Certainly true. Though I will say that a female engineering friend of mine--upon seeing A Year in Development (linked elsewhere on thread) created a few years later about, well, a year in development at DG--had the immediate reaction "Look at all the women!" But maybe that's more a statement about how things haven't gotten a lot better. (And many of the women, in my experience, were in project management and engineering-adjacent roles.)
In the last few years, according to LinkedIn at least - and my admittedly unscientific counting, it seems 50/50.
This makes me much happier.
(As a MeFite, it blew my mind when I read SoaNM a few years ago and realized that Tom was your father. Small world!)
I cast the same eye now on anything that romanticizes similar work, and I've even seen it in places that are somewhat unexpected. The movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a perfect example of this.
My wife "doesn't work" but does more work than I do. What I do professionally isn't possible without her.
Your comment just reaffirmed my priorities. Thank you.
So thank you for continuing to offer your perspective on your father and his work.
I'm glad that you maintained an OK relationship with Tom. It could be tough relationship.
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.