My favorite little bit of content about SOANM, and Tracy, is attached to this 2013 blog post.

https://tispaquin.blogspot.com/2010/12/1982-interview-with-t...

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.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...

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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.

The last few years, maybe since 2016 really in some ways, have been really difficult on the site and people got used to more of a siege mentality in terms of managing megathreads, and very limited resources (human and otherwise) and that's a tough set of habits to turn around.