Ask HN: What influenced you the most in your Engineering Career?

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As a self-taught software engineer, I was heavily influenced by the following

- CS61a (Brian Harvey) followed by SICP course - Writings of Eric S. Raymond - CS61c (in progress) - Real World Haskell - Practical Common Lisp

These things have increased my impostor syndrome, but also were an eyeopener for so many wonderful things in this field. I'm curious what was it for you?

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Probably a guy named René, who was the first person I worked with who actually seemed to give a shit about (a) the craft of software development, and (b) teaching a relatively new software engineer to care as well.

I hope I have the same effect on students doing internships where I work this year . I believe my René was Brian Harvey!

Peopleware by Tim Lister and Tom De Marco. Software is mainly about people.

Thank you for the recommendation! definitely that's a dimension I need to checkout :)

If we're talking engineering as a broad subject, I would say Design for Six Sigma. DFSS establishes the practical link between math and engineering, through the lens of industrial statistics. I greatly appreciated learning this link early in my career. It has helped immunize my technical acumen from being degraded by pseudo-scientific theories pervasive in the field of project management.

Economic cycles.

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