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Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#62"Ninety Percent of Everything" is a great book about what it's like to work in container shipping.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety_Percent_of_Everything
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
i love a good patio11 takedown. got a source for his call out?
He mentions it in the footnote of this article: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-mone...
Flash Boys: Not So Fast is the argument in much more depth, and should be dispositive.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's different in that you do have some subset of people who think they're doing things for the common good, and some actually are, but... "Greed is good" Gordon Gecko
Lots of finance people, rightly or wrongly justify their work as giving a valuable service to humanity: From "providing liquidity" to "absorbing risk" and "helping your pension grow" the list of supposed goods provided by finance is very long.
and this isn't much different from "we're making the world a better place by ____" https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#65"First Do No Harm" - A memoir from a brain surgeon.
For something a touch more down to earth regarding medicine:
House of God, by Samuel Shem. It might be difficult to believe, but this book is very realistic. Much more so than many other insufferable navel-gazing books about medical work taking grand philosophical stances.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#66I'm an industrial engineer. The book that got me started on that path was Cheaper By the Dozen, which we listened to on cassette tape on most road trips >2 hours growing up. I was fascinated by the thought of taking a process or procedure and eliminating as much non-value add time as possible, which they did throughout their lives on things like tonsillectomies for their kids. Some impactful books on the whole field…
I'm in operations and I also loved "Cheaper by the Dozen" as a kid. Have you ever read, "My Forty Years with Ford" by Charles Sorensen? He was the first COO of Ford and he talks about building the first modern assembly line, dealing with his difficult process engineering problems (for 1910) and creating one of the first continuous improvement programs. I really enjoyed how everything he described is still relevant today for operations and his seemingly intractable problems are now considered simple today.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#67Sorry for this kind of answer, but for Russians I highly recommend the book "Три Еврея", Юрий Мухин. Despite the idiotic name "Three Jews", it's an incredible description of management of a huge steel plant (and life in general around it) in 1980s Soviet Union. Something I'd like to see in a thread like this.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#68Ex finance guy here - Liar's Poker for 1980s Wall Street, When Genius Failed for 1990s, More Money Than God for 2000s, Flash Boys for 2010s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys obviously these do not represent all of finance but its a nice decade-by-decade recap o…
Would "Bonfire of the Vanities" make a good introduction to 80s Wall Street as well?
It's a good insight into the mind of a banker/master of the universe but it doesn't go into too much detail about the actual job IIRC, though tbh I haven't read it in a few years
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#69I feel like I understand nonfiction/business book writing and publishing much better after reading The Scribe Method. Super thorough step-by-step instruicions on creating a successful book.
Official free download: https://scribemedia.com/scribe-method-book/
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
May I ask why you left finance for tech? I'm considering going into trading instead of SWE because the environment may be more social. I also spend a lot time analyzing current events, so why not get paid for it, too?
I made a career change into sales and trading for a while, then went back into full-time medicine - finance is a really interesting subject, but the proportion of assholes in sales and trading is much higher than in software, medicine, or most corporate jobs (all of which of course have some proportion of assholes). That's not to say that people in that industry can't be charming - they totally can be, but they will…
I work as a dev at a financial company. I can say that I agree with you. The people (both business side and dev side) in the trading portion of the company were much more likely to be assholes than in the non-trading areas, such as client facing areas. It seemed like the closer people got to being a trader or portfolio manager, the more likely they were to have a mindset of "I'm better than you. I know more than you, so do what I say.", even when they don't know what they're doing.