Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, Ellen Ullman, City Lights Books, 1997

Here is a look at the life of a freelance software engineer running her own computer consulting business in present-day San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch. The temptation to give herself up to the world of machine logic sometimes gets hard to resist, but she knows that things like love, hate and human contact don't easily fit into lines of code.

She talks of teams of software engineers forming for a specific job, maybe, or maybe not, to form again in the future. She talks of a small business owner whose secretary has been working for him for 25 years, a woman he trusts to pick up his children from school. He wants to start counting her keystrokes, not because she has suddenly become less trustworthy, but simply because he now has the capability to do it with new software. An AIDS nonprofit group, for whom Ullman is helping to build a database program, suddenly wants to add more and more capabilities to the software.

Ullman does an excellent job at bringing heart, humanity and a female perspective to what can be a very technical and very male subject. This is very much worth reading, for techies and non-techies alike.