Curious -- To me it just seemed pretty standard (for any industry). Did you think the tech work environment today was somehow more enlightened than previous generations general working environments?

There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different, at least in the USA: worker compensation.

In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a world that's very far from the FAANG of today, at least were compensation is concerned.

People are mostly the same. It's just the cultural context that shifts, and mostly that changes slowly, even when tech changes rapidly.

Different segment of the industry but about the same time period (HaCF is maybe set a few years later).

Tom was very intense. Dotted line worked for him for a while. Latterly he had an internet-related effort that didn't pan out (welcome to the crowd) but also was fairly instrumental in CLARiiON RAID disk arrays and an early NUMA architecture, neither of which ultimately saved Data General but probably helped keep it running for longer than it otherwise would have.