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Comment by krystalgamer | Hacker News Reader

co-worker started reading "Extreme Ownership" and it improved his mindset and approach to problems. at the same time became extremely unbearable towards own team. if someone was complaining it was hard to get follow-up on a task from someone external he'd jump in and say "you're not owning it".

the tipping point for me was when he started preaching "Never Split the Difference". he'd gotten so cocky to the point he'd start meetings with "I already know how this is gonna end".

i don't mind these books as long as they come from a place of need, but it seems the main crowd are wannabe master manipulators. also, they can often be distilled to a couple chapters, not sure why they're so long.

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Reminds me of my sister doing a course in Nonviolent Communication and then for a while violently forcing all communication with her to follow these principles or she would get really angry.

Hahaha my only experience with an "NVC" adherent was their absolutely terrible communication and workplace productivity habits.

The problem is when someone writes one viral blog post, then decides to pad it out and sell it as a book. If you can find the original post, you get the entire substance for free in ten minutes.

It's funny when popular blog writers get criticised for turning blog posts into books (usually while leaving the original posts accessible) when I feel this is way more honest than doing exactly what you say. Resilient Management by Lara Hogan and An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson do the former and are two of the most useful SW Management books I've ever read.

If there is enough content to fill a book, then it's fine. The issue is that usually, there's enough for about two chapters, and then it's just padding.

> the main crowd are wannabe master manipulators. also, they can often be distilled to a couple chapters, not sure why they're so long.

Yes! Very similar to my own criticisms. It's thinly veiled authoritarianism. Nobody handing you one of these books is ever doing it for your benefit despite framing it that way. The message always is, "this is the behavior I expect out of you".

As to the content density, they all tend to ape Dale Carnegie's work. Carnegie himself borrowing heavily from Ben Franklin, who actually had a lifetime of interesting anecdotes. If you don't have that, you spin out 80 pages worth of filler.

Wow. The book we need should be titled something like "Of Software Teams and Cargo Cults"

"... a book had washed up on the shore... 'Extreme Ownership' ... soon the tribe was worshipping the book"

It happens over and over again in software history. I remember people running around panicking about TDD "But we only have 99.8% test coverage" until eventually it started to get shot down by "Show me the ROI on tests"

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