
Ask HN: Recommended (software engineering) books for first non-technical hire? - mertens
We&#x27;re currently a team of 3 engineers in our startup (myself being an engineer doing the non-engineering stuff). We have a very bright non-technical person joining to do non-technical stuff (legal, strategy, product, ...). His background is in economics and law.<p>He asked for recommended books to read before he starts to be able to follow more quickly.<p>We definitely don&#x27;t want to convert him into a technical person, but I imagine communication will be easier if he has a basic knowledge of software engineering. I&#x27;m thinking understanding terms like frontend, backend, server, deploy, pull request, network requests, caching,...<p>Is there a book that you recommend to non-technical people who want to have a basic grasp of (startup) software engineering?<p>Any other tips?<p>Thanks in advance!
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kremdela
In my experience, it's more important to educate non-technical colleagues
about your product and software development processes. Understanding pull
requests or redis don't matter as much, and can be picked up along the way.

I've gifted The Mythical Man Month (Brooks) and Inspired: How to Create Tech
Products Customers Love (Cagan) to colleagues and have received great
feedback.

Personally, I had never used the term attribution model until I worked at an
ecommerce company and didn't have a good reason to understand the details of
churn until working with a SAAS business. Any reasonably smart person can pick
up these domain specific understandings as they go.

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rudimental
I recommend two talks by Laurie Voss of npm. They're a brain dump / quick
overview of lots of random topics. The idea is things software engineers are
expected to know but are rarely told. He's a good speaker, and there's lots of
good information. The first video has poor sound quality for the first 5-10
minutes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJZnF_L5KI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJZnF_L5KI)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8VTCSbYQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8VTCSbYQg)

Also, How APIs Work [https://medium.com/@tyteen4a03/how-apis-work-an-analogy-
for-...](https://medium.com/@tyteen4a03/how-apis-work-an-analogy-for-dummies-
ac6ee1d1671b)

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Bucephalus355
I would highly recommend this book:

Technology Made Simple for the Technical Recruiter: A Technical Skills Primer
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1450216463/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1450216463/)

My team had a guy who was not very technical, but it was at a traditional
enterprise software company so it didn’t matter as much. He was actually
really good / smart and wound up getting hired by Google for a PR role. Anyway
his manager recommended the book above. Ever since, I have always recommended
/ bought it for ppl on my teams. I know it says “recruiter” in the title, but
really it’s for everyone who doesn’t have the word engineer in their title.

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remyp
I'm in the process of writing a book for this exact scenario. If anyone has
suggestions for what topics it should cover I'd love to hear them!

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digianarchist
Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

