Lately the industry has been in a kind of low-grade panic: not the kind where anyone’s screaming/shouting, but the kind where everyone’s quietly aware that the ground has shifted. The old blueprints are gone. There is no shared playbook anymore for how groups of people are supposed to build software together. You know it is happening when ThoughtWorks is racing to name new methodologies. And I do believe it eventually will find its center of gravity (right or wrong), it will be sold by large/small consultants, and everyone will go back to either agreeing or disagreeing, modifying or embracing it wholly… But until then, I think we are kind of in a gray zone, fog.

In a Sisyphean attempt to build the best team to build Integral through this fog, I have conducted 100+ engineering interviews over the past year. I asked nearly everyone the same core questions, that I have carefully collected, and curated over the past years.

Out of these, three questions consistently separated good candidates from exceptional ones for me. Not because of correct/wrong answers, but what the following conversations revealed how they think, grow, and operate as engineers.

As models makes technical skills more accessible, I argue that these behavioral signals matter more. You can teach someone how to create plans, implement and test them. You cannot easily teach someone to be coachable, self-aware, and accountable.

1. “What’s the best feedback you’ve ever received?”

What I’m actually asking

Can you distinguish between praise and developmental feedback? Have you been properly coached/managed in the past? Are you self-aware enough to recognize and articulate your edges?

The pattern I see

Most candidates immediately recall praise: “My manager said I was the best developer on the team” or “I got recognition for shipping the project ahead of schedule.”

That’s not feedback. That’s a compliment.

The answers that catch my attention sound more like this:

• “My tech lead told me I was solving the right problems but making them harder for others to maintain. That changed how I think about code ownership.”
• “A peer pointed out that I dominate design discussions. I didn’t realize I was shutting people down. I’ve been working on that for two years.”
• “Someone told me I optimize for being right instead of being effective. Still thinking about that one.”

These answers reveal something crucial: the candidate has worked with people who cared enough to coach them, and they were capable of receiving it.

Both matter. Some candidates actively seek feedback. Others receive it when offered. Both are green flags. What matters is whether they can articulate what they learned and how they changed.

This question also opens doors. Based on their answer, I can ask deeper questions about how much they’ve thought about their own patterns and growth edges.

2. “Who are the best engineers you’ve worked with, and why?”

What I’m actually asking

What do you actually value in engineering excellence? Can you articulate what makes someone great beyond technical chops?

The pattern I see

Mediocre answers cluster around surface-level traits:

• “They’re a 10x developer”
• “Super fast coder”
• “Really detail-oriented”
• “Knows every algorithm”

These aren’t bad qualities, but they’re incomplete. They focus on individual output rather than team impact.

The answers that stop me sound different:

• “She had this way of making the whole team better, which took me 2 years to understand. When she reviewed code, you actually learned something.”
• “He was the person everyone went to when stuck—not because he gave you the answer, but because he asked questions that helped you find it.”
• “She could hold really strong technical opinions while staying genuinely open to being wrong. Made every design discussion better.”
• “He was calm, which makes everything slow down in a good way. I just realized what he was doing when he was no longer there.”

Why it matters

When candidates describe what makes someone else great, they’re often describing what they value or aspire to be. Sometimes what they already are but don’t recognize in themselves.

Engineers who notice individual heroics tend to optimize for individual heroics. Engineers who notice multipliers tend to become multipliers.

Here’s something I keep thinking about: if you don’t know what good looks like, you work with approximations. And approximations are never good.

Working alongside excellent engineers gives you a calibrated sense of excellence that reading or watching videos cannot provide. Proximity to quality is irreplaceable. This slightly advantages engineers who have worked with genuinely good people.

I don’t see this as unfair. It’s just observable. If a candidate has had that exposure, it’s a strong signal. If they haven’t, it doesn’t disqualify them. But the way they talk about excellence still reveals what they value.

3. “What’s the biggest crisis you’ve managed?”

What I’m actually asking

How do you behave when things go sideways? What level of responsibility do you hold in tough times? What do you even consider a crisis?

The pattern I see

Everyone has success stories. Everyone can talk about the system they scaled, the feature they shipped, the architecture they improved.

Few people shine when describing their worst day.

Weak answers deflect or minimize:

• “I haven’t really had any major crises”
• “There was this outage, but it wasn’t really my fault”
• “We had this bug, but the PM should have caught it in review”

Strong answers lean into it:

• “I pushed a trivial but necessary change that took down checkout for 45 minutes during Black Friday. Here’s what I learned about deployment and incident communication…”
• “I made an architectural decision that locked us into a vendor we couldn’t escape. Goog on paper, nasty on the long term. Here’s how I navigated the team through the migration…”
• “I underestimated a project by 3 months, missed a critical deadline, and had to rebuild trust with the business. Here’s what changed in how I plan…”

Why it matters

Everyone fails. Not everyone takes ownership, and ride the failure. Most sink with the failure, find some well reasoned excuses.

Crisis reveals character. The engineers who can clearly articulate their worst moments, without blame-shifting or minimizing, are the ones who learn from failure. They get better.

These are the people you want when your production system catches fire at 2am.

Why These Questions Matter

Eventually the fog will clear and the panic will die. One or two ways of working (frameworks, orchestration, AGI.,..) will win out, get branded, get sold (and they will be overadopted with great enthusiasm by the Nokias of this era—companies that applied the playbook to the letter and still got left behind). Until then, the teams that move are the ones that don’t wait for a playbook, mass adoptation or need any virtue signaling. They build their own frameworks as much as they need, their own tools, and they ship.

