[MrDOS]

When I read the book as a teenager, I was awed by the technical achievement of the team.

When I re-read the book ten or fifteen years later as an adult facing burnout, I was awed again – by the human cost of the project. Grim stuff.

Fantastic book, but it bothers me that technologists who talk about it almost universally want to talk about the product, and often don't even notice how well the book depicts a real meat grinder of a process. Kidder was not a technologist, and I think that gave him a wonderful ability to really see everything that was happening around him, and to not simply fixate on the computer they were building.

[ferguess_k]

Nowadays I think grinding is just a big part of the project. Like the ancient Chinese wisdom that says half of the road is the first 90% and the other half is the last 10%. I guess by saying grinding you also meant 1) how the engineers were treated, and 2) how quickly they were burnt out, which I agree, but I really like the pinball analogy, and I believe most people feel that way, is because they never got the chance to really play pinball -- they just play games they don't enjoy, so when they read the books they say "Oh those guys' lives really suck".