Review: The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest

I recently read Po Bronson's sophomore effort, The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest (TF20MIATH), and had a few gripes about it. Click below to read mine, and to share your own critiques - compliments - comments - ramblings about the book. The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest author Po Bronson pages 237 publisher Random House rating 4/10 reviewer Jeff "hemos" Bates ISBN summary An attempt at writing a fictional Silicon Valley Story

Several months ago I read Bronson's latest book, The Nudist on the Late Shift . It was good - not quite Microserfs , but definitely worth the time I spent reading it.

So, with that in mind, and having heard a little bit about his other material, I kept an eye open for Bombardiers or TF20MIATH, and eagerly fell upon the first of the two that came to me.

Most of TF20MIATH's main characters are engineers, "iron-men" in the parlance of the book, who work for a research facility that's supposed to attract only the best and brightest. You aren't paid a lot of money to work there. You do it for the love of the work, and to prove you're an Iron Man, or "uber-mann." However, the work done at the lab does have commercial properties, and the lab is funded by commercial companies. The largest sponsoring company, much like AMD, is trying to compete with Intel. This fact creates some of the book's conflict.

The lead character, Andy, joins the lab after quitting his job at that psuedo-AMD company, but his desires to work at The Lab are (major summarization here) soon quenched by the other main character, Francis Benoit, who is constantly seeking to prove that he is the Super-Iron-Man of them all.

One of the ongoing battles of the book is between the powerful "big iron machines" the lab is known for developing and the evolving world of thin client, networked machines. Bronson's treatment of this conflict, coupled with the somewhat Messianic light that these cheap Internetworked computers will bring to the world writ large, is the books's central thought. It's a good thought, and I think it's one that has some validity. That is, as the world's population gets more education, and computers spread, I think things will get better. So does Bronson. And he says this again and again, in slightly different words each time.

The story itself, which in a way is a story about the world of the suits meeting the world of engineers, with the obvious party losing, falls short. The introduction of a female bit player who becomes Andy's girlfriend is contrived. Problems develop in the relationship, and we never hear if they are resolved or not. The disapperance of a fairly major character (Salman) is explained poorly, and is never mentioned again in any fashion.

Summary time: The story involves jealousy and politicking amongst the Iron Men Engineers while they as a caste also do battle with the Universe of the Suits. The main character must resolve issues with his girlfriend. All characters wrestle with problems, includings things like whether or not they will be fired, whether or not they can code something, and whether or not they can afford to buy better food.

It's not a bad book, it's just that unless this type of writing is your favorite, there are better books to read. There's a good book inside this one, but the problem is that the good book is only about one-third the length of the published version. Bronson is an author who seems to constantly be trying to figure out how to best tell a Silicon Valley story. In Nudist he did it succesfully, but in TF20MIATH he didn't. My recommendation: You won't regret reading this, but there's better stuff around..

You can buy TF20MIATH at Amazon.

Comments

Re:Computers make things better?

[Gleef]

I see both trends. What matters is which has more momentum. Automation does get rid of jobs, but the jobs it gets rid of tend to be more menial jobs, not "jobs where we can use our brains". To a certain extent, creative jobs will be lost from automation only if the old version has a large menial aspect to it that can be automated away, making the worker more efficient. In the real world, however, the computer seems to add at least as much menial crud as it takes away, so we aren't seeing a lot of this yet.

On the other hand, there is theoretically room for an infinite number of creative jobs. This is only limited by the supply and demand economics of the present system. How many (and what kind) of creative jobs is the economy willing to support? For example, the economy will happily support an programmer or a research scientist, but it's tough to find support for a performance artist or an inventor.

Even worse is the supply issue. How many people have both the ability and the training to thrive in a creative field. I don't know about the rest of the world, but the education system here in the US helps train millions of people to the point where they are barely qualified to flip burgers at a fast food restaurant. Our University systems, on the other hand, are so good that our students can't get in, and can't handle it when they do get in.

So basically, computers aren't the problem, they're getting rid of the crap work. The problem is we need to use the wealth so generated to train and support more creative people, rather than line the wallets of corporate executives.

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