These three questions help me find the people who can do that: the ones who move in the fog, enjoy it, and still deliver. They invent, give/hear the feedback, get into crisis and make it to the other side. If you’re building a team in the same fog, these three might be worth stealing.

You can tell a lot about a team by how it talks. You don’t need access to strategy docs or Jira. Just sit through a few meetings and listen. What’s said, how it’s said, what happens next. Or doesn’t.

There’s one phrase that shows up in almost every mediocre meeting: “We should…”

It sounds useful. Responsible. Strategic. It’s not.

It’s a linguistic placeholder — a way to describe a desirable future while avoiding the friction of making it happen. It’s usually followed by an ideal state, not a plan. No steps, no owners, no deadlines. Just a vague sense of what “better” might look like.

And that’s the trap: “We should” is how smart people sound like they’re contributing when they’re actually avoiding clarity. It’s the mask worn when someone wants to be seen as thoughtful, but doesn’t want to be wrong, or accountable.

I’ve seen this play out even in simple situations. A team wants to communicate a decision internally. Somehow, that turns into a 30-minute discussion about all the tooling we don’t have, what worked at their last job, and how “we should” standardize communication processes. In the end: no message sent, no plan made. The gap between ideal and real just got bigger.

That’s what this pattern does. It creates fake alignment. Everyone agrees in theory. No one moves in practice.

When this kind of talk goes unchallenged, the team gets performative. People speak in perfect vision statements and untestable goals. It sounds great. Nothing changes. And if you’re new or junior, it’s even worse — you think this is how you’re supposed to talk. Like you’re earning credibility by pointing to the summit, even if you’ve never taken the first step.

So I started cutting it.

Not with harsh corrections — that just makes people defensive. But with questions. “Who’s we?” “Is that me, you, or this room?” Then I offer the alternative: don’t say ‘we should,’ ask ‘how could we?’ Followed by a first step. Assignable. Concrete.

I’ve seen people shift quickly. Some resist — especially if they’ve built careers on management-speak. They’re used to declaring what should happen without touching the how. For them, it’s a dethroning. But others grow fast. They bring the same rule into their own teams. They start building momentum instead of narratives.

Over time, you see something else. The people who talk about ideal states the most are rarely the ones who move the team toward them. The ones who do real work — the ones who build paths, unblock others, take steps — almost never speak in grand abstractions. They ask better questions. They stay low to the ground. They focus on the next right move.

That’s the real tell.

• Introduction to Critical Thinking

Hardcover

• This Life by Martin Hägglund

  Answering questions I have not asked myself, the book compares religious life with secular faith. Being eternally happy is not better than living in the moment. Filed under books I bought because I saw them in someone else’s library.

• Greece Roderick Beaton

  First time realizing that these two nations are the only ones that fought an independence war with each other within 100 years. Surprising facts I recall: there is no singular “Greece” so much as a Hellenistic heritage; Crete is badass; and I still do not know much about the Cyprus/Turkey situation—which, honestly, does not spark much interest for me.

• The Experience Machine by Andy Clark

  We are mostly guessing what is going to happen and adjusting based on our predictions. The brain spends a lot of time thinking about that Monday morning operations meeting, running countless micro-simulations and building reactions for each one. In a way, it pre-determines the possible outcomes. How much of this awareness is helpful? How many times can I rediscover that the brain is a cleverly rigged lottery machine?

• 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

  This one is on my shelf to remind me that confident claims made by latent liberalists are often unfounded. There are plenty of counterexamples around the world that prove them wrong, but since TINA is the dominant mindset, we keep returning to them.

• A Line In The Sand by James Barr

  The Middle East is broken because a couple of aristocrats from France and England played high-stakes monopoly over the region. You can read this as imperialist ambition and oppression, but I keep thinking: people like this still exist today, making non-sensical decisions that alter the lives of many current and future human beings. My dialectically overthinking, under-educated mind cannot comprehend such faith in one’s own thoughts or the audacity to be comfortable making those decisions. I feel bad rejecting mediocre candidates after unimpressive interviews just because I like them. Meh.

• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

  Error correction is a path to progress, and this dude is intense. I did not really get it.

• Foolprof by Sander Van Der Linden

  First book about privacy, how to talk to people about it, and how a community or person can meaningfully fight misinformation. There is a lot of research about how we can be manipulated, but it turns out it is neither that easy nor super hard to reverse it.

• Strangers and Intimates by Riffany Jenkins

  A very long journey through how the private and public have been separated, only to be blurred 1,000 years later. What is private, how it changed, why it is important to have one. The book felt like a long documentary with a not-so-strong subtext at the end.

• Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

• Can’t We Just Print More Money? by Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning

During my restless navigation through the institutional maze, I came across people, who happened to be tasked working with me. It took me embarrassingly long time to figure out they do not operate like me, and even longer time to classify them and the various messages they deliver. so, here is my attempt to mentally label them, and some quick notes, in the off chance I am right, I can tell my self I wrote you so.

1. Lookout

Every group of people trying to do anything meaningful, will fuck it up at various points. Institutions are notoriously good at inventing ingenious ways to do this, in spectacularly organized ways, repeatedly. Some people take great pride at observing, documenting and even foreseeing these misfortunes, deserved or not, leveraging sometime the their vantage point in the organization. They bring the bad news, as soon as they can. I am sure you can hear them. I suspect they are motivated by recognition they received, but also, the response they conjure from the receiver. Also, maybe to distance themselves from the ‘fires’ they reporting.

