For me, Pirsig put it best: "Quality is the goal of Art." I too struggled to understand Pirsig's full metaphysical hierarchy of Quality, but this quote gets at the core of the similarities I saw in these books.
Pirsig was concerned with teaching his students writing and maintaining his motorcycle. Berry was concerned with doing fulfilling and meaningful work on the farm. The MIT hackers were concerned with finding The Right Thing: "the unique, correct, elegant [program]." All of these individuals were concerned with some notion of Quality.
Interestingly, they all viewed what they were doing as a form of art. A colleague remarked, "Sounds like art," to Pirsig upon hearing his ideas on Quality, to which he responded, "Well, it is art." Levy identifies "You can create art and beauty on the computer." as one of the tenets of The Hacker Ethic. "[A]ll serious computer programs are expressions of an individual." This was the first clue to me that they were all talking about the same thing.
Like art, Quality is more a description of a process than product. And the Quality way of working that all three books discuss is very much the same. For me, it is exactly the defining characteristics of the artistic process. Through their work, an artist expresses themselves. They make contact with their medium, be that motorcycle, field, code, or painting. They make choices. Their medium responds. Both evolve with each other. The process is inherently experimental. Importantly, their medium imposes limitations and constraints.
I gave this talk back in 2024, two years after I took the course. At the time, I was frustrated with my lack of artistic output post-graduation. These readings made me realize my creative/artistic outlet had just changed for the time being. I took a lot of solace in that. Recently, I've been trying to understand how AI fits into my picture of Quality programming.
If you've come this far, you might be interested to see some of my image & algorithm work [1]. The decluttering, exaptation exhibition was the culmination of the class and an independent study.
I should also mention Shop Class as Soulcraft (Matthew B. Crawford) as another book that influenced my thinking.