How to Lie with Statistics
Darrell Huff and Irving Geis
4.5 on Amazon
8 HN comments
Game Programming Patterns
Robert Nystrom
4.8 on Amazon
8 HN comments
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Will Larson
4.5 on Amazon
8 HN comments
The Federalist Papers
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison
4.6 on Amazon
8 HN comments
Calculus Made Easy
Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner
4.5 on Amazon
8 HN comments
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer - translator, et al.
4.5 on Amazon
8 HN comments
The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)
Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb
4.5 on Amazon
8 HN comments
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt and Gildan Media, LLC
4.6 on Amazon
8 HN comments
The Unicorn Project
Gene Kim
4.6 on Amazon
8 HN comments
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
4.3 on Amazon
7 HN comments
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
4.5 on Amazon
7 HN comments
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, et al.
4.7 on Amazon
7 HN comments
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))
Martin Fowler
4.7 on Amazon
7 HN comments
The Forever War
Joe Haldeman, George Wilson, et al.
4.4 on Amazon
7 HN comments
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Joe Ochman, et al.
4.5 on Amazon
7 HN comments
cerasonJuly 27, 2021
- His book on engineering management, An Elegant Puzzle: https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Ma...
- His blog also discusses management: https://lethain.com/
eatonphilonJune 20, 2021
I do agree The Manager's Path is a good one though.
Some other favorites are High Output Management by Andy Grove, Managing Transitions by William Bridges, The Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno, Measure What Matters by John Doerr, Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, The Innovator's Dilemma, etc.
BlackjackCFonApr 10, 2021
I find most management books to be useful in terms of thinking about general people management.
I had takeaways from An Elegant Puzzle that I could directly apply to my day to day work. That's more valuable than anything else.
tomervonMay 9, 2021
emiphilonJune 5, 2021
It's also really ubiquitous across a bunch of disciplines, from Drucker's Management & Gerber's E-Myth & Dalio's Principles in business/org development (not even mentioning the huge field of ops management) to the broader field of systems thinking like Donnelly's Thinking in Systems. Even frameworks like the Scientific Method are a form of this type of thinking, and it's easy to forget that these are all human concepts of trying to bring order to chaos. In the software world you have contemporaries like Larson's An Elegant Puzzle focusing on the management aspect and so so so many classics like GoF/Pragmatic Programmer/Code Complete that focusing on the developer. It's neat that the same ideas apply at different levels of the bigger systems (company, project, individual contributor).
It's also easy to forget that the cogs of many of these machines are people, and this article does a good job of bringing that aspect to the forefront.
shimmsonApr 11, 2021
Technology Specific:
* An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)
* Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Teams (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)
* Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)
* Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan)
* The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford)
General:
* The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)
* Turn the Ship Around! (L David Marquet)
* Just Culture (Sidney Dekker)
* Leadership on the Line (Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky)
* Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)
bjterryonJune 7, 2021
I also have a little bit of the feeling that the emperor has no clothes, since in spite of all their ideas, I can't find any major company that has successfully transformed an industry based on systems thinking, nor can I find any major social ill that has been solved through the application of systems thinking. If anyone has any concrete cases of those, I'd also be interested.
I have a blog post working on applying Donella Meadows' Leverage Points to an engineering problem (incident retrospectives), but it's unsatisfying enough that I haven't figured out how to make it publishable.
amirkdvonJune 19, 2021
- The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier
- An Elegant Puzzle, by Will Larson
- Team Topologies, by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
- Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows
- Also see: references cited in the above and other works by same authors
Disclaimer: Not a seasoned EM and definitely not the first to recommend these on HN.