I imagine them, imagining my reaction, when they are talking/discovering a fire - something to report.

Note to future self: they never know as much as they claim, never the full picture. The heat and light fascinates them. Do not shoot them down, they always find someone to talk about the fires, if not you. Be generous with your reactions, and questions. Make sure they have your ear, direct connection but never send them to fight the fires.

2. Solver

As fascinating as it is to me, every group has one solver. That is the dude (yeah, it is always a dude), which always has an answer to everything. He hits them problems as they appear, sometimes faster than the poor lookout can bring them up. Problem with the backend, change the language. Issues with hiring, get a recruiter. Strategy missing, write down a vision. Not superficially, sometimes in depth but always as fast as their mind can land on a solution.

These people gave me a lot of problem, (still do?), since I have not realized they are not really thinking about their thinking, and worst I approached them as If they do. Worster, I spent a lot of time, trying to explain/disprove their ideas; something which they have failed themselves. Yeah, I am not getting those heartbeats back.

Note to future self: You love these guys, they help you think by throwing ideas faster they you can think, especially when you don’t make them cling to the first one to survive. Let them survive, let them attack the fire, watch the discussion.

3. Analyser

Oh, the Analyser. These are the people who cannot see a problem without seeing the seventeen other problems it is connected to, which are also connected to twelve more, and before you know it, you are in a meeting where someone is drawing arrows between your CI/CD pipeline and the company’s parental leave policy. They are not wrong (or they are?), mind you. That is the most infuriating part. There IS a connection, somewhere, between every goddamn thing in the organization, if you squint hard enough and have enough time (which they do, annoyingly).

They approach every topic like a retired colonel explaining how the fall of Rome is actually about supply chain management and also your microservices architecture. Everything is connected. Everything has dependencies. They will spend two hours in a doc (with links, always link) explaining why your deployment process is slow, and the answer involves five teams, three reorgs, a budget cut from 2021, and someone’s personal preference for Kubernetes that became institutional dogma.

Note to future self: You became one of these, which is why they exhaust you so much - you recognize the dance (of eternity). The difference is you learned (sort of?) when to stop. They haven’t, won’t, and probably shouldn’t. Here is the thing: they are usually right about “a” connections, even when its too much. Do not let them run the meetings, they will suck all the oxygen. They are trying to understand, make sense, bring some order. Find one, so you don’t become one.

4. Executor

The Executor is the one who starts moving before anyone finishes talking. Either because they are bored or they cannot understand the damn thing, if they are not into it. They just go. Do they have the full picture? No. Do they care? Also no. They trust, deeply and maybe irrationally, that they will figure it out as they go. While the Analyser is still mapping dependencies and the Solver is proposing the third alternative approach, the Executor already shipped version one, discovering things only possible to find if you do the damn thing. It might be wrong, it probably is incomplete, but it EXISTS, which is more than everyone else can say. They learn by doing, fix by iterating, and honestly don’t understand why everyone is still in the meeting.

Note to future self: You WERE one of these, which is why they exhaust y… wait, what? Anyway, you need these people more than they need you. When everyone is stuck in analysis paralysis, when the Slack thread is 50 messages deep about the “right way” to do something, the Executor is NOT your way out, although everything shows the otherway. They learn not to dig deep, by digging too deep, and usually leaving it there. Let them work, talk to them about v3, v4. Remind them about what happened last time they had 412 v1 shipped.

Epilog

What is also become clear to me, while re-writing this, is that most people saw/present themselves as the next/previous one on the list. So, I end up with lookout thinking they are solving things, or a solver thinking they are great at executing…Or maybe and more likely, my labeling needs insert ML joke here.

–

PS: The fact that I did not go full D&D on this one, shows something about me.. Yet, I have interviewed one person who described himself, at length, as a Paladin in the Tech team, and another one talked about his one hander and two hander. Life is strange…

Project/Code Generation

• AutoCodeRover
• SWE-Agent

Terminal Tools

• sgpt

Documentation generation

• reading existing documentations, inline documentations
• finding outdated documentation (the comments says x, the function does x,y and z)
• using an ubiquitous language for comments (my llm says this is dependency, mine said it is optionl)
• using in multi repo, project level.
• must have chat interface (event better integrated to slack or google meet)

Autodoc

I liked starting this one becuase, I believe this what people would have build in the first phase. This is a simple implementation of a documentation generator, where each file is passed to LLM API provider and parsed to generate the documentation, along with a thoughtful comment.

Nice Parts:

• cost estimation, however inaccurate it is, it is a good starting point.
• uses the fundamental linux strategy of dotfiles to store markdown files.
• generated documents contains some meaningful Q&A section, mostly for beginners.
• generates also some usage examples, which is a good starting point for the user.
• generates a summary file for each package.

Could be better:

• An overall documentation structure could be better, it is simply following file <> markdown association
• Navigation is missing, it is hard to move between files.

The biggest problem with this approach is that it is not scalable, and it is not a good idea to send each file to the API provider. Also, if the LLM cannot link the knowledge between files, packages and libraris used, what is the actual improvement here. 1

Doc-Comments-AI

This nice python application targets more in-file documentation, and it is a good start for lazy programmers. It uses the LLM API to generate comments for the functions, classes, and variables in the code.

Nice Parts:

• easy to use, just run the script and it will generate comments for you.
• have a guided mode to go through functions one by one.
• check the git status of the files
• Skips the already commented functions

Could be better:

• Skips the already commented functions, does not integrate with the existing comments.
• Does not generate comments that are linked, so the context is lost. It would be interesting to find what is the most important this methods calls / iscalled and why
• Does not generate comments for the classes, only for the functions.

