6 Books About What It’s Really Like to Work in Tech

IBM legend Fred Brooks wrote this in computing’s early days, but it still serves as the definitive guide to why our human flaws always show up in our software--and why your project timelines never seem to work out.

Sometimes, tracking down the one flaw in your code can feel like a life-or-death situation. Ullman’s dramatization of this is fiction, but only just.

It’s hard to keep a hold of your humanity when it gets in the way of your ambition, which is the central tension in Kristi’s book. She and I worked together at Amazon a decade ago, and reading her book brought back all the memories, good and bad, of the formative experience in both our professional lives.

Edward Snowden: folk hero or political stooge? The answer, it turns out, is neither--just a normal person who found himself in an impossible situation. Snowden trusted his conscience above all, which is more than you can say about many of his industry peers.

There’s an old adage: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. This deeply-researched book behind Nvidia shows how a company founded to make graphics cards turned into the world’s foremost supplier of AI chips--and why patience, long-term vision, and a ruthless focus on execution matter most of all.

You may not like him as a character, but Antonio Garcia Martinez has seen it all. He founded a startup that was bought by Facebook, and later designed the ad system that supports the world’s largest social network to this day. His memoir reveals the combination of technical brilliance and moral depravity that makes Silicon Valley both great and terrible.