Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

llearner_yearner about 7 hours ago 8 comments

FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

Pls provide link if the course materials are available anywhere.

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neuralkoi•about 2 hours ago

Not a book or course per say, but based on a book:

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" by Venkat [0]

Other contenders:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [1]

Haseeb qureshi's articles on Negotiating [2]

These along with er... mind-altering substances, helped me see that reality as we live it (careers, status, institutions, ect) is like software: built/programmed by humans and can be changed by shifting your perspective.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLfc2WtGuVP...

[2] https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...

oumua_don17•about 1 hour ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Fail_at_Almost_Everythi...

firefax•about 3 hours ago

Two books I read after 9/11 shaped my path greatly:

1.) Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police

ISBN #: 0813337445

2.) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

ISBN #: 9780671728694

Both should be available in most public libraries, but with the ISBN you can usually get almost anything via inter-library loan.

kbelder•about 1 hour ago

>The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

An amazing book. I'm not sure how it's particularly career-path-impacting, but it is fascinating being able to follow the cause and effect chain in Germany leading up to and all through the war (in excruciating detail).

mikewarot•about 3 hours ago

The Boy's Second book of Electronics by Alfred Morgan(1957) introduced me to electronics circa 1975, and lead to a technical mindset and lifestyle.

eb0la•about 7 hours ago

Data Smart, by John Foreman. Out of print, but you can get it from Abe Books: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/data-smart-using-...

Why it is cool?

Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel.

The best part for me was optimization.

JohnFen•about 5 hours ago

A digital electronics design course I took at the local science museum when I was 11. It was free, so what the heck, I took it on a whim. I didn't know it at the time, but it set the course of my career for the rest of my life even though I'm a software, not electronic, engineer.

Natashash23•about 7 hours ago

for me it was learning devops