The soul of a new machine - Tracy Kidder

A book from the times of the first computers. A journalist goes along with a engineering team who develops a next generation of computer.

• About the new HQ: "Who was the architect?" - "We didn't have one". Company engineers designed the HQ building themselves. And they made it functional and cheap.
• They never tried to hoard a majority of the stock, but used it instead as a tool for growth. Many young entrepreneurs, confusing ownership with control, can't bring themselves to do this.
• When they chose their lawyer, who would deak with the financial community for them , they insisted that he invest some of his own money in their company. "We dnot want you running away if we get in trouble. We want you there protecting your own money."
• Their lawyer insisted that each of the founder "take down a million bucks". This so that they could negotiate without the dread of losing everything.
• IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.
• "Can I get you signed up to do your part?" Toms message is: "Are you guys gonna do it or sit on your ass and complain?" Its a challenge he throws at them. "West brought us out of our depression into the honesty of pure work. He put new life into a lot of peoples jobs.
• By signing up for a project you agreed to do whatever was neccessary for success.
• the pratical virtues of the ritual were manifold. Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up you in effect declared: "I want to do this job and I'll give it my heart and soul." 
• When they had time on their hands to look up from the machine, some saw that they were building it all by themselves, without any significant help from their leader. It was their project, theirs alone.
• but not many bosses would have done as much as he did for them, letting them grow in their work, giving them a chance to really do something.
• "a feeling of accomplishment", "self-fulfillment", "self-satisfaction" 
• Part of you is in that machine
• He sat up the opportunity and he didnt stand in anyones way
• He welcomed a journalist to observe his team
• Cray said that he liked to hire inexperienced engineers right out of school, because they do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible.
• They didnt know what they could not do.
• somepeople would rather work twelve hours a day of their on choosing than eight that are prescribed
• Grades mattered in this first winnowing of applications - not only as an indication of ability but also as a basis for guessing about a recruit's capacity for long, hard work
• When you deep dive into problems:
• can take a grip on an engineers thoughts and hold on. After playing this way for a while, you look at a tree and, aha, it is clear that a tree is much like a computer and a road with side streets is - what else? a kind of computer program.
• Once, someone brought a crying baby past his door, and afterward it took him an hour to retrace his steps through the circuit design he had been pondering.
• Time in a computer is an interesting concept
• I like to work around "Why", he told me. "I prefer not to know the established limits and what other people thing, when I start a project."
• "The wayto stay on schedule", he said, "Is to make anothe one."
• "If you cant get what you need from some manager at your level in another department, go to his boss - thats the way to get things done.
• "It doesnt matter how hard you work on something. What counts is finishing and having it work."
• "Lets see. I am a little confused here." he tends to say now, when what he means is "You guys are all wrong."
• These guys dont realize how dependent they are on that thing to create their identities.