[twitchard]

Let me get this straight: you can be better than 90% of people if you just read a book, but wait, not just any book, it has to be the right book -- and also it doesn't have to be a book, it can also just be "lived experience" or technical documentation, that counts too.

At this point, the thesis is more qualification than statement. Mostly what I drew from the article is that the author feels smugly superior to many of his peers, and wants an excuse ("they didn't even read a book") to morally blame them for their (perceived) shortcomings, while serving up a generous helping of false modesty on the side.

[ludicity]

You can obviously substitute a book for whatever you want, but a great book is a huge accelerator. And yeah, it has to be good, which doesn't seem very controversial. Fluent Python is a great example of this. I could, with enough effort and time, piece together some of the philosophy underlying the language's design, but someone has already put a huge amount of pedagogical effort into pre-chewing a lot of that food for me. This probably isn't intrinsic to books (I really like Josh Comeau's CSS course, for example, which has book-tier thought put into it) but I do think that books attract authors who are thoughtful, and the form factor makes them pleasant to revisit. Even some of the suspect, like The Mythical Man Month, have some beautiful prose and thought that I think wouldn't appear typically appear in a more colloquial format like a YouTube series.

I do appreciate you taking the time to read my mind for false modesty and vaguely insult me though, thank you!

[twitchard]

A paragraph like

> ...I am clearly worse than almost everyone that emails me along all of these dimensions. I only have a dim understanding of how my 3-4 years of experience coming from a strong background in psychology has rounded to "senior engineer", I've only ever written tests for personal projects because no employer I've ever seen actually had any working tests or interest in getting them, and I wrote the entirety of my Master's thesis code without version control because one of the best universities in the country doesn't teach it. In short, I've never solved a truly hard problem, I'm just out here clicking the "save half a million dollar" button that no one else noticed. I'm a fucking moron.

comes off to me as false modesty in the context of an essay that characterizes the majority of industry colleagues as "drowning sleepwalkers." Take it as a criticism of your writing persona, not a personal insult. You are right that I can't read minds, only the text in front of me.

I am glad you are mentioning specific books about software here in the comments. The essay had a very thoughtful and detailed discussion of books about drawing. If it had kept that energy when it turned to discussing software, instead of retreating into taking potshots at "the average developer", consultants, etc., it would come off to me like a persuasive essay rather than a self-congratulatory smugpiece.