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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patio11 specifically calls out flash boys as bad and inaccurate. He recommends: https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-... Which I’ve had on my shelf for a while, but haven’t yet read.
i love a good patio11 takedown. got a source for his call out?
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-mone...
A collection of stories showing some of the ugly parts of being a psychopharmacologist, based on the author's own experiences.
You might like The Shipping Man by Matthew McCleery. It's fiction, but the author is in the shipping financing industry and the book is a fun way to learn about (a caricaturized version of) that world.
It’s fascinating and covers a very wide range of professions. Sorta of like a more modern remake of Stud Terkel’s 1974 book “Working”
"First Do No Harm" - A memoir from a brain surgeon.
>>> Max Perkins was the editor of Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, and other famous 20th century writers. Great, great, book.
Bartending: Cosmopolitan by Toby Cecchini
>>> Very well-written memoir of a bartender in New York in the late 1980s. He invented the Cosmo in NYC while working at the Odeon — on a lark, without thinking much of it. The drink took off, but I think he's still a working bartender in NYC.
Cooking: Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain
Painting: Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Music: Meet me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman
Tech: Chaos Monkeys by AGM
And seconding swyx's recommendations for all things Michael Lewis, who can spin a good yarn about any profession — whether it's baseball managers, junk bond salesmen, or high frequency traders, etc.
I've also picked up lots of good recommendations from this thread https://ask.metafilter.com/243036/Recommend-a-nonfiction-aut... (I, too, like "insidery" type business books. I'm currently reading "The Emperor of Scent" about the world of perfume and it's pretty good! Also looking forward to reading "Ninety Percent of Everything" about the shipping industry.)
Ex 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…
https://www.amazon.com/Gig-Americans-Talk-About-Their/dp/060...
It's basically a series of interviews with people across various industries talking about their jobs. Not exactly "memoir"-style but more of an anthology.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...
A personal favorite that I read alongside the first recommendation. Just puts a lot of things in perspective with respect to finding meaningful work.
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Those are all good recommendations, but if anything tech/SV is resembling every day more and more to 1980s WS.
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