This tool could be useful when we had a large codebase and a checkstyle that enforces comments, but you are too lazy to write them. But this problem (generating basic comments for functions) I believe is already solved by the IDEs, and the comments generated by the IDEs are more meaningful than the ones generated by the LLM. Plus, if the comments are meant to be read by actual Senior Engineers, they are not going to be happy with the comments generated by the LLM: they explain what the code does, which is not heard to understand from the code itself, but they do not explain why the code is written that way, which is why the comments are there in the first place.

RepoAgent

This is the best application that I have seen so far that integrates a couple of nice ideas together. The emphasis on the pre-commit is a bit too mch in my opinion, but it is a good start, how git should be somehow integrated to any documentation tool.

Still, the generated documents are lacking integration. The LLM’s are too short of a memory to remember the context of the whole project

Test Generation

Thanks to those survivors, now the world is filled with rushed, half-baked, over-engineered, under-tested, tech-debt riddled, and under-delivered software. They power the application that made the world around us kind’a work. It is very clear that the next wave of AI powered software will be about eating that software world. The question is how this new wave will develop, and how it will impact different types of companies.

The current software world is built on the idea of “software as a service”. The next wave will be about “software as a product”.

VC backed, cheap-money infused, solve-one-problem SaaS companies will be the first to be eaten. Whatever their size, their reliance on software and human engineers, will force them to either get more out-of-their software, as in more features and more domains. Or try to reduce the cost of their software development. The hiring and wages will be the first to go. SEcond will be more off/near shoring. And inevitably, there will be a lot of mountebanks, consultants, who will sell AI assisted software development tools, that will promise to reduce the cost of software development. I wonder how many of them will be able to go through the trasnsformation, while relentless competition, who can and will build similar tools/services from scratch using the same AI.

Software Engineering and Software Development Life Cycle will be redefined

When the problem of how to best manage/organize large numbers of engineers disappear, all the solutions that were built around that problem will disappear too. This will include engineering management, agile, career ladders, scrum, devops, and all the other buzzwords that are currently dominating the industry. The coders and journeyman will linger around, working for the companies where shor-term cost of replacing them is higher than the long-term cost of keeping them. After-all, there are still successfull conpanies, that never made it to cloud or never cared about Agile. They were not THE solutions, neither will be AI-assisted software development.

The Future is very bright for Human Software Engineers

The best analogy I can think of about the future of software engineering will be similar to mathematics. Most people will have the ‘concepts’ to build the simple things, using very simple, intuitive toole. A big number of it is will be automated and hidden. There will be some, very skilled people working on the those automated tools and infrastucture, very few picking their brains to solve problems using lots of assistance.

So, my advice to myself, is to ‘learn’ as much as possible about different architecture/paradigms in the most hands-on possible way, so I can understand the problems that have ben isolated from me. That way, I hope, I could design and debug large systems.

There might be a single explanation for this crowd-funded-propaganda: The single biggest common advice you will find across the internet given to enthusiastic engineers looking to level up is to become visible; start writing articles, tweet, post on linkedin, youtube channels and so on. As it happens with any abundant loud unchallenged advice, a lot of engineers do follow it. The result is short of miraculous garbage of content: 100M article on how to get started with Spring,114M videos about k8s secret management, etc. This huge mess of garbage demands sorting and curating, so the rest of us could figure out what is worth reading. Here, unfortunately, fellow ordinary engineers, like the rest of the industry, choose to rank by signals: the current/past company of the author, how many startups they have created, how much money they have raised, which fancy framework they have created..

In the tech-world where your employers’ success strongly signals your success, these good creators set the tone for what is normal, what one shall expected from a company by default, bay any company for these engineers. They spread the the good gospel all the while working with above average engineers in above average companies, and all the average engineers gobble that information one youtube video at a time. The good becomes the norm against which all the ordinary engineers judge their companies and themselves.

So, here is my attempt to provide Ok Advice for Good People Leading Average Teams.

• Delegate
• Follow up and Follow through
• Interviewing
• Managing Up
• Meetings
• Onboarding
• Managing Performance, Leading People

• What is our problem by Tim Urban

Audible

• Project Hail Marry by Andy Weir

  They should make a movie out of this. Oh wait, probably they do. yes.. nice.

Hardcover

• Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Setiya Kieran
• Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present by Yanis Varoufakis

• Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

  It Falls oddly somewhere between an academic paper and a very long reddit posts, where a lot of repetition made me lose the author’s points. The Fordism or Taylorism in the software/technology industry is a fascinating and maybe under-scrutinized topic, but this book merely accepts it exists.

• Talking to my Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

  The book I wish I’d read in my 20’s, so I do not struggle with the simple concepts of economics in my 30’s. Most of the time, simple looking things are, indeed, simple. And, The Matrix is my favorite movie. If not, Groundhog Day.

  • A society with market into market society -> Polanyi?
  • Oedipus’ interpretation: it is about the prophecy.
  • Faust vs. Scrooge
  • eudaimonia
  • Luddites

• I moved your Cheese by Deepak Malhota

  Wow…I’ve never seen one clever sentence trying to become a full book and fail this miserably. I heard about the book/fable somewhere before and when it crossed my path again, I thought I would give it a try.. It does not even have enough content to be a tweet… man, this is a best seller.

