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You must read at least one book to ride

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#61

Post by aksss »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #49
asdasdsddd wrote: post #30

I absolutely hate reading tech books, I feel like my soul is getting sucked thru my eyes, but it's shocking funny how much better you can reason about the world with just a couple of philosophy books.

Any recommendations?

If you can't stand reading non-fiction, read "literature" quality fiction. High quality fiction conveys deep concepts through narrative. You can put yourself in the minds of others and experience different ways of reasoning, communicating, and being. For example, you could read "Homage to Catalonia" by Orwell (non-fiction experience during the Spanish civil war) or "Animal Farm" by Orwell (short fictional allegory) and come away with some of the same ideas the author has reached regarding power dynamics. One is lived experience, another is the distillate of the same, perhaps. Of course, reading both is best, but this is just an example. Personally, I find fiction a less efficient protocol, but there are many cases where it is more profound, more impactful, and more impressive a learning tool than non-fiction, particularly as concerns the more elusive and esoteric.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#62

Post by fragmede »

duggan wrote: post #53
deergomoo wrote: post #39

> Then there are engineers [...] who never try for the entirety of their careers This matches my experience 100%. I am not a brilliant developer by any measure. I'm competent enough, I can put together good solutions to the admittedly low-scale problems I'm assigned, and I like to think I have a pretty good sense for the right and wrong ways of going about doing so. But I'm not even sure I could land an interview wit…

> Have I just had the misfortune of working at particularly crappy companies, or are things really this bad across the whole industry? It's not universal, but you might have to do a lot of searching. Personally, I think it's easier to find the right people in smaller companies, mostly because it's harder to hide in the crowd that way, but there are clever, dedicated people in companies of all sizes. You'll do ok. Kee…

smaller companies are more exposed to customer demands. whether that makes for better or worse code depends on the team and company culture. the demand to ship something right this second and is existential for the company tends to prioritize shipping over well engineered code. At the opposite end of the spectrum, being totally insulated from such demands can lead to some really nice design docs, and code that might be the epitome of software engineering, but it also takes forever to actually ship anything because there's less of a forcing function, which also leads to complacency. there's a happy medium between the two that's optimal, though finding the right one is challenging.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#63

Post by dank_meme »

keybored wrote: post #33

Oh right, it’s the dominating Matlab piledriver[1]. 1+ book, playing the guitar, having this one weird hobby, being a semi-pro gymnast—insert whatever you want from your life experience in order to have a story frame to justify a long rant about how you are so good without even trying (or everyone else is a moron). Reading is more of a facilitator and a start. Practicing is what makes things fall into place. And bein…

[dead]

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#64

Post by asdasdsddd »

MaxHoppersGhost wrote: post #49
asdasdsddd wrote: post #30

I absolutely hate reading tech books, I feel like my soul is getting sucked thru my eyes, but it's shocking funny how much better you can reason about the world with just a couple of philosophy books.

Any recommendations?

I like Locke, Hume, and Nietzsche. Stanford has a great "wiki" for their ideas so I would start there and then read further if you're interested.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#65

Post by loeber »

> I've only ever written tests for personal projects because no employer I've ever seen actually had any working tests or interest in getting them, and I wrote the entirety of my Master's thesis code without version control because one of the best universities in the country doesn't teach it.

I'm sorry, but after reading this sentence there is no way that this man is a great engineer. And I don't care how much he studies. This is unprofessional. Pretending you don't need version control or tests is wildly arrogant.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#66

Post by deergomoo »

what-the-grump wrote: post #58
deergomoo wrote: post #39

> Then there are engineers [...] who never try for the entirety of their careers This matches my experience 100%. I am not a brilliant developer by any measure. I'm competent enough, I can put together good solutions to the admittedly low-scale problems I'm assigned, and I like to think I have a pretty good sense for the right and wrong ways of going about doing so. But I'm not even sure I could land an interview wit…

