That’s the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify about any behavior with it. Maybe that’s why you do it, so you don’t have to deal with all those other problems.
I never expected to find the explanation of BOFHiness in The Soul of New Machine. The book lived on my wishlist for a long time and it was gifted to me, only to wait there inside the kindle for a couple more years. Tracy Kidder follows the team that built Data General’s Eagle, their first 32bit machine and a kind of Plan B for the company, since the market was being dominated by the Vaxen and they had to react. Serious computing history unfolds in front of you.
A very interesting story, and lucky Kidder got to follow a lot of the story in the making, even though this was supposed to be a secret project. While this is not a hard science book, you get to learn a lot about computer architecture, or depending your skills, computer architecture history. You get to understand the magic that happens when your keystrokes are transformed into the desired result. The moment when the software and hardware connect. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about debugging boards with an oscillator.
While I cannot claim the brilliance of Tom West, I do see elements of similar behavior and the reasons for this. I need to work on that.
Thus he supplied them one answer to the question of what happens to computer engineers who pass forty.
I reached 44 yesterday. Still not a middle manager.
Managing organized complexity 