• *The Great Mental Models *

• How to Stop Fascism by Paul Mason

• Truth by H. Macdonald

  Which story you pick to tell: Burning Platform vs. Golden Opportunity.

  A mindset is a set of beliefs, ideas and opinions that we hold about ourselves and the world around us. Our mindset determines how we think about things and how we chose to act.

  Why this is so hard to explain? Why people who seem to understand this, confuse mindset with reality, 5min later? Why are people priding themselves for naming baises bad at entertaining the idea that they are acting on a bias?

  A good story that makes complex stuff coherent and clear -> 1. A process of change 2. Selective Casual Relationships 3. Trigger (bu kismi cokemelli). Simple but difficult.

  Find good ways to say the same thing with different words. How to master this?

• You can be angry about capitalism by Bernie Sanders

• The Big Con by Mariana Mazzucato

  It is gratifying to see someone else also thinks the same way about the current state of consulting business. How inevitable it is to have the business itself, yet how much it hurts overall.

• When We Cease to UUnderstan the World by Benjamin Labatut

  The mathematician who goes mad, because he saw the end of the world: Grothenieck. The only way I can visualize Heisenberg confronting Schrödinger in his conference is an instagram video shot by someone from the audience. I wonder if I can remember these names when I need them. The comparison between the discovery of the quantum to the tennis rules is brilliant. I will definitely steel that.

• Trouble in the Paradise by Slovaj Zižek

  I need to put a Zizek here every other year to show how intellectually versatile I am. And reading the book with his voice in my head is funny. No idea what the book is about. I also finally found my polical stance: cynical indifferent.

• Empowered by Cagan Jones

  Another wonderful example of a map vs terrain topic, which I will one day write a great blog post on my imaginary and wildly popular blog. I re-read this one to understand a dear colleague’s point of view, left with the depressing idea of people walking around with simple treasure maps with a single tree and a giant X, on an island with thick fog, dense forest and a lot of wild animals. A full generation of professionals get their initial learning through these books and blogs, following ‘guru’s. Don’t get me wrong, there is a treasure on the island, and the map is accurate, but the terrain is very much real. Which many people cannot hadnle. (Here, imagine a Jack Nicholson screaming, terrain, you can’t handle the terrain!)

• Don’t Trust Your Gut by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

  School matters less than you think, the people you choose to expose your kids to matter more. Let that sink in… Looking competent is as important as being competent, so wear that hoodie from time to time, and do the hacker shit. Some are lucky, some capilize that luck better. There is a funnel, you are in the middle somewhere.

• Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis

  How come there is no Netflix series about this? This is succession on the country level. Also, it is ok to dream about being a narcissistic technocrat with very strong opionions. This is where the right sized problems to think about born. Also also, ‘Yunan cok ucuz yeaa’ is actually a tragedy.

• Debt by David Graeber

  Why do we have to repay debt? And Nasretting hoca’s ‘dying pot’ is a financial tale. Who knew?

• What is your problem by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

  Reading about things that I think are mind numbingly obvious but that so many people seem fascinated by is my happy place. I am gonna steal this one, a lot.

• Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

  This is a longer version of the famous article on Strike by the same author. I loved the idea and the fact that it has now a name and a credible origin why we have them. I have seen, first hand, how they have been created, carried over and defended by the very systems that are supposed to be efficient because they compete on the markets. Think of how capitalism is supposed to work without these

  If you are on the clock, don’t be too efficient. You will be punished

  If there is a system, there is always someone trying to figure out how to game it.

  European Universities send roughly 1.4 billion a year on failed grant applications. : )

  The fact that you have to force your imagination to come up with a world where these shitty jobs do not exist, is a good indicator why they are here to stay, and how the system is failing me. This is very similar to what I read with Zizek, on how TINA works against you in the very simple thought processes like this one.

• The Dawn of Everything by David Graber and Davir Wengrow

  As usual, I followed my latest beloved author to the bitter end, and I guess this is where we parted ways. In many ways, this book is a counter-argument I don’t know I needed for all those Jared Diamonds believers. No, there is a huge amount of proof that contradicts that hierchical societies are the only way to go, and they are the direct result of agriculture. Yes, there were societes with agriculture, with economics as we know it (borrowing and virtual money) and they did ok. Not everything leads to inevitable capitalism. I need to come back to this one, and read fully, hashtag reminder.

• Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath

  How I decide, and how this is utterly boring and predictable will never be boring. The premise is so simple, and uninspiring yet I am sure I will discover this again and again:

  • Widen your options
  • Reality test your assumptions
  • Attain distance before deciding
  • Prepare to be wrong

  what a bore…

• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

  Why would I invest time on such useless books that I know I will be only disappointed at the end, and I will be only satisfying myself here by complaining about them in a snarky, shallow way? I guess the alternative is my eating a bigmac and watching a netflix series, so I will take this.

  • what’s on your mind?
  • ..and what else
  • what’s the real challenge here for you?
  • what do you want?
  • how can I help?
  • if you are saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?
  • what was most useful for you?

  how does these questions work on different context, with people who really struggle with self-reflection? How do you teach self-reflection as a manager? do they even realize I ask the same question every other week?

