The shoulders of giants
No technology career is built in a vacuum. We all come to our jobs as the sum total of our education and our interactions with people. I talk a lot about the people in our collective lives and community, so today I wanted to share a bit about my personal education.
Isaac Newton said that if he ever saw farther, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants. I did not get where I am today by summiting Mount Knowledge all alone, either.
If I am a good programmer, a good employee, a good colleague, it’s not because I created all the ideas that I use on a daily basis. It’s because of the great colleagues I’ve had and the education I come to the table with. I read regularly, and books were key in my growth as a developer, and one way I learned the same things as people I respected.
Today I want to talk about some of those great books and the principal ideas they gave me. I want to share them with you in case you, like me, are curious about “stuff”. I’m also soliciting ideas. You got a great book you’ve read that really opened your eyes or changed your life? Please share! This is what we have a community for.
For me, influential non-fiction books fall into a few categories: Technical books, Management and Leadership books, and books that guided my Personal Development. This is my “best of” in each category with a mini-review. Maybe these books help you grow, and maybe you want to share your formative books in the comments below! I’m especially interested in what contemporary authors that folks in their late twenties, early thirties are reading. Who are the new influential authors in thinkspace?
Technical books
As a developer, I read many seminal works of the craft. I didn’t come up through a CS program, but I was relentless in reading about the craft of software development. The following are the books that probably had the most impact on me as a technologist.
Refactoring — This work by Martin Fowler demonstrates how to improve the design of your code by changing the implementation without changing behavior. While this book was published a long time ago, its ideas underlie how many of us develop today: unit tests enforcing contracts while we refactor without fear.
Design Patterns — The original Gang of Four book feels a little dated now, but so many of these patterns are baked into how we develop today. Patterns are still used on interviews as a shibboleth to assess whether someone is “in the know” about these specific design patterns. It’s still a great survey of techniques that can be used to improve your designs and every developer/architect would find value in it still.
The Pragmatic Programmer — So much of what was written prior to this work seemed to focus on BDUP, or “big design up front”. In the Project Management ago, we were taught a heavily prescriptive methodology, like RUP, or Method One. But those methodologies often produced costly failures. This book taught me to challenge how projects were managed and showed me how taking things on in a more agile way enabled projects to make pragmatic changes that measurably produced better deliverables. Reviewing the tips from this book reads like a “do this to be successful” checklist.
Clean Code — Like the Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code taught me to be a better developer. It has great examples of what makes code “clean” — easy to read, maintain, and extend. Through examples it shows you how to refactor your code to get there. Clean Code also challenges the processes around coding and project management. It was also a great reinforcement to the discipline of unit testing.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code — Ah, brown-field development. We’ve all stepped in it. I’ve done a bit of it, and I actually enjoy it. I learn a lot from looking at other people’s code. I use it as an opportunity to practice coding in a different style or voice. The techniques outlined in this book gave me confidence to shim into places other developers fear to tread.
Test-Driven Development — Red-green-refactor. Three little words that had so much impact on my career. Tests give me the confidence to maintain my code. They make the code more maintainable, they tell me the intent of the code I’m about to write, and they help me remember where I left off.
Extreme Programming Explained — This book was my introduction to agile processes - I think a lot of people’s introduction to agile, at least those in my generation. It’s not the process I use today, but it started these methodologies burblin’ around in my head.
Management and Leadership
Early on in my career, I was dissatisfied by much of the corporate experience. I was driven to try to figure out what was making me feel so uneasy, so I turned to books about management to see what the best thinkers said about what makes companies and management great.
Death March — This seminal work about technology projects should feel more like a history lesson than it does. A Death March project is one where the people working the project feel as if it’s predestined for failure, or one that requires a long period of overtime that results in employee burnout. These projects can and do happen today, and those involved with them often pay a hefty personal penalty, if not a business one.
The Mythical Man-Month — Another classic of technology literature, The Mythical Man-Month brings us the adage that adding manpower to a late effort makes it even later. It provided my first real understanding that employees are not fungible resources, and that who you have on your team makes all the difference. It also helped me understand why the waterfall planning method that involves multi-year, highly specific Gantt charts is so flawed.
Good to Great — I started getting interested in what makes not just teams great, but entire companies. This book introduced me to the difference between companies being run by lip-service management and those that are run with real passion to solve a problem for their customers. This work taught me that you can have an honest business, run with integrity, serving a customer in a beneficial way, and that’s what can truly make a company great.
Death by Meeting — Oh, meetings, how I loathe you, and this book was the first to demonstrate the actual cost of meetings to an organization. After reading this book, every time I went to a meeting, I made a note of the salary cost of the meeting (number of participants * average hourly salary estimate of a company employee). You start totting up those numbers and look around at the people barely paying attention, and you start to see opportunities for saving the company tons of money and improving productivity.
Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It — The title puts me off a bit as negative, but this book introduced me to the concept of a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). I’ve never worked in one, and I’m not sure how practical they are, but it changed my idea of what a salaried employee should be. As salaried employees, we’re told we need to work until the job is done. In a ROWE, when the work is done, you physically leave the building, the same way you stay if the work is incomplete. I learned here that the model of the modern enterprise is only that, a model, and one that could be vastly improved.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — This book taught me to be a team player and how to build a team that’s more than the sum of its parts. It taught me that intra-team communication, trust, accountability are all critical attributes of a successful team.
The Startup Way — In this work, Eric Ries takes the lessons from his other work, The Lean Startup, and applies entrepreneurial thinking to the enterprise. With real-world case studies from big organizations like GE, he shows how it is possible to build an innovation center within an existing enterprise to help the company create new ideas like a startup, but deliver like a mature organization. It’s an astounding look at how to organize a traditional corporation around innovation to enable that organization to avoid obsolescence.
The 4-Hour Work Week — Tim Ferriss is a bit hit-or-miss for me, but in this book he discusses techniques on how to automate your life to enable you to enjoy more of it while still retaining the lifestyle you want. I can’t say I followed his recommendations to hire an inexpensive overseas personal assistant to handle my emails and other life drudgery, and I didn’t start a company selling dubious vitamin supplements to generate a passive income, but this book really made me question whether the corporate work arrangements of the previous generations applies to everyone or whether there’s a better way.
Remote — This was the read for me. It’s what really got me excited about working remotely. It’s a complete primer for companies that want to explore office space cost reduction or finding employees outside their local talent pool for any reason. The benefits and responsibilities of both the company and the remote employee were spelled out better than I’d ever seen anywhere before or since.
Personal Development
I wouldn’t be here talking to you all in the tech community if I’d not first overcome my introversion, discovered my real values, and learned some fundamental communication skills. Each of these books has become part of who I am, and why I write:
How to Win Friends and Influence People — I heard about this book as I was growing up described as a manual for manipulating people’s emotions and tricking them into doing what you want. I was so wrong. Carnegie’s work taught me more about integrity, humility, and empathy than anything I’ve read before or since. It showed me what it means to find common ground with people, and the benefits of truly connecting with people. It’s these values that underlie the youthful American spirit I felt as a kid, and spend my days trying to live up to.
Getting to Yes — Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. For us as individuals, for us as families, as teams, as companies, as countries, we all compete for resources. To do so, we either poke each other with ever-pointier sticks or we negotiate. Negotiations are scary. They are crucial conversations you need to have. You need to treat them as what they are, an opportunity to find mutually agreeable terms, where at first there seem to be no agreeable terms. This is the work that taught me that life is not a zero-sum game. That the best negotiation is not “win/lose” but rather “win/win”.
Crucial Conversations — Every one of us has to have hard conversations in our lives, either on the bad news sender or bad news receiver. “Death of a loved one”, “bad medical diagnosis”, “letting an employee go”, or “close a business” kind of bad. How you handle those conversations may have a huge impact on your whole life. Heavy topic, but it helped me through some tough conversations, and I do endorse it.
The Power of Moments — A very recent read, and probably my least digested work here, the authors acknowledge that the sum total of who we are now are recalled not as a continuum, but as a series of recalled moments that define you, define your life, shape your personality. It sets out a treatise for making moments special, delightful even, for people, whether they be family, friends, colleagues or employees. When you truly prize happiness in yourself and others, you create those memorable moments. This is currently in the process of altering how I understand my role in my life.
Stumbling on Happiness — Honestly, I probably read this one because of the endorsement on the cover:
“If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Author of Blink.
Blink was a book I also found enlightening. Trust Malcolm Gladwell? Sure, why not?” But the read opened my eyes to the scripts we all live. The American mythology we passed down to our kids that defined happiness not only doesn’t necessarily bring happiness in them, it measurably doesn’t. When you get an eye-opener like that, you start to think about what life is, and what happiness you want to have while you’re here.
The Tipping Point — Gave me my first glimpse of where the “internet future” had become when we got there. I think this book came out around the time I first stumbled on TED Talks. TED Talks and Gladwell’s books reframed the way I thought of the world. It got me interested in learning again, after earning my doctorate wore that out. It taught me that my education in college stopped, but there were people out there synthesizing what I wanted to study and offering it to me, online in video lecture form, for free (as bestsellers, these were all book available at the library, too).
Freakonomics — With some of the other books I mentioned delving into economics, I wasn’t able to avoid reading Freakonomics. Study after study dives deep into data to discover hidden economic worlds and challenge your intuitions about what drives people. Beyond the interesting parts of the stories themselves, the value of this book was in showing how many deeply held, “obvious” beliefs can be demonstrably wrong. If beliefs about human behavior is wrong, what other beliefs did I hold that might also be wrong?
So, the floor is yours, community. What are your “defining” books? What book changed your life, and how?
