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Books that changed my career as a software engineer

julianogtz.github.io

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Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#111

Post by phendrenad2 »

Osiris wrote: post #61

Is it just me or do other people struggle to read these kinds of very technical books? It's not that I don't comprehend, it's that my brain finds it boring and hard to focus. I think I have trained my brain so much on rapid skimming of websites for useful info, while throwing away most of the content, that I tend to do the same with books, which really doesn't work well. Has anyone found alternative ways to consume t…

My trick is to keep a stack of these books around, and when I have some downtime I flip one open to a random page and read. I also keep a few in my car and on my desk at work.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#112

Post by rmk »

dorinlazar wrote: post #76

I have a terrible problem with people recommending books that „changed their whatever”. And sometimes I think that it comes from an arrogant place where people being „influenced” by books is a bad place. But I do understand that sometimes books can change the way one thinks about things, and it makes sense to make a list of those. For me, there are books that had a negative impact on my work. The GoF book is one such…

I think you are being unfair towards GoF. GoF came out when Object Orientation was the rage and it provided a useful compendium of solution archetypes that can be used in response to (solved, recurring) problems. That is not to cast aspersions on your personal experience. It sounds like you had an encounter with an Architecture Astronaut and ended up in a bad place, but the fact that you are writing about it is a good thing, isn't it?

I also agree that "changed my x" is a bit of a stretch; perhaps it's hyperbole and should be taken as such. There are very few "things" that change one's life. Perhaps being in a war, or a natural disaster or some such, having an encounter with death but averting it or some such event could singlehandedly change one's life, but I doubt that reading a book or a set of books is one of them.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#113

Post by rmk »

exdsq wrote: post #49

The thing that changed my career as a software engineer, in terms of seniority & remuneration by time and effort, was by changing my efforts from learning arbitrary tech to learning the domain I worked in. Asking useful domain-related questions gets you noticed in stand ups and helps you write the right code. I work in fintech so the best bang for my buck I’ve had was reading an entry level cert in investment finance…

This is good advice for something like finance. But many software companies are out to "disrupt" very broad areas, and unless you intend to stick in one such area, I doubt there is a whole lot of benefit to doing that.

For example, if you are developing software at Uber, there is no "domain" to speak of. Ditto for a search engine at Google. The company pioneered information retrieval in the internet age, so what's the relevant "domain" there?

Of course, if you are writing MCAS software for Boeing, having a good understanding of Control Systems, or Aeronautics (which you can gain by attending nontraditional programs in colleges or universities) will be very helpful. Same thing for something like trading firms (where it's practically formalized and there are programs that turn out quants), accounting firms (e.g., Intuit) etc.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#114

Post by rmk »

dhosek wrote: post #58
exdsq wrote: post #49

The thing that changed my career as a software engineer, in terms of seniority & remuneration by time and effort, was by changing my efforts from learning arbitrary tech to learning the domain I worked in. Asking useful domain-related questions gets you noticed in stand ups and helps you write the right code. I work in fintech so the best bang for my buck I’ve had was reading an entry level cert in investment finance…

Exactly. Programming is ultimately pretty simple. The hard part is the specific domain knowledge of the business.

Writing individual programs is often quite simple, but developing software products is often not. It's a combination of taste, hard-won experience, a feel for the organizational dynamics at play, and of course, raw programming ability. Note that the things on the list, other than programming, are often pretty complicated!

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#115

Post by digianarchist »

bear8642 wrote: post #86
dorinlazar wrote: post #76

I have a terrible problem with people recommending books that „changed their whatever”. And sometimes I think that it comes from an arrogant place where people being „influenced” by books is a bad place. But I do understand that sometimes books can change the way one thinks about things, and it makes sense to make a list of those. For me, there are books that had a negative impact on my work. The GoF book is one such…

>Or books on fundamentals… Abelson, Sussman's Structure Interpretation of Computer Programs also good recommend - helps show that whilst it's not magic, fact everything still works is magical

This has sat on my shelf for my ten year career and I've never read it. Are there any up-to-date resources to help approach the text?

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#116

Post by TeeMassive »

Osiris wrote: post #61

Is it just me or do other people struggle to read these kinds of very technical books? It's not that I don't comprehend, it's that my brain finds it boring and hard to focus. I think I have trained my brain so much on rapid skimming of websites for useful info, while throwing away most of the content, that I tend to do the same with books, which really doesn't work well. Has anyone found alternative ways to consume t…

I have the same kind of problem. It has gotten to the point that I couldn't even read sentences that make more than two statements.

What helped me to go back on track was reading novels and constantly asking myself: did I understand the last sentences that I've just read?

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#117

Post by digianarchist »

lovecg wrote: post #22

I’ve read The Pragmatic Programmer. It’s not a bad book - I was nodding along the whole way. And that’s sort of the problem with the books of this genre. The thing is, I recognize that these are good techniques because I already spent lots of time applying them. I just don’t know if the idea of compressing years of hands on experience into a textbook works well in practice. This goes for most self-help books as well.

I vaguely remember a chapter on code generation which was the only failed recommendation/prediction. The rest was spot on.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#118

Post by wpietri »

lostcolony wrote: post #73
alecbz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I can't believe that as an industry we've failed to internalize things we've known about for almost half a century. It'd be one thing if there were managers out there actively disputing the ideas in the book, but I don't really ever see that. Like you say, more often I find managers that claim to have read it and agree. But still, shit like "let's flag if this project is late so we can try to add more peopl…

Well, speaking as a manager, I can tell you a LOT of that is coming from above middle management too, and the optics of adding people and failing is better than not adding people and failing. Heck, I stepped away from my last job in part because the environment was that (really, 'leadership' was just generally so bad, and this was but one of its manifestations of suck). I kept having status meetings as we neared a du…

> a LOT of that is coming from above middle management

For sure. One of the curses of the modern business environment is the belief in management as a universal skill. That if one has an MBA one can manage anything. That all one needs to do is find the appropriate graph and make it go up and to the right. In practice it ends up being an erasure of domain-specific knowledge in favor of the naive beliefs of the powerful.

A great example comes via Poppendieck's "The Tyrrany of the Plan": https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/

Transcript here: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...

The Empire State Building was built on time and under budget, but they did not have a complete plan when they started. This sounds impossible to the modern ear, but that's because executives see plans as a substitute for competence.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#119

Post by nsomaru »

zatkin wrote: post #99
banana_maker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep, focused reading is a muscle that you need to work on. There isn’t a real answer other than practice, and focus on delayed gratification. We skim websites/articles because there is so much information out there, and not all of it is useful. I skim articles and then go back to fully read them once I make sure they’re actually worth the time. Same with some books, but books generally are worth it since they went t…

I had this exact problem. I set a single New Years Resolution goal to build this muscle: 12 books in this year. I’ve read 22 now. What compels me to keep reading is the Reading Insights Streak feature in Kindle. It’s like a little reminder I can always check on to see if I’ve read today or not.

It seems like if you need to remind yourself if you’ve read today or not you aren’t doing “deep reading”.

Schopenhauer’s essay “On Reading” is instructive here. He recommends reading fewer books but going deeper into them.

Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer

#120

Post by nesarkvechnep »

Osiris wrote: post #61

Is it just me or do other people struggle to read these kinds of very technical books? It's not that I don't comprehend, it's that my brain finds it boring and hard to focus. I think I have trained my brain so much on rapid skimming of websites for useful info, while throwing away most of the content, that I tend to do the same with books, which really doesn't work well. Has anyone found alternative ways to consume t…

Are these very technical really?
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