• Technofeudalism by Yannis Varoufakis

  That is the forth book I am reading from this dude. The whole idea of writing to a specific person, from your life, who has an imaginary but good question is a good idea, and I appreciate the effort to water-down all the financial kakaphonie to a level that I can understand, though it would be nicer if I know where to go from here. I also like the idea of forcing one’s self to imagine an alternative to the current state of things, what comes next? (my favorite question for the agile people). What I would remember:

  • cloud mobilisation: boycot amazon (minimize the risk, maximize the gain)
  • the idea of a global minimum wage with the central bank as everyone’s main bank
  • “death of something bad would not necessarily deliver something better”

• *A More Beautiful Question” by Warren Berger

  Asking questions is good; asking good is better. Never settle for the first good answer. Ask why, how, what if, why not, what else. You will be fine. Right Question Institute is a thing, with a process: pick a theme, produce questions, improve questions, prioritize questions, take action on the prio ones. eh

  What do you think the new CTO would do?

• How to avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

  Bill was the first billionaire I loathed (that is why we are on a first name basis). He was pure evil, trying to destroy linux. For that, I have mixed feelings about the books he authored. For once, I quite liked to level of a book. Giving context to numbers (mid-sized city gigawatt, small town megawatt, your home kilowatt) is a simple and effective tool. 51billion is a large number. Making things (31%) creates double the greenhouse than getting around (16%). I am fantastically ok with well written propaganda.

• Invention and Innovation by Vaclav Smil

  One of the preferred council of the bellowed Bill Gates (see above). The cliche is, the surprise I had on how fucked-up things were and how no-one did anything except a bunch of people will be dwarfed compared to what Nil will have in 10-15 years from now.

  • from welcome to undesirable: Lead Gasoline, DDT, and Chlorofluorocarbons (stuff that makes other stuff cold)
  • were to dominate and do not: Airships, nuclear fissions and supersonic flights
  • keep waiting for: vacuum travel (middle finger to Elon), nitrogen-fixing cereals and controlled nuclear fusion It is hard not to see another list like this for other technology domains (looking at frontend technologies)

• Yellow Face by R. F Kuang

  I wonder if this topic, authenticity and who is allowed to speak about what, will be still a concern in 10-20 years. I presume, once more and more identity becomes more blurry, (like mentioned in the book), the unwritten rules need to be replaced. Gradually, then suddenly.

• Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

  We are slowly and collectively ruining our kids’ future by spending more money and attention, hoping to one-up each other, making mediocre services rich along the way. Book should have been an article, but I will add this to my echo-chamber about education. Design the environment.

Hardcover

• Choke Point by Rebecca Giblin

  I am still amazed by the idea of passive protest days against Amazon (or any big tech) for that matter. Why hasn’t this
  been done before, or has it? How to build more democratic platforms for creators is a wonderful problem. Choke points are bad.

• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Hudson

  A rare book, where one does not mystically and subtly boost his success while pretending to give world-shattering advice, but instead give re-usable/adaptable tactics with the context. I understand a lot of it came from the internal stripe blog post, makes me wonder how I would have done in such place.

• How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg

  Plan a lot, iterate and learn from the mistakes. What is the name of the phenomenon where, by the time it takes one to figure out how to manage/achieve difficult, one is never again in an easy position to do them again. 1

• Time to think by Hannah Barnes

  The gender topic is an endless well, where one can find himself on the ‘wrong’ side of the argument, since the sides of the same dargument are wide. One thing I am not surprised, how large organisations and system fails. This is very straight forward, I guess. What I really wanted to learn is the surge of the natal females who are referred to the clinic after 2013. I only found one link where it says NHS will investigate. Some of my wtf’s from the book:

  • Some parents prefer their kids to be trans than gay.
  • Being trans might considered as another way to hurt their body when they are in distress.
  • Talking about this topic withouc vindicated as transphobic is not possible, even for the professionals.
  • Blockers do not have long term studies and do not provide time to think. They don’t.
  • gender dysphoria is not a mental illness, but it is treated with mental health professionals.
  • gender non-comforming kids do not necessarily have gender dysphoria.

• 37Thigs One Architect Knoes About IT Transformation by Gregor Hohpe

  This book was supposed to help me navigate a tech disaster and apprach anew to the topic, hopefuly equiped with insights. I should not critize the book on its content (shallow) since it only offers a glimpse into his journey, which I found depressing and very unmotivational. It definitely contributed to my discontent, since a lot of the stories where very similar to what I have seen and the way out of them where as blurry as twitter threads offerintg wealth in 10 steps.

  I will took away one picture though, which I tried to explain with words to many engineers why static service architectures are not usefull, how they could become more usefulcon. I believe this image explains it, better.

  Also avoid authority without responsability or accountability.

• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

  This dude has a dream resume on everything related to AI. Yet, apart from the hidden-but-not-hidden doomsday calling, many of the containment ideas/suggestions are suffering from the first-order-thinking in his narrative. While it is intriguing to pose these questions, it is a bit mental-cowardness not to pursue any of the multiple scenarios (deadly virus, political manipulation, financial chaos..) a bit further. I also fear that an AI-designed and SB-engineered super-virus could wipe out half of the humanity but how could an AI-monitored health system fails to detect it and AI/SB powered scientific community is unable provide a cure. I am not optimist on that matters but reading someone thinking deeply about this would have been really wonderful.

• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

  Fuck me if I understand any of this but I love reading it.

  If I see a man, armed only with a sword, attack a group of of machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd.

  We are the ones with the sword, I guess and the act of living is absurd, but we should chill..

• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

  I am late to the game, and in a way, I am glad to read this very late. My worst nightmare is private-city-states, and being trapped in the RedZone. And reading the book reminded me how close it is. Unlikely but possible..

