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Books that changed my career as a software engineer
21–30 of 295 posts
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#22I’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.
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything you recommend instead? Personally, I got a lot of value from Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann.
> Designing Data-Intensive Applications Exceptional in every way.
I don't think you meant this to be as absolute as it sounds, but as someone currently reading it, I find the asides, especially ones that focus on the nuances of a word's definition, such as "atomic", "consistent", etc. to be tedious while simultaneously lacking in clarity. I hope if Kleppmann ever does a 2nd edition that strips out some of this stuff and adds more examples, because most of his sales are probably from people like me who are job searching but lack distributed system design chops.
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#24Is there a good book on object oriented programming for beginners? By beginners I mean people who code regularly but aren't software engineers.
I think it's more important to find a good text book about the language you want to learn programming in, rather than a book about OOP. OOP is implemented differently by each language, and some popular languages these days completely avoid OOP.
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#25I'm not sure how any of these books have anything to do with actual career advancement. Career trajectory improvements are generally catalyzed by high-risk business decisions (e.g. doing a startup, joining as an early employee, job hopping, etc.), or political posturing (e.g. getting promoted, gaming the stack ranking, aggressive negotiations, etc.). Being a good engineer doesn't really have anything to do with eithe…
> Being a good engineer doesn't really have anything to do with either.
Being a good engineer is necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for being promoted.
There are some toxic workplaces where politics is the only way to get ahead, but they tend to fizzle out quickly as the upper ranks become filled with people who aren't good at anything but politicking and the good engineers and managers leave for greener pastures. It's certainly not characteristic of a typical, successful company.
In fact, neglecting engineering skills and trying to exclusively play political games is one of the quickest ways I've seen people tank their engineering careers. The problem is that it might work at first, for a short while, but eventually the people around the person realize they're all talk and no show.
Reputations are hard to build but easy to destroy.
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#26I'm not sure how any of these books have anything to do with actual career advancement. Career trajectory improvements are generally catalyzed by high-risk business decisions (e.g. doing a startup, joining as an early employee, job hopping, etc.), or political posturing (e.g. getting promoted, gaming the stack ranking, aggressive negotiations, etc.). Being a good engineer doesn't really have anything to do with eithe…
Being an engineer is just that - an engineer. It's different from being a leader. Being a "10x" engineer just makes you a better engineer, it doesn't mean you're any more capable of making a decision that would generate a company $100 million in yearly revenue. Just different skill set. Steve Jobs wasn't a great engineer, but he was a great product visionary and marketer.
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#27I'm not sure how any of these books have anything to do with actual career advancement. Career trajectory improvements are generally catalyzed by high-risk business decisions (e.g. doing a startup, joining as an early employee, job hopping, etc.), or political posturing (e.g. getting promoted, gaming the stack ranking, aggressive negotiations, etc.). Being a good engineer doesn't really have anything to do with eithe…
My personal experience shows to the contrary, the super talented engineers do well, and get promoted much more easily.
And I’ve seen many cases of “run-of-the-mill engineers” change cultural aspects of the office and the company.
This is all based on mostly one employer, but a very big one. I suspect smaller companies make fast promotions for talented engineers and cultural changes even easier.
(I do agree that sometimes people that look in no way special at first glance turn out to be fantastic founders)
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#28I'm not sure how any of these books have anything to do with actual career advancement. Career trajectory improvements are generally catalyzed by high-risk business decisions (e.g. doing a startup, joining as an early employee, job hopping, etc.), or political posturing (e.g. getting promoted, gaming the stack ranking, aggressive negotiations, etc.). Being a good engineer doesn't really have anything to do with eithe…
My personal experience shows to the contrary, the super talented engineers do well, and get promoted much more easily. And I’ve seen many cases of “run-of-the-mill engineers” change cultural aspects of the office and the company. This is all based on mostly one employer, but a very big one. I suspect smaller companies make fast promotions for talented engineers and cultural changes even easier. (I do agree that somet…
Promoted to what though? A job with more responsibility but not really a good enough increase in pay to go along with it? No thanks.
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#29SICP made me fall in love with programming
Re: Books that changed my career as a software engineer
#30I'm not sure how any of these books have anything to do with actual career advancement. Career trajectory improvements are generally catalyzed by high-risk business decisions (e.g. doing a startup, joining as an early employee, job hopping, etc.), or political posturing (e.g. getting promoted, gaming the stack ranking, aggressive negotiations, etc.). Being a good engineer doesn't really have anything to do with eithe…
The article is titled: Five Books that Changed My Career as a Software Engineer
The operative words being "My Career". The article is a subjective listing of books that the author found to be useful in their career and at the stage of their career they read them. Not an edict of what every SWE needs to read to progress in their career.
I have read 1 of the 4 books on your list (and read another partially) and haven't found them to be remotely helpful in my career progression. They may have huge impact on someone else at another stage of their career, that is the point of lists like these.