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 are
contractual, 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, portable
phones, 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."
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Top reviews from other countries
Jeremy Walton
Well-written code
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 5, 2013CambridgeAcademics
An Interesting Read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2013