• Buying a small Business by buch of rich guys

  We are not there yet…

• The Bee String by Paul Murray

  I have surprised myself by finishing such a long book, following a family drama. Am I losing my cynical edge? The father losing his job, that he never wanted, working for his dad, slowly getting out of touch with his kids. He cannot just be there, instead builds a bunker. Oh, this is I think the first time I read 100-or-so pages without any punctution, which described nicely the hental state of the narator.

• Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa

  Growing bilingual does not make your kid smarter, though it helps. There is no concerete evidence in either direction.

  We believe someone who sounds like a native speaker more than someone who speaks with a accent.

  It would seem that inviduals take language use as A MORE indicative sign and not so much the colour of a person’s skin

  Emotional values of the words in second language seems to be smaller and grabs our attention less, and it does not interfere much .

  The cost of language change is greater when one must switch into the dominant language. The cost of switching is asymmetrical. The paradox, therefore, is that switching into what is easier for us is actually more costly then switchign into what is more difficult.

  First language attrition is a fascinating topic. Also alos, the expriments on this book on babies about languages/learning were fascinating…

• How the world _REALlY_ Works by Vaclav Smnil

  It starts with the queston I love: “Why do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works?”. Anyone who dooes explain big, complex stuff by reconstructing it with basic parts will have my unconditioned love. yes, love.

• Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish

  This dude is a scammer, but hey, he is MY scammer. He is bascically hashing the same wisdom, over and over again in different forms and I keep following. Sorry but not sorry.

  What would you advise yourself (Assuming I could tolerate myself to have a civilized conversation)

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

  Ok, this was a big one, because I have learned the actual names of many ideas/problems I had in mind, and people thinkinng/writing about those. The premise of the book is simple, and data backed: Social media is bad for the kids, even worst for girls. The suggestions at the end are shallow and too generic (except the kid phone toggle). It is going to be hard…

  Also, there is a duded called Frank Furedi, who, among other smart things, pointed out the breakdown of adult solidarity. Should you trust the adult in the street to do the right thing with your kid?

  Across cultures and throughout history, parents acted on the assumption that if their children got into trouble, other adults –often strangers– woudl help out. In many societies adults feel duty-bound to reprimand other people’s children who mishebahve in public.

  My best quote from the book :

  When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male or female). When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

• Algorithms to live by by Brian Christian

  Meh.. Makes great cocktail conversation and fun to geek out on sorting algorithms..

• Numbers Don’t Lie by Vaclav Smil

  Remember how, once you discover a great song, you try to find and listen everything from the band/singer, and eventually you realize you only liked the first song. This me and Vaclav. I guess he felt the need to make even more simplistic and shorter explanation, to get his point accross. This one was too -light- and mostly felt like scrolling reddit.

• Does Capitalism Have a Future?

  Reading Varoufakis lead me here, since he left me with the annoying question of why we are unable to even imagine a future near/long after capitalism. These poeple 1 2 makes an analysis of what capitalism is, how it might (or even should) end. Not easy to follow, and populated with new concepts (world systems?), but depressing much. I do like long, well constructive narrative that ends up with convincing strong statement:

  When unemployment reaches 40% of the work-capable population, the capitalist system must come under such a pressure that it cannot survive.

  Financialisation enchances the dynamism of capitalism. It cafilitates the constructive descrtuction of existing structures of capital and spurs teh development of new tech., products, production processes. When extreme, it drives investments toward even more short-term profits and undercuts lon-term and deeper growth. ..

  Not a happy read…

• Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism

  How this will all end and What comes after capitalims lead me to this more depressing read about this joyous fellas.

  • The inevitable raise of the neo-liberalism, which makes gouverments/states less and less powerful against corporations, forcing the political rethoric to focus on identity politics instead and small financial improvements instead of state-wide economics.
  • There is no easy way to get the power back
  • The almost identical two solidly organised mass parties (big left, big right) that has been established almost everywhere. The gouvernements everywhere shifted from one to another, without much change in the course to globoalisation.
  • This will lead more to find the enemy within the system, whithout looking into the system
  • The states between democracy and Gloablisation become more and more trapped, with very little options (Spit upwords, there is the mustache; downwards is the barbe).

  Economically speaking, there wont be much difference who is elected, the levers they could manipulate, without causing an uproar, is very limited.

• STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World

  As the title says, not talking has been proved to be more effective almost on any situation. Listening is a superpower.

• The Fabric of Reality

  wtf! Why I have not discovered this dude, who invented and explained in such simple terms the multiverse MUST exist? Very hard to follow, and impossible to explain. This is one of them books, where I think I understand but I cannot explain.

• Amusing Ourselves to Death

  Everything, that can be said about social media, he said about television ages ago. The whole book is filled with arguments and foresight about how things will turn out. Best book, must reread later.

  America is founded by Intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communication revolution to recover. (not only the founding dudes, the litteracy and the habit of reading was crazy high )

  The television does not teach anything, study after study failed to prove that any information presented has been retained by the viewers. (netflix documentary intellectuls of 20225 : ))

  There can be no liberty for a community, which lacks means by which they detect a lie (X, Instagram, OpenAI..)

  We americans (and now everybody with Instagram) know everything about the last 24 hours but very little about the last sixty centuries or last sixty years. (Are you not entertined?)

• Of Boys and Men

  Richard Reeves goes around, talks about the male suffering, which is hard to take seriously at first. But the sort of hegelian dialectic means foccusing too little on men, (which is not necesserialy caused by focusing on others) creates a meaningless existence for themn in the new world. This is interesting for me in the context of the end of the capitalism. We have almost proven that men (overgeneralization incomming) can be content with video games, sports and porn.

  not the best crafted arguments, and definitely wil be used as argument for Zucks ‘bringing masculanity back’ type of nonesense.