You likely work at the top of the food chain in your IT structure as a result? You put care into your work and get results, people leave you alone? I am the person everyone calls when things hit the fan, when disagreements need to be settled, when unfixable things need to be fixed, when something needs to be figured out. Do I feel qualified, never, no. I don't feel I'd last one day at say Facebook, no chance, I don't…

Pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Personally I do try my utmost on the patience and teamwork aspect. It might well be naive, and I’d much prefer to not have to, but I’d rather give the same feedback a dozen times, even if I’m despairing inside, than for anyone to feel like they couldn’t reach out for advice. Some of that is wanting to help my colleagues when they need it, some is the more self-serving point that if there is going to be a problem, I’d rather it be caught as soon as possible. Thankfully the company I work for is small enough that there are very little politics at play. There’s no risk of backstabbing or oneupmanship—if there was I would probably feel very differently.

Still, when I read the words “can we jump on a quick call” I know I’m not getting much done that morning.

> Build a book of people over 5–10 year period and never, ever letting go of them, keeping those relationships alive.

No worries there: while I lack both the skills and the personality to ever run a company, if I did somehow find myself in that situation I already have a small dream team of current and previous colleagues in mind. The sort of folks that are an absolute joy to work with.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#67

Post by wiseowise »

harrall wrote: post #38

Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars without ever touching a car. Is reading helpful? Absolutely. Does it mean you would trust them to work on your car? Absolutely not. Would you trust a mechanic who didn’t read any books? I sure wouldn’t discount them because of that. At the end of the day, there is no signal of someone’s effectiveness better than their history of getting results. Measures…

> Reading a book is like a mechanic learning how to work on cars without ever touching a car.

What a weird analogy.

Programming without reading anything (a book, a manual, a guide) just makes you a monkey with a typewriter.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#68

Post by DavidPiper »

> I can't help but feel that something has gone dreadfully wrong in society in that we've decided to start incentivizing people with no talent or interest to participate in the technology space. Many of them are extremely wide awake in other areas, be it sports, art, mathematics, whatever. Unfortunately for complex reasons related to some sectors having more money than they know what to do with, large organizations being impossibly hard to run well, ...

While I agree with his point to a large degree, this line of thinking leads to some interesting possible conclusions:

1. Tech hiring processes, across the board, are "several levels" more sub-optimal than even people in the business complain about. Even when looking for fresh talent, maybe what companies screen for is wrong.

2. There are extremely poor financial incentives for any long-tailed vocation (professional sports, arts, etc). Addressing the problem the author identifies probably involves addressing this problem too, which itself is a rabbit hole.

> But since they're producing nothing anyway, or are a net negative to society accounting for opportunity cost

3. If the situation is so bad, why aren't companies training their staff directly, on the job?

4. We seem to never ask whether this opportunity cost is more expensive than Universal Basic Income because private and public sector decision making tends to be orthogonal these days.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#69

Post by wiseowise »

keybored wrote: post #33

Oh right, it’s the dominating Matlab piledriver[1]. 1+ book, playing the guitar, having this one weird hobby, being a semi-pro gymnast—insert whatever you want from your life experience in order to have a story frame to justify a long rant about how you are so good without even trying (or everyone else is a moron). Reading is more of a facilitator and a start. Practicing is what makes things fall into place. And bein…

> 1+ book, playing the guitar, having this one weird hobby, being a semi-pro gymnast—insert whatever you want from your life experience in order to have a story frame to justify a long rant about how you are so good without even trying (or everyone else is a moron).

Credit where credit is due.

Re: You must read at least one book to ride

#70

Post by kelseyfrog »

> This led me to Betty Edward's Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, a book whose title profoundly upsets me as someone that left psychology due to the field's horrendous epistemology.

I was hoping that the author revisited this at the end of the piece. We see this line of thinking on HN all the time. Perhaps judging an entire field solely on epistemic grounds is a form of all or nothing thinking?

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