I'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 either. You have plenty of baseline engineers both starting companies and getting promoted over the studious "10x engineers."
Take the 37signals Remote book, for example: as a run-of-the-mill engineer, you quite literally have no say in what the work/office culture of your employer is. Unless you're (at a bare minimum) a VP, no one cares what your opinion is, as you have zero political capital. I don't want to be too negative, so here are some books I would suggest:
The 48 Laws of Power
Outliers: The Story of Success
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
How to Win Friends & Influence People
I find Outliers' chapter on Chinese people and rice field preposterous. It was like reading astrology: The entire Chinese people have grit, and their grit came from growing rice because it was such a laborious job. Really? Really? Really? Did the author even know that for thousands of years, it was the Northern China that dominated the history, and Northern Chinese largely grew wheat? And the book said Chinese were good at math because Chinese digits are short to pronounce. I'm sure Apollonius of Perga, Newton, Euler, Gauss, Hibert, Poincare, and countless others are rolling in their graves. Besides that fact that arithmetic is tiny part of maths, China produced good students in the past decades because Chinese invested in modern education, believed that a nation needed to have many great scientists and engineers, and relentlessly pushed students to learn more maths and science. The Qing Dynasty was a laugh stock in front of the rest of the modern world. The entire nation of China felt the pain and humiliation for not catching up with modern civilization.
They will fuck anyone over for telling them they must lower their standards for the crap like being inclusive or no kids left behind, as if everyone can learn advanced maths. They's how they got better at maths. That's how they produce good students: they believe everyone's potential, and push students as hard as necessary. They still have catch-up to do, but they are getting closer everyday.
The best description of have scene of the pop psychology and pop business books is “knowledge porn”. Guns germs and steel is like that. Makes the reader feel the secret history of the world or some topic is being revealed even though it’s at least partially, or wholly, fantasy :)
In my head, I consider these sorts of books more generalized models to run information through. For example, when I think about some historical occurrence I run it through evo bio, Marxism, geo determinism, critical race theory, symbolic culture, etc. Yeah, some of the origins of these models are dumbed-down, but my reasoning is that the more of these models I have, the closer I can get to that secret history :P
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.
> 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.
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)
Exactly, why are you chasing promotions? Isn't it ok to be happy with where you are and have satisfaction? My title is Sr Software Engineer. My boss keeps bringing up in our 1 on 1s about what we should do to carve out a path for a promotion to "Principal Engineer" but I don't care. The small amount of pay bump is just not worth the added responsibility (not to mention the hoops they make you jump for the promotion).
Very reassuring to hear that I am not the only one in a position like that; thank you for sharing! (I am planning on stepping pretty firmly off the path to Principal Staff to substantially alleviate work-related stress and anxiety)
This is a great mindset to have. I would especially recommend that you avoid management for as long as possible. The joy of building software is hard to replace once you hang it up and start attending meetings for a living.
Exactly. For many people senior software engineer is a stepping stone to something more, for me, there is nothing greater. If I wanted to be more ambitious I’d start a business.
Have you ever managed people? This bit does not match my experience at a number of companies: "you quite literally have no say [...] no one cares what your opinion is, as you have zero political capital".
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.
> Being an engineer is just that - an engineer. It's different from being a leader.
I disagree. In fact, the third or fourth stage of your promotion will often be a leadership position (junior, senior, principal/tech lead). If you're okay with being a "senior engineer" until you're 45, you're going to be in for a rough time when you get inevitably laid off.
I stand by my take. A good engineer is not guaranteed to be a good lead. And a bad engineer isn't guaranteed to be a bad lead. They are different roles.
Most competent companies let good engineers who won't be good leads stay in IC roles with bigger responsibilities.
I disagree. Reading the books mentioned by the OP are more geared towards being a better software engineer. Your list seems to be better aligned to improving the success of a software manager. As for Remote, I found the book useful for making the case for remote work, and how to succeed with remote workers in a corporate culture that was highly resistant to the ideas.
I'd argue that you have near 100% control over the work/office culture of your employer. You have 100% control over who you work for, so you can control the office culture you work in. It's a 1 to 1 relationship.
If during an interview they say.. "3 days in the office" you counter with "how about zero?" They say "The best we can do is 2", you again counter with "Zero works for me." Don't take the job.
> as a run-of-the-mill engineer, you quite literally have no say in what the work/office culture of your employer is.
Who hurt you?
My experience has been quite the opposite. Creating a great work culture is well within the ability of even new engineers. I would probably suggest the opposite of you, in fact, and suggest that, between engineers and the VP/C-Suite level, mid or senior level engineers probably have the most sway over company culture. As an engineer, you have time, inclination, and ability. VPs don't have the time, CEOs don't have the inclination, and, frankly, no one but the boots on the ground have the ability.
You do in fact seem to negative, and have a take on life that is a bit more cynical than reality. Completely dismissing any value in actually being a good engineer for career advancement for instance is a bit over the top. Suggesting companies always don’t care about employee opinions as well. Real life is pretty bad sometimes but not universally dystopian.
> Suggesting companies always don’t care about employee opinions as well.
Ah yes, the same companies that laid off mass numbers of engineers in 2000 and did it all over again in 2008. The same companies that vehemently fight any kind of unionization efforts and the same companies that insist to haze potential hires with live-coding & whiteboarding tests even though folks have 10+ years of experience. The same companies that were wage-fixing employees' salaries and had to pay out almost half a billion dollars in restitution[1]. Those companies? If you think you have any kind of influence on corporate culture as random engineer #3419, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Take the 37signals Remote book, for example: as a run-of-the-mill engineer, you quite literally have no say in what the work/office culture of your employer is. Unless you're (at a bare minimum) a VP, no one cares what your opinion is, as you have zero political capital. I don't want to be too negative, so here are some books I would suggest: