📚 Books I read in May 2024
My notes and recommendatios on the 3 books I read in May 2024.
One of my goals for this year is to make reading my default activity. That's why I recently started a new segment in my newsletter, reviewing the books I read in the previous month.
Important: As of this issue, I'm introducing affiliate links for the books I recommend, with a notable exception in today's article. As I intend to keep this newsletter free for the foreseeable future, this is an experiment to figure out non-intrusive ways to start monetizing it.
Here we go with the May 2024 edition, which includes 3 non-fiction books.
📓 Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
241 pages, First published: January 1st, 2009
This is the first book I finished in May and the most sophisticated of the three.
The book analyzes the topics of “meaningful work” and “self-reliance,” converging into what the author defines as the struggle for individual agency that afflicts modern life.
The author investigates the critical differences between the abstract world of knowledge work and the physical and arguably more real world of manual labor and trade work through his personal journey.
After getting a PhD in political philosophy, Matthew Crawford joined a political think tank in DC, where he felt miserable.
As he had been a happy electrician at an earlier age, he eventually decided to leave the world of knowledge work and set up a motorcycle repair shop.
Through his personal story and vast knowledge of philosophy, Crawford offers a nontrivial elaboration on the merits of trade work and contrasts them with the frustrations of white-collar jobs.
One key idea in the book is that the shift away from craftsmanship and towards undifferentiated generalist knowledge work has many negative repercussions on us as human beings. It undermines our ability to recognize and take pride in the results of our work.
As he says very early in the book:
The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgement of reality, where one's failure or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
I'm a knowledge worker, and my hobbies include woodworking and tinkering with home automation, so I can fully understand his point. Rarely have I felt the same level of satisfaction in my day-to-day job as when I see a piece of furniture I built in its place in our house or when the curtains open and close automatically after I wired in the controller and built the required automation.
When moving into the management track, I lost a significant portion of the ability to practice my job as a craft. I have often talked about how this switch's hardest part was losing most feedback loops.
When you write code, you will know quite clearly whether it works. You can use objective observations to evaluate the quality of your work.
As a manager, you have none of that. Appreciating whether or not you're doing a good job is inherently subjective. The distance between what your team does and generating more revenues could be very long.
That is what I always found to be the most frustrating part of the job.
The other main takeaway from the book is that, despite being written in 2009, most of its observations apply worryingly well to the world in 2024.
When going through my annotations on the book as I wrote this article, I was surprised to notice how often I marked sections with references to AI and LLMs. These notes can be grouped into two main categories:
With the introduction of the assembly line, Ford—and subsequently any other car manufacturer—could replace skilled workers with unskilled ones, effectively reducing labor costs. AI seems appealing to many as a way to reproduce the same movement in software development and other areas of knowledge work. Though I don't think this future will materialize anytime soon, I can see the parallel from a capital point of view: driving down labor costs, regardless of the implications for the human sense of agency.
Crawford talks about how modern vehicles are becoming increasingly difficult to repair due to their required electronic components. This has gradually shifted the repairing trade towards a replacement job. The worker's understanding of how the vehicle operates has been steadily declining, removing the need to apply thinking and troubleshooting as part of the work, ultimately eroding the sense of fulfillment that comes with applying one's skills to make something work again. I can see this happening in software development, as companies run to build features on top of third-party AI models. The sense of agency for software engineers is being eroded as they increasingly rely on black boxes whose internal work no one really understands. Bug-fixing will become more and more frequently a matter of switching to a different model, and hopefully, it will magically solve the issue.
These are just the key highlights from a very dense book that can be read from many angles. It's one of those books I'll go through at least once a year to extract new and more refined insights about the world of work and its impact on human feelings of self-worth.
👍 I recommend it to anyone who is in the knowledge work sector.
📕 Out of the Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason
Out of The Software Crisis by Baldur Bjarnason
195 pages, First Published: December 21, 2022
I discovered Baldur only recently when someone shared one of his recent essays on AI.
The internet is full of platitudes and common wisdom about software engineering. Baldur's perspective on the topic is unique and very interesting.
After reading more on his blog, I decided to buy the bundle of his three books. I believe in supporting independent writers who have something new to say more than just aligning with what everybody else is reading.
The core thesis of this book is that most software development is broken, and that's not due to the wrong tools or processes but a lack of system thinking applied to the discipline of software development.
Baldur has an extensive experience working in a broad set of projects. The book is opinionated, something that I personally appreciate.
