have different background, different characters, but they are all very bright, and they fit together. The author reserves some parts of the book to tell about personal lives of these characters, and by reading these parts, we know a lot about IT status of 70s period. In 2013, for a moment, I lived in the breath of 70s’ IT industry. Reading in the part which described “Tube Wars” – The game, or “war”, between Alsing and new comers in Eagle team made me laugh a lot. Oh, so that geeks also dared, “cyber attacked” each others in the old days! This was an exhilarating journey!

Still, I can learn so much from that journey. The author tells a little bit of the success secret of Data General – How it grown steadily and continuously in a decade! In my point of view, the success comes from both technical factors – The design of big main board and managerial factors – The company pays equal attention to every factors, not just technical, and that they have a way to create deep involve of employee to the company. Having lawyers to buy company stocks so that he put all effort to protect his company – and this property – in court is a valuable lesson.

In 2013, they talk about ecosystem of software engineering, but I was surprised that people from 70s were totally aware of the important of software ecosystem. The IBM’s case of creating software which works on all 360 lines of its computer was a precious lesson. Good software demands high scalability, compatibility ability. One thing to comment here is that, today the term “ecosystem” is much more complex. It do not only contains hardware and software, but there are much more to add: freelance developer, social network…

This story also tell us a lot about management: How to build a team and how to run it. It was a big surprise to me to know that the team who creates Eagles is made of many youngsters who just graduate from university. But when I dive into reason, I find that this strategy offers many advantages: Since making a whole thing is much more interesting than modifying, and since fresh graduate always wants to make impression from the start, West has in his hand a team of enthusiastic people who do not work for money, but work for passion. The example of an interview introduced in this book remind me a lot of the reviews that I attended. I saw similarity. It is a fun thing to know that the recruiter share something  in common. They ask question to know whether the interviewee has passion for his job, and the use “dare” technique: “You will work late if you accept this job. Can you endure the challenge?  How long will you endure?” Yep, I have confronted this kind of interview questions.

Although the prefer-youngster strategy worked, but it triggers some questions. Which type of project should we apply this strategy? In my opinion, the project must be ambitious, and its ultimate purpose must be to create a brand new thing. This will attract young people and scare the elder.

In dealing with rejection, this book gives an important lesson. When Wallach – the design genius of Data General refused to design Eagle’s CPU, West was the one who understand the situation. He understands why Wallach react in that aggressive way. – The reason is that Wallach think he was given a stupid task – to create a stupid design, making him a loser in front of North Carolina’s team. West totally understands the situation, and he tried and tried again to make it clear to Wallach that: Building the CPU like his demand is a meaningful work. It really makes sense. Finally, Wallach agree.

There are many more things to comment on this wonderful book, but I will stop here. I will come back to this book later. And this is my promise to myself – reading this book again, and see how my view on this change in the second time I read it. It will be interesting! To stop my post, I want to raise a question about the seemingly contradicting strategies of West and Aisling when dealing with people in lower order. To quote West: “If you get too close to the people who work for you, you’re gonna get burn”. Alsing, on the other hand, is more friendly and more easy to meet and discuss with. He even play “Tube Wars” with his employee!.Which type of management will you choose? On my case, I choose Alsing.