6 non-technical books every software engineer should read
Today I wanted to talk about 5 non-technical books that I think every software engineer should read. I wanted to cover 4 important areas with these recommendations: mindset, productivity, finances and entrepreneurship. We will start with books that will help you create the right mindset to be successful, and work our way down from there.
Range - David Epstein
The first book in this list is, Range by David Epstein. Whether we realize it or not, just by trying to have a successful career in software engineering, we subconsciously put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Not only is our definition of success hyper-inflated, but the path we’ve convinced ourselves that leads us to that success is very structured and one-dimensional — be born intelligent, start coding early, excel in high school, take advanced placement classes, attend a top engineering school, get a few internships before graduation and land your dream job at a FAANG company right after graduation. Heck, even one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, popularized the 10,000-hour rule which states that you need at least 10,000 hours to gain mastery at any particular thing. And mastery, given the right circumstances could vaguely be correlated to success, right? So if we mess up even slightly along the way, are we doomed? David Epstein, the author of Range, thinks otherwise. He believed that this idea that there is one proven path or formula to success is a myth, and I wholeheartedly believe in him.
If you have watched my video “20 years of coding, my software engineering journey” you would have seen that I failed throughout my career. In fact, I probably failed more than I succeeded. And I would like to believe that I’ve had a fairly successful software engineering career. So I can attest what this book talks about — there is no one path to get to where you want to be in life, and that it is never too late to pursue something you are interested in. If you’ve ever doubted yourself on whether you can start a company at 45, whether you can switch to software engineering after 20 years in finance, or learn the latest tech stack after being a C++ developer for 12 years, this book is for you. But, even if you have not wondered about those things, this is still a great book because it explores various examples of success and how multiple people have made it in life even though their journeys have been completely different and have started at completely different stages of their lives.
So definitely check this book out.
Grit - Angela Duckworth
The 2nd book I recommend is Grit by Angela Duckworth. As software engineers, we are very privileged, esp. in western, developed countries. We are very fortunate that we get to use our brains to do most of the heavy lifting. And the salary is great, the perks are great and the work life balance is usually great as well. But if the only major problem in your life is that your back hurts because you have to sit and code for few hours a day, chances are likely that you have lost perspective on what hard work and perseverance means. That is probably why not everyone can get into entrepreneurship, because all the luxuries of holding a corporate jobs get thrown out. And the difference between a successful venture and one that fails often boils down to perseverance and hard work. Mark Cuban was very accurate when he famously said, “Today’s generation is mostly made up of “wantrepreneurs” — they want to become successful entrepreneurs, but don’t want to put in the effort that is required to do so.”
Also, many successful leaders and businesspeople are lauded as “great geniuses,” but the author of Grit, Angela Duckworth argues that talent and intelligence matter less to success than grit, which is the personality trait behind perseverance and hard work. This book explores what grit is, where it comes from, how it drives success, and how you can develop it.
So, in a world where we can get used to having things nicely laid out for us, I think this book is a fresh breath of air that reminds us to keep holding on to powerful character traits like strong work ethic, hard work and perseverance. I highly recommend it.
Atomic Habits - James Clear
Alright moving on, the 3rd book I recommend is Atomic Habits by James Clear. You can have the right mindset and the appropriate psychology, but those alone wont bring about changes in your life. Big changes are a result of small everyday habits. And this book helps you build exactly that.
Few common questions I get during my monthly Q&As in instagram are:
I want to improve my coding skills, but I lack the motivation to do so. People say that they can code for hours, but I feel I need to drag myself through even 1 hour. There are so many things I wan to change and improve, but I just don’t know where to begin.
While these may seem like pack of interest or passion, you’d be surprised that bad habits are the culprits behind most things that manifest as lack of motivation or passion. More than 50% of our daily actions are automatic actions, or habits, that have been formed through repeated actions over the course of our life. Some are good and some aren’t. But within understanding how habits are formed and how to change them, progress becomes extremely hard.
In this book, James Clear provides you the techniques that will help you discover who you currently are, detail the 4 Stages of Habit Formation explain to you the psychology of behaviors, describing how actions become habits, why some habits stick and some don’t, and how to reframe your life to create new habits and maintain them over time.
I think this is one book that everyone that aims to live a good and balanced life needs to have in their bookshelf.
Indistractable - Nir Eyal
Book number 4 is all about avoiding distractions. I recently made a video titles, “Youtube could be ruining your software engineering career”. The main motivation behind that video was my frustration at today’s culture of immediate gratification in combination with people’s short attention spans. And the problem is that we are too used to watching a 7-min video to mend our broken dishwasher, or watching a 30-second Tik Tok to get our entertainment fix, or checking out notification for 1-second to stay up-to-date with our life.
Anything that is worth doing, takes time, effort and care. But sadly in 2022, we live in a tech-dependent, app-centered, notification-ruled world, where 1) it is is too easy to get distracted and 2) we have already been conditioned for years to consume said distractions. So you may have the right mindset, you may be prepared to work hard and you may have set up some good foundational habits ... but as long as you keep getting distracted and losing your attention, you will not make meaningful progress towards being successful at what is important to you — your values, your relationships, or your work. We keep complaining about lack of time, but it is not the lack of time that is preventing you from getting your stuff done, it is the lack of focus.
To improve this sad situation, I recommend that you read Indistractable, Nir Eyal. In this book, he explains a four-part model for what he calls, “gaining the modern-day superpower of indistractability.” It teaches you how your distractions start internally, why your schedule should be based on your values instead of tasks, how you can diminish the power of external triggers, and how you can commit to yourself so you can start driving your life instead of letting its distractions drive you.
This book is a must-read, more so in 2022, than ever before!
The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
Ok let’s move on from mindset and productivity, over to finances. I have met with many people, some of whom are my friends and colleagues, who make a very good salary, but don’t care about long term investments or don’t focus on growing their wealth. See, you may make 50 thousand dollars a month, be able to live on a multi-million dollar mansion and drive a fancy super car, but if you don’t have good short and long term investments, you don’t have any financial security. You may feel rich today, but you are still living paycheck-to-paycheck. Take away that job that pays you 50 grand a month, add an event that changes the desirability of the field you work on, and you are suddenly on the street .. no million dollar mansion, no fancy super car. You are probably thinking this is obvious but you will be surprised just how many people don’t put much thought into investing their money. I once read somewhere that financial security is the difference between being rich and being wealthy. Being (or looking) rich is cool and all, but what you really want to focus on is building your wealth.
If I had to recommend only one book that you can treat as a gateway into investing, I would say the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which is the fifth book in this list.
One of the world’s greatest investors, Warren Buffett read this book when he was 19 years old, and he still calls this “by far the best book about investing ever written.” The ideas in this book are timeless. I covers in detail, how the market behaves, how investment is different from speculation, and how to identify profitable investments.
A word of warning though, this book covers a lot of investment topics, some of which can be scary and overwhelming for someone who is new to investing. If you find that is the case, you can always hold off on this, start reading some basic books on investing, then come back to this one. But whatever path you chose, I do recommend that you come back to this book eventually because it is just a goldmine of valuable information.
Lean Startup - Eric Ries
The final book in this list is about entrepreneurship. It is the Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This book is literally like a bible in the tech entrepreneurship community. It has a collection of practices and processes that help you uncover what your customers actually want. It is data-driven and experiment-based to make sure you can prove (not speculate) that you are making progress. The goal of this book is to help you launch your product as early and cheaply as possible so you don’t waste time and money. This book teaches you some critical concepts like MVP, cohort metrics, A/B testing, virality, and pivoting.
As software engineers, we all have some inherent interest in entrepreneurship. It does not really matter whether we actually want to launch our own start up or not, just by being software engineers, we constantly build products from scratch and release it to our customers, which in themselves are like mini-startups. So while this book is titled the lean startup, the concepts you will learn in this book apply to any project that you are working on. Being data driven and failing fast are valuable traits that apply many facets of life as well.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