My key takeaways from the book:
Most software projects fail, and even when software works, it tends to be largely over-engineered and bloated.
Variability in systems is one of the critical indicators of trouble. Reducing variability and creating predictability is one of the key levers for better planning, strategies, and, ultimately, results.
Crap software makes enough money; therefore, there is little incentive to make it good.
10x coders aren't a thing, but 10x systems are.
It is essential to think of unit tests and typing as ways to preserve the future economic value of the code. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book
In software, the biggest threat to the economic value of code is that everything is always in flux. The business purpose of unit tests and types isn't to prevent defects but to prevent variations in quality. Unexpected improvements in quality are just as undesirable as discovering a bug.
The role of design is to produce economically helpful information, not to please particular aesthetic views.
The difference between Intrinsic and Extrinsic innovation. The former occurs when you start by altering an existing system or building a complex new one from scratch and have a high risk. The latter starts by exploring what new outcomes a preexisting system is capable of, and it is inherently less risky.
The lures of Programming as a Pop Culture are that if it's new, then it must be an improvement. Experienced developers differentiate themselves by their ability to be aware of this natural tendency and mitigate it in technical decisions.
The programming pop culture favours specific code aesthetics based on the trends of the day.[…] The issue is that the programming pop culture demands that code exhibit the latest popular aesthetics of rigour, formality, and cleverness. […] it's a fashion industry, Trends come trends go. The lack of historical awareness is considered by most to be a feature.
While I found the read to be largely positive, there are two aspects where I felt it could have been better.
Baldur tends to fall into the dichotomy of Managers vs Programmers, generally ranting about all managers being idiots or very close to it:
Most of our managers know less about management theory, organisational psychology, or even basic principles of collaboration than an abusive high-school gym teacher. They mean well but are the ‘chaos’ in the ‘Chaos Report’ made manifest.
Unfortunately, these statements undermine the entire book's credibility as they sound arbitrary and largely contradict a system's theory approach.
I found the writing style unusual for a book. Short paragraphs and many empty spaces made me feel like I was reading a series of online articles rather than a book. After a while, you get used to it, but it negatively affected the flow of reading in my experience. I guess this is because this is an independent author who can't afford expensive editors to help with that.
👍 Despite these last two points, I strongly recommend the book, and I recommend you buy it from the author's page to support his work.
📘 The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly
The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly
335 pages, First Published: September 20, 2022
I've had this book on my reading list for a while, and as I've recently started working with a few Staff Engineers, I decided it would be a good time to pick it up and read it.
It's supposed to be the Staff+ equivalent of Michelle Fournier's famous book The Manager's Path, and I think it does a pretty good job at that.
First, it helps advance the collective understanding of a role—or set of roles—that is still largely misunderstood. Staff engineers' roles vary widely across organizations, from glorified Senior Engineers to peers to VPs and having mandates over teams. It's good that a book like this exists to help us build a shared mental model that can be applied to different realities.
I liked the book's combination of conceptual explorations and practical advice, as it aligns very well with the nature of the role itself: a staff engineer needs to be able to zoom out and see the big picture while at the same time getting into the weeds when needed.
You can also see that this book was written by a Software Engineer, as most chapters followed a very similar structure. This structure helps create consistency and manage expectations, but I found that an excess of consistency in a book can undermine engagement, making the reading harder. Luckily, Tanya spiced it up regularly with exciting anecdotes!
The author also did an excellent job researching and engaging with prominent figures in the industry, which helped build a broad and multi-faceted view of the role.
Though I found most of the content relevant, it occasionally felt a bit too verbose, especially when it got into generic advice that applies to the Staff Engineer role and many others. I found this most evident in Chapter 3 and Chapter 9.
It didn't help that I had to read this book on a digital device - not an e-book - as I read it via the O'Reilly Media platform. I guess that contributed to the sub-optimal reading experience.
👍 Despite that, this is another book to recommend. Especially if you're a Staff Engineer or a Senior Engineer aiming for a promotion. It's also very relevant for managers in the tech field as they often need to take care of, promote, and help staff engineers have a meaningful impact on their organizations.
🔭 Looking forward to…
Please let me know if you end up reading any of these books after reading my observations. Knowing when we're influencing other people's lives from a distance is always rewarding.
As for last month's issue, I'm looking forward to two things:
Do you enjoy the idea of a monthly book review?
Your reading recommendations. I already have a long list of books I want to go through, but I take recommendations very seriously.
Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
See you all next week!
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