[thehappyfellow]

I’ll have two recommendations.

1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point.

2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is going to be useful.

Also, it’ll enrich your life and you’ll have more to talk about during coffee breaks :)

[FriedrichN]

I'll second the recommendation of fiction (I love the classics) and add a recommendation for reading philosophy and specifically the history of philosophy. Learning how our frame thinking evolved from the time of the Greeks to the middle ages to more modern times has been nothing short of illuminating for me personally. I don't think you need to read the original works or the really academic stuff (you can if you want to) but having a feel of how our thinking got to be is really useful.

[Breza]

Totally agree about fiction. Hadley Wickham's textbooks were influential in my path to become a data scientist. The writing is so good. I follow him on Goodreads and he is a voracious fiction reader.

[pbrw]

Point 2. is interesting. Is it your personal experience or you have some sources to explore that topic?

[skydhash]

Personal POV:

I mostly read Fantasy books and a little bit of SF, but the main points I would say is better visualization. Reading textbooks gives you understanding, but being able to reconstruct scenes and characters just from a few lines is a nice plus. When reading story from a ticket, it's become much easier to visualize a concrete use case. Also empathy building. Manuals and documentation are very dry and text is more constrained bandwidth-wise than visual interactions. Reading fiction can help you interact better through text emotionally. And we respond better to stories than logical arguments.`

[mewpmewp2]

Do you mean visualising a mental imagery? Because I wonder if I never could enjoy fiction and anything with long descriptions of a scene or what something looks like because I couldn't see the image and other people do? E.g. I might have aphantasia?

I like the idea of learning about human psychology though.

[romanhn]

You might indeed. I do as well, and the long scenery descriptions are basically fluff to me, adding nothing to the experience. That said, I quite enjoy fiction, so that must be something else.

[thesnide]

Indeed. Do DnD style tabletops with your dev team mates. Seriously. It definitely enables you to know how they operate.

And in general, it also enables you to understand the meaning of some writing for and from others.

Boosting its creativity is a nice bonus.

[alok-g]

Am not the OP, however, I have similar observations too. I noted that people who read fiction often handle various life's situations better. My hypothesis is that this would be because they get broader exposure to life's situations than what non-fiction books deliver in practice.

I wish there were a lot more non-fiction books dealing with common and uncommon life's situations, which step out of the theory towards what actually happens in practice.

[mewpmewp2]

Could you give some more specific examples of such situations?

[alok-g]

Love and relationships, rejection, failures, etc. When I was in middle to high school, I had no good understanding on how to handle these. Later too, have struggled with some situations. There have been situations that were nowhere talked about in any coursework and are somewhat rare that many people do not have experience with them. Movies sometimes talk about various situations, however, deal lesser with practical situations. I found that a few people around who understood these better and were known to be more mature had all been reading fiction books from middle school.

[thehappyfellow]

Personal experience. I’ve come back to reading fiction after a long break and noticed a difference.