Reading novels: what can software developers learn from it

Since the beginning of the Modern Era, philosophers like Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger pointed out that the image of the world and ourselves we constantly built has changed. The world and the man became an object of technological research and specialization; the world as we know it from daily life (Lebenswelt) disappeared.

Milan Kundera, the Czech-French novelist, stressed this moment in his essay The Art of the Novel. According to Kundera, the Modern Era created not only science and specialization but also novel. Where Husserl notices a “human crisis”, Milan Kundera sees the birth of the novel — as an opportunity to embrace dailiness with its complexity and uncertainty.

The novel becomes a place, where we should abandon quick judgments and try to understand characters, their motivations, their weakness, in one word, we should experience the complexity and the uncertainty as it is — “Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it’s either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.” (Milan Kundera: The Art of the Novel)

Agile, design thinking or product management emphasize the importance of communication, collaboration, and empathy. Simulating various games and non-violent communication models became a sprint routine for us because we need to stay focused. It seems very important to me to say, that this effort could be an answer to our technological environment, which tends to interpret events in the black and white manner, very often ignoring event’s complexity and the unknown.

Software developers, product managers as a successor of the technological world can learn something useful from reading novels. They will learn nothing about the world or how to code. But they can learn a lot about themselves and their reaction to the complexity and uncertainty. The world of the novel is not a simulation, nor game, but a field of unique emotions and experience.

I like the world of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov, Josef Škvorecký. What are your worlds of choice?