Rating: 7.9/10. Book about the principles of management, written by the former CEO of Intel. It begins with a toy example production process of a restaurant preparing breakfast meals. The first essential principle is to organize the process around the limiting step, which is the step that takes the most time. For instance, in the…
Category: Self-Help / Career

The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Rating: 8.3/10. The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change by Tanya Reilly Book about the staff engineer role, a position in many tech companies that is separate from software engineering manager and a parallel track. A staff engineer oversees the technical direction for a project, without directly managing reports….

First-Time Home Buyer by Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen
Rating: 7.9/10. First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes by Scott Trench and Mindy Jensen Guide to buying real estate, with a focus towards first time home buyers and assumes you’re in the United States (although most of the advice applies to Canada too). The first thing to know is that your…

The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
Rating: 7.8/10. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef A lot of psychological research has shown how we’re prone to cognitive biases, although less has been written about how to overcome them. Many of these biases result from deciding on some opinion and holding onto it, even…

Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier
Rating: 8.4/10. Book for new and aspiring software engineering managers about how to do the job effectively. Unlike an individual contributor, your output as a manager is basically the output of your team (plus others that you influence), so the job is less about your individual output, and mostly about getting others to achieve their…

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
Rating: 8.0/10. Jordan Peterson’s sequel to 12 Rules for Life, written after a lengthy break due to medical issues. The content is similar to his first book and there is a lot of overlap with the similar messages of being truthful to yourself and others, taking responsibility for your own life, confronting problems when they…

Good Work If You Can Get It by Jason Brennan
Rating: 8.2/10. Book by an economics professor on how to succeed in academia and become a professor. Faculty positions are extremely competitive, and the nature of job depends on what tier of university you end up, and whether you’re in tenure track. Top-tier research (R1) universities have professors doing research and only a bit of…

Atomic Habits by James Clear
Rating: 6.5/10. Habits are actions that seem insignificant in the moment, but whose effects compound so that the long-term effect is significant. If you become 1% better every day, you will be very good after a year. The habit loop is subconscious and consists of four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward, thus you should…

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson
Rating: 7.0/10. I got this book in an effort to improve my public speaking. It provides a bunch of tips on giving talks; the majority of it was either too vague to be useful or very obvious, but some of it was interesting, like the chapters on visuals and stage setup. The problem is this…

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Rating: 7.7/10. Book that discusses various aspects of how habits work. On a high level, habits have three components: cue, routine, and reward. The cue is a set of conditions, such that you automatically perform a routine in order to get a reward. After a while, you will crave the reward when given the cue,…

12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
Rating: 8.2/10. Jordan Peterson’s new book that quickly hit #1 on the bestsellers lists after being released this year. He’s famous around UofT for speaking out against social justice warriors, but [redacted] told me that he’s got a lot of interesting videos on philosophy of how to live your life. This book summarizes a lot…

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
Rating: 7.0/10. Life and career advice book by Cal Newport, the guy that writes study blog. He offers a few pieces of advice, kind of similar to Larry Smith’s book: Don’t pursue your passion, because most people don’t have any passion that can be turned into a career Focus on career capital, that is, increase…