unconventional book recommendations
Three books to help us become better Staff+ Engineers
It's a new year, and with it usually comes new year resolutions. We look at them differently, but somehow, we can generally agree on the number of books we would like to read in year X—remember, quality, not quantity, matters. :) I would like to tackle that New Year resolution with an unconventional look at the books that I find valuable.
Why unconventional? It's easy to recommend The Staff Engineer's Path or Staff Engineer books as a source of what Staff+ is. Don't take me wrong; these are really good books worth reading, and you probably already have them on the list or have heard of them. Good! However, I recommend three books that helped me become a better staff+ engineer, not only for myself but also for the organisation I'm working for, and that are not obviously related to our role.
Unconventional recommendations
Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking by Mehdi Hasan
Win Every Argument follows Aristotle's ideas of persuasion - logos (logic), ethos (credibility, character), and especially pathos (emotion). This is nothing new; a twist is that the author proposes to concentrate on pathos (emotion) as it usually beats logos (logic). And if you think about it and look at the world around us, emotions typically take over logic (who has toilet paper from COVID time still stashed in the basement?). Hence, we should use language that engages emotion and storytelling over facts.
Those who tell stories rule society.
Platos
You might think that's not the case in IT, where we make educated decisions using data. Yes, sometimes we do. Sometimes, we need to align two departments, and data might not always help. We need to create alliances with people who can influence others. We must work from behind the scenes to make our final meeting smooth and not warroom-like.
It's not a handbook; it presents arguments from the perspective of public debate. However, it provides many tips and tricks on what we can do and how we can prepare to win the argument. It's a good read that gets you familiar with a topic and helps you go deeper into it.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith
Whatever we do in one organisation and role might not work in a new role or organisation or even department in the same organisation - hence the title What Got You Here Won't Get You. One organisation might value honesty, whereas another one will be treated as rude and honestly needs to be given with a bit of honey. This is also shown in The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded by Michael D. Watkins. We must change how we work to succeed at a new level. Will that be Engineer to Staff or Engineer to Team Lead? What worked well in the role might be a blocker. Hence, this book shows how to change, what to do and what to concentrate on. Instead of a Todo list, let's a Stop list.
The only thing that stands between us and greatness is us. :) The already mentioned book about the first 90 days strongly emphasises change, especially when we are "climbing" the ladder. Start by being self-aware, having the courage to change, and being willing to learn from your mistakes (yes, making mistakes ourselves teaches us more than reading not to DELETE * FROM table in production...).
How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now by Stanislas Dehaene
The only thing we do our whole life is learning. To progress in whatever we do, we need to learn. Understanding How We do Learn that and how we can improve it will help us daily, as well as our team and organisation when we translate that into mentoring and leading. The author defines four pillars of learning:
attention, filter what you want to learn and what's important
active engagement, creating hypotheses and testing them
error feedback, which helps identify gaps in knowledge
consolidation, store, and consolidate knowledge, mainly during sleep (if you haven't read Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, read it)
If you think about them, it's precisely what programming looks like; we read about some specific pattern or algorithm, write code, test the hypothesis by debugging, then find issues, and the cycle repeats. We do that unconsciously, whereas, with other things, we should be more intentional. Incorporating pillars in our learning strategy will help us be more effective than traditional passive learning. Then, to keep that knowledge from being recycled by our brains, we need to space repetition over time. That's really well presented in the book Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain or Duolingo. Yes, Duolingo uses that spacing and repetition to help us remember things that we might forget because of the brain recycling process.
With knowledge of how we learn and the most effective strategies for remembering things, we can not only learn better but also teach others better.
Summary
These books will broaden your knowledge of aspects that are important to being a good Staff+, but all books will help you in other areas of your life—whether that be kids, a new role (e.g., Engineering Manager), or just being able to discuss/align with others (husband, wife, kids, that policeman who stops you for speeding...). The better you become in these areas, the better and more valuable Staff+ you will be.