A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest to Recover from Great Success by Tracy KidderMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read Tracy Kidder’s first big book, “The Soul of a New Machine”, when I was starting college. I soon changed my major to Computer Engineering, the career highlighted in that book about the creation of a new line of computers. To say that book was personally impactful is an understatement. It drove me into work that I enjoyed, and topics that I loved to learn and practice. But instead of computer hardware, the focus of the first book, my career was mostly in software. Now, at the back end of my career, Kidder has released a book about a software engineer, covering the life of Paul English, who worked as a software engineer but converted into a manager, then entrepreneur. English follows the career path that I always envisioned for myself, though I stalled out around step two. It was very enjoyable to see how English grew in his career to become a wealthy business developer and owner, and even beyond that, to invest in charity programs to better people’s lives. Kidder explores English’s various mentors at different phases of his career, illustrating their value to him at the time. He also focuses on English’s team, who follow him from enterprise to enterprise, forming the core cadre of his ongoing series of company startups. The other focus here is on English’s battle with a mental disorder throughout his life. What starts off seeming like it’s going to be something like a Fortune magazine business leader bio article ends up being more than that, not only documenting the growing of tech companies, but also dealing with personal mental issues that impacted English throughout his life.
The question is whether, having read this book, I would have changed my major to software engineering, had I been at the beginning of my career. On reflection, I’d have to say maybe. The earlier book, if I recall correctly, played up the common sense technical know-how of the team, and the team itself. These aspects both appealed to me. In “A Truck Full of Money”, you also see the value and the enjoyment of having a good team. I didn’t get the cleverness of the solutions beyond the software engineering realm, though. This may just have been harder to illustrate, given how much software function is “behind the scenes”. Or it may be simply that times have changed, and tech folks have found different ways to stand out. To me, this was a little less impactful for those reasons. Nevertheless, a very good story, interesting throughout.
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