Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

The book is an emotional and nostalgic memoir of a mid-age software engineer, a consultant in the area of networking during the internet boom of 90s. But there is more to it: the protagonist is a woman in a male-dominated profession, an ex-communist turned libertarian, an LGBT, a Jewish, and a transplant from New York to Silicon Valley. Other book characters are equally complex, and weird to some extent. Beware that some content is clearly 18+.Book’s writing style is very emotional, describing personal and physical relationships, and lifestyles in the high-tech community. Personal and professional sides of life are tightly intertwined. Even pillow talks are about payment transaction processing, and prospective business ventures. There is a constant roller coaster of contract jobs coming and going, startups found and dissolved (or gracefully shutdown), programs downloaded, tried out, discarded, and becoming obsolete, and intense moments with colleagues who then disappear. There is a constant unknown in business environment, and fear of losing an edge of cutting edge of technology and becoming obsolete. That’s the grim reality of software development: nobody knows the answers to many questions, or worse - there are too many answers.Amid all that, there is another brighter side. Engineers are fortunate to build things, and taking satisfaction from humming machines and running programs. Engineers are good at functioning in a sea of unknowns, and figuring things out. Even more: weird strangeness and eccentricity are positive traits, making an engineer a better professional. Some of the most talented and lucky ones enjoy sizeable payouts.Although I’m not a software consultant, the book resonates well with my experience working in Silicon Valley hi-tech start-ups and large corporations as a full-time electronics engineer.

Highly recommended. Captures the zeitgeist of the dotcom boom with a focus on what's it's actually like to do technical work on a high pressure project and what is required to keep your skills current in a time of rapid technology evolution. Ullman's 1997 observations on knowledge work were prescient and are still relevant 20 years later."I was once a devoted employee. But one day I arrived late to work from a dentist's appointment to find my colleagues heading toward me with their belongings in cardboard boxes. The software company had been swallowed up by a much larger one. Only a small maintenance crew would be left. My project and all the others had been killed. Only my boss and I were left. We were now in charge of "special projects." That is, we'd been given the courtesy of time to look for new work.""The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts brely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal wtih confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself."We virtual workers are everyone's future. We wander from job to job, and now it's hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments arecontractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading.""We spend our time alone in front of monitors. We lead machine-centered lives; now everyone's life is full of automated tellers, portablephones, pagers, keyboards, mice."Also a candid exploration of what it's like to work as a technical consultant:"But nothing ends all at once. Every project leaves behind a distinctive echo: a rhythmof energy, a way of speaking, a way of speaking, a circle of relationship. For weeks I was certain I had calls to return, meetings to attend. It doesn't matter that you tell yourself you are a consultant who will go away. You've shared your working life during a time of stress, which is a precise form of intimacy. Consulting is like any relationship: it is impossibl to stay in it for any length of time of you don't care.""For now, I'm just going to enjoy where I am: at the beginning of a new contract, the rocket-takeoff learning curve, the exquisite terror of it, the straight-up ride against gravity into a trajectory not yet calculated. And for now, just this now, I feel I'm where I'm supposed to be: hurrying to a place I've never seen before."

Pros:* Really real moments she experiences when wondering about how non-technical people in the software business deal with technical people, and viceversa.* Good to appreciate the pressure and other non-technical challenges that non-technical people face in software engineering world* Nostalgia 110% to an 1997 internet* Interesting to learn the behind the scenes of small contractor type software development back in the dayCons:* Her personal story outside the "software world" is not super engaging. It tries to paint a picture on what drive people, but feels like a very long way to make a point. This is why not 5 stars.Note:People complain about the sex parts. These and the "romantic part" are nothing scandalous, but frankly a bit dull and not necessarily so interesting.These moments may have a bigger impact if you are aware of/involved in the start-up world behind the scenes and you see many founders that have no clue of what they are talking about.

Here's a book which describes the life and work of a software engineer in the Silicon Valley of the mid-90's. As an English major turned programmer turned writer, the author is particularly well-suited to tell this story: she concentrates on how it feels to do what she's doing, rather than giving too many technical details about how it's done which would exclude non-specialist readers of her tale. Listen, for example, to her describing the appeal of programming (p24):"If I just sit here and code, you think, I can make something run. When the humans come back to talk changes, I can just run the program. Show them: Here. Look at this. See? This is not just talk. This runs. Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have are words and what I have is this, this thing I built, this operational system. Talk all you want, but this thing here: it *works*."Everyone can understand how she feels here, but those of us who have some experience of this world can attest to the accuracy of her portrayal. We smile, and nod in agreement when she says matter-of-factly that she's so familiar with the C programming language that she "could read and write [it] like English" and "could debug just by having it read to [her] over the phone." (p112), before going on to enumerate the other languages and interfaces she's had to teach herself in order to remain up-to-date. Then she uses this experience to make a general point which is very apposite: "Fidelity in technology is not even desirable. Loyalty to one system is career-death. Is it any wonder that programmers make such good social libertarians?"Given the pace of technological change, other readers have identified this book as a historical document (it was first published in 1997), detailing "what it felt like when humans were first engulfed by artificial computation", as Jaron Lanier describes in his introduction. To be sure, it does that but (as Lanier also acknowledges) it's still relevant to our lives today, when we're all "living with computation" in our online existence. This book shows what it was like before that world arrived, and conveys how programmers still feel when they build something that works out of pure thought.

Its good to read about a woman working in computation who doesn't differentiate herself on the basis of gender but rather sets out to define that characteristics of a programmer and how she, sometimes regrettably, shares these traits. She relates interesting stories that throw light on the mechanisms behind the scenes of corporate giants.