My dad was Tom West from Soul of a New Machine. Tracy Kidder lived at our house on weekends in the late 1970s while he was working on this book. He and my dad remained friends for the rest of his life, going out on boats, drinking a lot, talking about big ideas. Tom and Tracy and (Richard) Todd were the guys, when I was a girl. I wasn't as in touch with Tracy but I'd see him at events sometimes, I had a Tracy Kidder website up before he had his own website. He came to my father's memorial service in 2011, talked about the doors that book had opened up, how his life was changed by being able to tell that story as he's been able to tell so many people's stories since then. "I know the book was good for me," he said, "but I was never quite sure if it was good for Tom."
My favorite little bit of content about SOANM, and Tracy, is attached to this 2013 blog post.
It's a 1983 report from The Computer Museum (Inside "The Soul of a New Machine" Tracy Kidder and Tom West) which contains the partial transcript of an event that Tracy and Tom did together, that I don't think they did again. When Tracy was asked what he was up to and if he was sick of computers, he said
"I'm digging out from under. I'm writing some articles about atmospheric research. To be honest, I'm a little tired of my book. I put it on my shelf and
won't read it again for years. I think I know what's wrong with it. In some
sense, writing a book is like building a computer. There are rewards but one of
the main ones is that Sisyphean one that if you do one you get to do another. So, I have an opportunity now to write a better one." And he did, he wrote so many books that were, if not better, at least just as good.
Right?! Hi I'm Tom West's daughter, librarian, owner of MetaFilter and someone who spends a LOT of time talking to people (mainly men) who take only some of the messages away from that book. The book was great. I'm in it in a single sentence. My sister isn't in it at all. My parents divorced shortly after the book came out. My father had never "let" my mother have a job (it was a different time) and so she was ill-prepared for the single life, but made it work.
I hammered out a decent relationship with my dad despite the fact that he was basically married to his work, was probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, and had a problematic relationship with alcohol. He was a good guy but he learned interpersonal interactions somewhat by rote and in a business role where the goal was "results" he just did what he had to do. It's weird growing up when your dad's nickname is The Price of Darkness.
He wound up having a decent retirement after being a company man most of his life, got to sail a lot more, had a second messy divorce, and died in 2011. At his memorial service Tracy Kidder spoke eloquently about working with my dad through the writing of that book (he basically lived with us on weekends for a while) and how he knew the book had been good for him--he won a Pulitzer, was catapulted to some level of renown, got to write more books--but he was never quite sure it had been good for my dad. I also wonder sometimes.
So, yeah, when I talk to people who are reading it again or for the first time, I often ask them to reflect on what the book says about work/life balance, about gender norms (there's one woman in the entire coding team), about how project management should run, and about the weird cult of personality that can grow up around people who don't quite get along with people, and how things could be different.