14 comments

  • neuralkoi 13 hours ago ago

    Not a book or course per say, but based on a book:

    The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" by Venkat [0]

    Other contenders:

    Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [1]

    Haseeb qureshi's articles on Negotiating [2]

    These along with er... mind-altering substances, helped me see that reality as we live it (careers, status, institutions, ect) is like software: built/programmed by humans and can be changed by shifting your perspective.

    [0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLfc2WtGuVP...

    [2] https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...

  • mikewarot 2 hours ago ago

    To answer the question as I misread it:

      What's the most career altering *course of action* you've gone through?
    
    I was an IT guy, and I took a job making gears in a job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but it was immensely satisfying. Some of the gears I helped make will still be in service in a century.
  • firefax 15 hours ago ago

    Two books I read after 9/11 shaped my path greatly:

    1.) Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police

    ISBN #: 0813337445

    2.) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

    ISBN #: 9780671728694

    Both should be available in most public libraries, but with the ISBN you can usually get almost anything via inter-library loan.

    • kbelder 13 hours ago ago

      >The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

      An amazing book. I'm not sure how it's particularly career-path-impacting, but it is fascinating being able to follow the cause and effect chain in Germany leading up to and all through the war (in excruciating detail).

  • schmudde 8 hours ago ago

    "The Annotated Turing" - I didn't know you could meaningfully intertwine biography and technical analysis like that.

  • oumua_don17 13 hours ago ago
    • NishanStepak 8 hours ago ago

      Sounds about right. It is called failing forward. Fail forwards, fail fast and keep going.

  • slipwalker 11 hours ago ago

    Programming Perl, 1st Ed. from Larry Wall. The three great virtues of a programmer were enlightening for a fresh-outta-college beginner.

  • eb0la 18 hours ago ago

    Data Smart, by John Foreman. Out of print, but you can get it from Abe Books: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/data-smart-using-...

    Why it is cool?

    Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel.

    The best part for me was optimization.

    • jfil 5 hours ago ago

      I loved that book!

  • mikewarot 15 hours ago ago

    The Boy's Second book of Electronics by Alfred Morgan(1957) introduced me to electronics circa 1975, and lead to a technical mindset and lifestyle.

  • AnimalMuppet 11 hours ago ago

    "The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie.

  • JohnFen 17 hours ago ago

    A digital electronics design course I took at the local science museum when I was 11. It was free, so what the heck, I took it on a whim. I didn't know it at the time, but it set the course of my career for the rest of my life even though I'm a software, not electronic, engineer.

  • Natashash23 18 hours ago ago

    for me it was learning devops