Ask HN: Recommended (software engineering) books for first non-technical hire? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommended (software engineering) books for first non-technical hire?

11 pointsmertens5 comments

We're currently a team of 3 engineers in our startup (myself being an engineer doing the non-engineering stuff). We have a very bright non-technical person joining to do non-technical stuff (legal, strategy, product, ...). His background is in economics and law.

He asked for recommended books to read before he starts to be able to follow more quickly.

We definitely don't want to convert him into a technical person, but I imagine communication will be easier if he has a basic knowledge of software engineering. I'm thinking understanding terms like frontend, backend, server, deploy, pull request, network requests, caching,...

Is there a book that you recommend to non-technical people who want to have a basic grasp of (startup) software engineering?

Any other tips?

Thanks in advance!

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In my experience, it's more important to educate non-technical colleagues about your product and software development processes. Understanding pull requests or redis don't matter as much, and can be picked up along the way.

I've gifted The Mythical Man Month (Brooks) and Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Cagan) to colleagues and have received great feedback.

Personally, I had never used the term attribution model until I worked at an ecommerce company and didn't have a good reason to understand the details of churn until working with a SAAS business. Any reasonably smart person can pick up these domain specific understandings as they go.

I recommend two talks by Laurie Voss of npm. They're a brain dump / quick overview of lots of random topics. The idea is things software engineers are expected to know but are rarely told. He's a good speaker, and there's lots of good information. The first video has poor sound quality for the first 5-10 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJZnF_L5KI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8VTCSbYQg

Also, How APIs Work https://medium.com/@tyteen4a03/how-apis-work-an-analogy-for-...

I would highly recommend this book:

Technology Made Simple for the Technical Recruiter: A Technical Skills Primer https://www.amazon.com/dp/1450216463/

My team had a guy who was not very technical, but it was at a traditional enterprise software company so it didn’t matter as much. He was actually really good / smart and wound up getting hired by Google for a PR role. Anyway his manager recommended the book above. Ever since, I have always recommended / bought it for ppl on my teams. I know it says “recruiter” in the title, but really it’s for everyone who doesn’t have the word engineer in their title.

I'm in the process of writing a book for this exact scenario. If anyone has suggestions for what topics it should cover I'd love to hear them!

Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

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