• Clear Thinking

  meh..

• Too Late to Awaken by Zizek

  Another brithening book, describibg in details the nonesensical world that has been created and presented as a normal place. There is not much hope, we have passed the time world could have been better, it will get worse before it gets maybe better. And not better, for sure, for everyone.

  In western Europe, we are effectively, witnessing a growing incapability of the ruling elite - they know less and less how to rule! …. In Europe, the blind are leading the blind.

  the pain of the concrete knowledge (Snowden)

  simply put: when in 2008, financial breakdown big banks become insolvent, it was OK for the state to cover their losses by spending billons of tax-payer money, but when a WHOLE people finds itself in misery the debt SHOULD be paid.

• Don’t trust your Gut

  Yes, there is bacteria in your gut, they are connected to your brian. No, they are not smart.

  Role models works:

  Little girls who see a lot of successful female inventors around them try - and often succeed - to emulate these women. If you want your daughter to become an inventor, one of the best things you can do is get her in the vicinity, when she is young, of women who have become successful investors themselves.

  how we look, massively influences how far we advance in life, (depressing) but we can greatly improve it (hopeful) In short, pay attention to small facial cues to guide the influence you want to have.

  Thiking about models, which read all of these research and insights about us, about how it is insanely easy to trick our brain… uff

• Baumgartner by Paul Auster

  Auster kesfettigimde, olecegini hic hayal bile etmemistim.

• Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans

  This is so simple yet everyone gets it wrong. This is one of them books, where I think I understand but I cannot explain.

Kindle

• Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1) by Venkatesh Roa

  Venkatesh is my shepherd in this corporate world but he himself lacks experience at some point.

• The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

  Who does not dream to be next Machiavelli? This dude is not.

• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

  Drunken, grumpy fighter pilot who is also genius. Archieved under the books made me feel lazy.

• Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

  Following a wonderful conversation with Daren, I got this book but Lale is not Corey.

• When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think

  I am a sucker for bad management book. Still, I have hope..

• Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth by Muir Tamsyn

  What a wonderful, brilliant series. Aferin basak.

• The One Minute Manager

  see above

Hardcover

• Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Bradford DeLong

  Another heavy holiday read, which I will remember hopefully 10%. Trying to understand the system and where it might go.

• Surrounded by Idiots

  Just bought it to be display it on my shelf for it has the exact title of my imaginary future autobiography : ). Useless book used by many to distinguish people into categories and conquer them. Berkay would love it.

• Organization Man: The Book That Defined a Generation

  This book and I, our paths have crossed too many times so I ended up buying it. Extremely outdated but more fun to read compared to modern organisation books. And man, most people stole from this dude!

• *Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life As Play and Possibility

  Super short book to help me think about systems and games we are playing.

• No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed

  This book helped Gizem far more than I could have helped me. I guess I am trying to handle my feelings at work but this book was a waste of money.

• Ezbere Yasayanlar by Emras Safa Gurkan

  I like the man. He talks fast, he thinks fast and does not too much shit about what it is happening with him. I guess this is his attempt to use his fame to make contribution on some of the issues he complain constantly. A good effort.

• The Daily Stoic

  Stoicism has a place in me next to Friends, Metallica and Matrix.

• The Boy Who Would Be King

  Yes I am buying somebooks in the likely case/hope of Nil picking one up in the future and ending up liking them. No, I am not desperate.

• Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia

  I have watched this smart dude talking in one of the few youtube channel I follow and he was really good. The book is a bit too much though.

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built (A Monk and Robot Book)

  Daren’s recommendation. Love short books that deliver.

• Seeking SRE: Conversations about running production systems at scale and Seeking SRE: Conversations about running production systems at scale

  The feeling of not having enough knowledge on topics as much as I think I should have hunts me.

• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

  The book Lale cannot stop speaking about :)

• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

  The privileged winners are lousy teachers.

• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

  I believe Psychological Safety, as the product being sold to corporation is nothing but a hoax. I have day-dreams where I am a investigative journalist, proving this was a marketing blog post going viral during the hiring wars.

• The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture byu Scott Belsky

  I loved this one becuase it ackknowledges at least the hardest part of any endeavour. Got a lot of one time advices that applies only to states, and in some cases 2010’s but a good read.

• The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

  What a hard book to read! I’ve decided to come back to this one once I have more understanding of what I am reading.

• Erdoğan

  Fantastic and scary how much of that horrible story I’ve forgotten, which otherwise called my 20’s

• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Tradeoff Analysis for Distributed Architectures by Neal Ford

  What a primitive book! Pointing to the hard parts is not the hard part, is it Neal?

• Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)

  Mike still has not returned my book

• Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really is Donal Gause

  An old book about system thinking. The first book I saw teaching what I consider common sense. excellent…

Audible

Honestly, this is the year I have ended my subscription to Audible and got bunch of credit left. Bought most this the last day, hoping to listen one day….

• Team of Teams

  How do we still allow army people to give advice on management? How can this still be a thing? In which universe you can compare my infrastructure team to your Intelligence officers? How many generals can just quite and go to the rival army? How many generals dream of retiring early, by founding a great army and fought one war?

• Winning Now, Winning Later
• Quiet by Susan Cain
• The Fifth Season by Jemisin
• My Heart is Chainsaw
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

• The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell

  Interesting take on WWII, by going after the bombers and its tech. Not sure if I can finish this one.