> I'm genuinely curious why Gladwell is a negative control. The name sounds familiar but I don't know much about him
He's written a lot of bestselling pop social science books. IIRC, he's a good storyteller, but is criticized for cherry-picking stuff to create the impression that you've just learned something profound and counter-intuitive when maybe you actually haven't.
I don't have any good resources on the data modeling side, but on the SQL side the PostgreSQL manual[0] is really good. Even when I'm working with an Oracle database, I often find myself looking at the PostgreSQL documentation.
You might have second thoughts when you read about working conditions at SpaceX and Tesla. It's a job I'd love to do and I have enormous respect for Elon Musk, but I have no desire to work for him.
My manager does this. He is incredibly wary of adding process so he tries to automate it and it never gets implemented. For example, every quarter he tries to come up with some automated system for assigning code checks. It usually has some jank that causes it to go unused and we fall back on just asking one another as needed until he tries again.
