Tag Archives: systems engineering

Scale by Geoffrey West Reviewed: Where Physics Meets Hubris

Geoffrey West’s Scale seeks universal mathematical laws of growth across biology, cities, and corporations. It’s bold, partly right, and mostly over-extended. The biological physics hold up; the social analogies don’t. Useful for thinking about efficiency, fragility, and systemic limits; but best treated as heuristic, not law.

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My Years at Sun Microsystems: From Dream Job to Oracle Redundancy

A memoir of nine years at Sun Microsystems, from the revelation of “The Network is the Computer” and parachuting into nasty projects, to the culture of contrarianism, the pressures of leadership, press training in Nice, and the slow decline into redundancies that culminated with Oracle’s takeover. It closes with reflections on philosophy, craft, people, and the enduring value of diversity and neurodiversity in engineering.

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