Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @06:53PM (#34333167)

Many more beyond this but these are my for sures.

People / Soft Skills:

* How to win friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

* Secrets of Consulting - Gerald Weinberg

* Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

* Nurtured by Love - Shinici Suzuki

* Turn the Ship Around! - David Marquet

* Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss

http://dhemery.com/articles/resistance_as_a_resource/

http://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change...

Macro Skills:

* Toyota Production System - Taiichii Ohno

* Workplace Management - Taiichii Ohno

* Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows

* Fifth Discipline - Peter Senge

Agile:

* Extreme Programming, Explained (2nd ed.) - Kent Beck (the annotated bibliography is a goldmine)

* Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick

Programming:

* Implementation Patterns - Kent Beck

* Test-Driven Development, By Example - Kent Beck

* Refactoring (both editions) - Martin Fowler

* Refactoring to Patterns - Joshua Kerievsky

* Practical Object Oriented Design - Sandi Metz

* Functional Programming in Scala - Chiusano & Bjarnason

* Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests - Freeman & Pryce ("The Goose Book")

* Modern Java in Action - Raoul-Gabriel Urma

* Java Concurrency in Practice - Brian Goetz

* Grokking Algorithms - Aditya Y. Bhargava

Architecture:

* Righting Software - Juval Lowy

* Release It! - Michael Nygard

* Site Reliability Engineering - Beyer, et al. ("The SRE Book”)

* Domain Driven Design - Eric Evans

* Introduction to Permaculture - Bill Mollison and Mia Slay

* Fun with a Pencil - Andrew Loomis

Design:

* All books by Edward Tufte, especially “The visual display of quantitative information”

* The Elements of Typographic Style - Robert Bringhurst

* Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud

* Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

* Notes on the Synthesis of Form - Christopher Alexander

* The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @06:59PM (#34333219)

Also, you should study up on TCP/IP networking. You should be able to telnet to an HTTP server and write out a correct request by hand and have it work.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by intelVISA on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:33PM (#34334362)

Oh you tease, TCP/IP is more than just \r\n and HTTP/1.1! We need at least 21 libraries for that!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:47PM (#34334464)

Haha yes, for sure. I mean that it’s good to understand that HTTP is built on top of other things.

I can’t tell you how valuable it’s been at times to understand how packets flow over a network. When ECONNREFUSED first rears its ugly head many developers tremble. Over time you learn it’s just a slog of debugging. Emotional control while programming is invaluable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by twawaaay on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @07:09PM (#34347058)

Connecting to FTP server with telnet left as exercise for the reader... :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by halkony on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @08:21PM (#34333824)

I love you

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @08:27PM (#34333884)

That’s kind, thank you.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by bentobean on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:31PM (#34334348)

I don’t love you, but I do like you.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:45PM (#34334451)

“I have just met you…and I love you.” ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by wayeq on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @12:19AM (#34335262)

i don't mind you. you're solid.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by jgilias on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @01:56AM (#34335862)

Thank you for putting people skills up there first on that list! It was a small revelation to me when I at some point realized that people skills is just another thing I can just learn how to do. That it’s not necessarily something that comes naturally and then you either have it or don’t.

Also, the realization that people skills are actually no less important than tech skills in a tech setting.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @03:40PM (#34344378)

> the realization that people skills are actually no less important than tech skills in a tech setting.

Yes, and this is hard to accept: they are more important than technical skills. I have worked with many truly brilliant engineers who didn't see their ideas implemented because they didn't have good social/conversation skills. The most common version of this is the engineer who gets miffed/irritated/pissed off if people don't accept their ideas after 5 minutes of explanation. Meanwhile, the hustler whose code totally sucks gets the win because they know how to schmooze the business folks (or literally just tell the best lie).

Hard technical skills are not enough for most people to be successful. There are the outliers with "super programmer skills" (and here I'm thinking Linus Torvalds / John Carmack level status) who are just so indisputably expert that they should be heard. But even then they may not get the win. You have to know how to talk to others.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by jgilias on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @04:37PM (#34345282)

I get why many people dislike the idea of working on those skills. The way you put it, some people might go like “I’m not playing ‘games’ like that, and I’m proud of it!”

So, the way I think about it instead is that I’m just another type of system that can be maintained, improved, evolved. And my communication with others is simply an interface. And, well, any engineer can grasp the idea that easy to use and well thought out interfaces are valuable and worth working on.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by eric-hu on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @07:59PM (#34347612)

It’s worth pointing out that John Carmack resigned from Meta because, among other reasons, he felt he wasn’t heard enough on issues he was trying to flag as dumb ideas.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by Andys on Thursday January 12, 2023 @12:59AM (#34349758)

So cool to see Bill Mollison in there. I live on a farm and work remotely in part because of that book.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to softw... by belfalas on Thursday January 12, 2023 @01:36AM (#34349971)

Thanks! There is a lot the software world could learn from permaculture. I think software in many ways is more akin to gardening than building physical buildings.

[ Parent | on HN ]