69th book of 2020: An elegant turd.
After being in the business of ‘managing’ for about two years, it feels like I’ve learned enough to write a book. I have the scars, fines, and wrecked relationships, to prove the tuition paid for becoming a better manager. Will Larson takes a similar experience at Uber and in ‘An Elegant Puzzle’ actually turns it into a book. Unfortunately, both Will and I have no business writing so much about a subject we know little about. This isn’t to say that the lessons in the book are wrong, but that they are not presented in a way that is absorbable, or useful to any reader that cannot tie a list of bullet points back to their own experience. The lessons are presented more in a way of ‘here’s how I do things’ without a thoughtful examination of the alternatives and ways in which separate strategies could work. No subject is covered in any reasonable depth, and many of the sections felt like reading a bullet list. The 3 pages spent on what it means to be a PM I found amusing but not informative. The most memorable takeaway I have is that “A deeply flawed system can’t be saved by bandaids, but can easily absorb your happiness to slightly extend its viability.” but you can save yourself a few hours and just read the blog post (https://lethain.com/doing-it-harder-and-hero-programming/) itself. The second most useful takeaway was the list of book and paper recommendations. I plan to go read: The Goal, Accelerate, 5 dysfunctions of a team, and will revisit the list of papers if I become more engineering focused. Yet if the highest recommendation of a book is its bibliography, maybe better to just look elsewhere.