Robert L. Glass "ACM Fellow" Interview

Thanks for the reflection, Edward. It's great that you mentioned Glass's book, The Power of Peonage, which I think was the first or second he published. I recently acquired a nice first printing of that, and enjoyed reading the stories. (You should see my crazy collection of out of print software books--someday I'll post about it.)

I especially like this passage from the interview:

Why did I write? It's a very unusual thing for a person in industry to do; it's not a goal that most industry people have. I grew up in an academic family: my father was a college professor and my mother was a college graduate, which was extremely unusual back in those days. I guess I inherited some of my tendencies towards things that lead to my writing.

My work influenced how and what I wrote about. When I was working at Boeing, it was a very successful company which excelled at manufacturing. Engineering was good, but manufacturing was how they made the money. As a result, the leaders of the company were often manufacturing people, not engineering people. That in turn led to a culture that de-emphasised the importance of the individual, and emphasised the importance of the team. That frustrated me because I've always seen my chief contribution to be as an individual, not a group one, not a communal one. Hence some of what I wrote I did so under an assumed name. I told failure stories many of which were from the Boeing environment. I disguised the name of the company, my identity and the key players in the stories. I published in Computerworld under the name of Miles Benson for five or ten years.

My writing then was very informal, more journalistic than academic. The reason for that was when I went through college I wasn't at all sure what I wanted my major to be. I drifted into mathematics because I seemed to be good at it. In retrospect I don't think that was the right choice for me, but that's what I did. However, I also took the college offers in journalism, and worked my way up to be editor of the student newspaper. Hence, journalism was always a passion of mine, and this writing was part of my need for a journalistic outlet I guess. I also did some reporting for Computerworld as a 'stringer', which in the journalistic world means you are not a salaried staffer, rather you are paid by the article. I was Robert L Glass writing articles and I was Miles Benson telling failure stories.

Dan