“How not to be wrong: The art of changing your mind” is a follow-up to James O’Brien’s earlier book, “How to be right.” The idea this time is that he walks through a number of areas where he has been wrong in the past and has changed his mind.

It’s such a simple concept, but, as a society, we have difficulty doing exactly that. Politicians are criticised for doing the wrong thing and then again for doing a u-turn. Tribal loyalty means that people won’t change their minds if that would mean agreeing with “the enemy.” I’m not putting myself above this¹, sadly, and neither does O’Brien.

I have a problem with this book. Now that I come to write some notes on it, I find that there is so much that I want to quote that I may as well copy and paste the whole text.

I’m not going to, but here are a few.

I hate competitiveness, because I know I’m better than that.

And.

People say I’m self-deprecating, but I don’t think I’m very good at that.

I’m biased. As Mulder did, I want to believe. Except, I want to believe that being a generalist can work. And that’s what “Range,” by David Epstein, claims. It’s subtitle is, “How generalists triumph in a specialised world.”

It’s not a challenging read. There is a lot of anecdata, examples of people who took a broad path and still succeeded. In that sense, maybe it’s like “Quiet,” which is about introverts. It doesn’t tell you how to succeed, only that it’s possible and that you’re not alone. Maybe that’s enough?

I recently shared a blog post entitled “The Most Successful Developers Share More Than They Take” with the comment:

I try to practice “public by default” though, because of my work, it’s often “on the internal wiki” rather than fully open.

Unfortunately the article spends a lot of time talking about blogging and podcasting which, perhaps, undermined the point I was trying to make. If you want to write blogs, speak on podcasts, and present at conferences, good luck to you¹. Not everyone will want to do those things, and that’s fine. I’m not advocating for that. I think most people can do what I meant.

I’ve been working from home for five years. I started well before the pandemic and, like many who have tried it, would have a hard time going back to an office full time. However, I used to spend my commute reading. In those years I have not managed to consistently find time to just sit and read.

What I’m saying is that 2022, from a book reading perspective, has gone not got well, even worse than 2021! I have only completed four books. I enjoyed two of them, the other two were a bit meh. Not actually bad but I wouldn’t say that they justified their word count.

I’ll be honest: I wanted to like “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering” by Robert L. Glass more than I did. I’m not sure if it’s dated badly — it’s from 2002 — or I was in the wrong frame of mind, or something else, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is structured as a list of facts grouped around areas such as “Management” and “Requirements.” For each fact, there is a discussion, the controversy, and then the sources and references. The writing aims to be friendly, but I found it a bit grating¹.

Have you heard about the Maker Schedule? The idea resonated as it explained a lot about my productivity.

For the uninitiated, here are how the two types are defined.

The manager’s schedule is [where] each day [is] cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

The Maker’s schedule, on the other hand:

Before you ask, yes, it is weird that I’m reading a bunch of “management” books.

You can watch Michael Lopp’s career by following his various books. Start with “Being Geek,” the software developer’s career handbook. The move into management resulted in “Managing Humans.” And his promotion from manager to director and executive gets you “The Art of Leadership,” which is the book I recently finished.

My career has not followed the same trajectory. I continue to be an “individual contributor,” so why would I read this book?

“Radical Candor” is one of those phrases that I’ve heard and wondered about. Is it another vacuous management phrase? Does it mean anything? I saw it in the library and thought I’d find out. I’m cynical about these things but it doesn’t mean I’m closed minded!

The pitch is “Be a kick-ass boss without losing your humanity” which sounds positive but I don’t manage people at work. Even if it contained genuine insight, would there be anything I could use?

A couple of years ago I did a conference talk called “On Cloud Nine: How to be happy migrating your in-memory computing platform to the cloud.” I wish I’d had “Cloud Without Compromise” back then. It covers much of the same ground but, as you’d expect in a book rather than a forty minute conference talk, in much greater depth. More importantly, it puts some concepts into context much more clearly that I did, either by explaining it better or by giving it a good name.