Save Me the Plums, a memoir by a former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, that chronicles the golden age of print media before the Internet turned the world of publishing upside down. https://www.amzn.com/081298238X
Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#42My favorite genre as well. Found this one riveting and hilarious: Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution by James B Murray.
https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Nation-Frenzied-Cellular-Rev...
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#43Not exactly what you asked for but something in a similar vein are profession-specific Reddit forms. I'm not sure they fully qualify as professions but I've found these two regularly odd and insightful: - https://old.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/ - https://old.reddit.com/r/McDonaldsEmployees/ I guess you could also add these to the list: - https://old.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/ - https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFrom…
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#44Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana is about a way of life long gone, but it is well worth reading. As for the more recent merchant marine, Christopher Buckley's Steaming to Bamboola is very funny, and I suppose fairly accurate. For forest rangers, Norman Maclean's novella "USFS 1919", collected in A River Runs Through It, gives a picture of how it was then.
August Fruge, longtime director of the University of California Press, wrote an excellent memoir, A Skeptic Among Scholars. There are many academic novels and memoirs, but I think very well of Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave. Also there is Herbert Simon's Models of My Life, which touches on academia and computing.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#45Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#46Ex 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…
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 also do whatever it takes to boost up their reputation (and therefore their annual bonus) at your expense. "Liar's poker" is a pretty accurate description of the culture, but it's much worse when you have to deal with it every day.
My experience was on the sell-side, things may be different on the buy-side. Feel free to message me if you want to chat.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#47I'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 include Factory Physics (focusing on material flow through a factory) and The Toyota Way (focusing on lean manufacturing).
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#48"Snapshots from Hell" by Peter Robinson is a great description of an MBA, with some good descriptions about finance and consulting.
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#49Ex 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…
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 should prob write my "why i left finance" up in a more permanent place but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847266
Re: Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions
#50Here's a reply[0] to a question that asked about directory structure. Ignore the programming/technology part. Military books (such as "One Bullet Away" by Nathaniel Fick or "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO). Field manuals can be interesting and you can learn a lot from them. Knot books. "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" by Robert Gates is interesting. "The Art of Intelli…
> "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO)
I haven't read the book but I've seen the miniseries many times, it is one of my favorites. It has a TON of great lessons about how large groups of people organize themselves and how the individuals within those groups behave and why that are very pertinent to tech and management in general.