Reddit mentions of Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, The: Essays On Software Engineering

As a software engineer at a DoD-funded company, I learned about this disaster at work when taking training on how software should be accounted for at each stage of a mission.

I feel like so many problems like this could be avoided if we just teach everyone software engineering fundamentals. I'm surrounded by some of our country's brightest engineers, scientists, researchers, and analysts but they still don't get the value of input validation! That one hurt my heart when I heard it.

Software engineering isn't even that hard. There are facts that we've been taking for granted for decades in the software industry. Everyone at this company depends on software and most people at least write the occasional script to help them. They should all know what's involved in making quality software.

(Of course all of these resources should be taken with a grain of salt, but it never hurts to gather more information to consider when making mission-critical decisions.)

Anyway this 'everyone should learn software engineering' thing is the hill I'm gonna die on at this company, wish me luck.

Although more about product delivery and lifecycle management, i'd recommend:

https://www.audible.com/pd/Business/The-Phoenix-Project-Audiobook/B00VAZZY32

[No audiobook, but worth the read] The Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition: Essays On Software Engineering https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B8USS14/

[No audiobook, but about 1/3 the price at the moment for kindle and really good]
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Developer Best Practices) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JDMPOK2/


https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent-Software/dp/B00AQ5DOCA

https://www.amazon.com/Scrum/dp/B00NHZ6PPE

> I've never been a people manager.

There's oodles of books on this topic that will be far more beneficial than any academic program. I like Managing Humans. It's so much less about being confronted with dicey situations, and so much more about teasing out situations that may become dicey. There's a fine art to that. The things that are in-your-face as problems are trivial by comparison :)

Michael Lopp also has a podcast. Here's the one about management:

https://overcast.fm/+H4J-3Yk3c

Other book recommendations on the topics of "management" and "engineering management":

• The Manager's Path
  
• The Mythical Man Month
  
• An Elegant Puzzle
  
• First, Break All The Rules
  
• Radical Candor
  
  
  > I've never had budget responsibility and don't have any sort of business/financial management experience.
  
  Don't take a management job without someone above you on the org chart spending around an hour every week coaching you and your team through the transition. A small part of that should be "here's how to manage budgets. here's your dollars."

That's a good way to do it. And I'm sorry for that guy who said about banning - it's an assholly thing to do. As you can see in the other thread, a lot of people (if not the most) argued with him.

Getting whitepaper ready is a good first step. What you can also do is check out some books about software design. The most important ones I'd say are:

https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Anniversary-Software-Engineering-ebook/dp/B00B8USS14/

http://www.amazon.com/Producing-Open-Source-Software-Successful/dp/0596007590/

There are also essays by Paul Graham (google who he is if you don't know), especially this one:

http://paulgraham.com/start.html

As for publishing the whitepaper - by all means go for it. If you don't want to share it publicly at first, you can send it to selected members of community, or to people who you noticed that are quite sensible within the community.

As for the NDA-s, and non-competes, I guess people explained to you that nobody will do these kinds of things. That is because inexperienced people often have very basic ideas, and nobody wants to then be tied down and exposed to lawsuit because of it.

Imagine that you sign an nda or a non-compete as an architect, and you discover that the guy's brilliant idea is for a building with just round windows. It's really not that novel, and you'd then have to explain to the guy why it isn't that novel. And be exposed to lawsuits for years to come, whenever you make round windows.

Somehow, nobody has these kinds of ideas with architecture, but every other day someone comes to software people with something like this.

Finally, when it comes to holding back your idea... Sometimes (very rarely) it is beneficial, but most of the times it's not. I remember the people working on the first web email system - hotmail.com. These guys were secret as fuck, afraid of someone beating them to the market. But on the other hand, they were already experienced in building systems, and had a team built and a budget.

There's a chance somebody else has an exact same idea, and they are working on it at the same time as you do. And the thing is - the more relaxed they are about sharing the idea, the faster they will go. And also - if anyone ever decides to "steal" your idea once you publish it, you'll be way ahead of them. Because by the time they see your idea, you'll be already way ahead of them in terms of gaining support for your own.

Good luck!

Give CODE a review. It's pretty good at laying things out for the layman.

I don't think any of them would give a lick about HTTP or APIs. I would focus on the process of developing rather than how it works.

For the group you have listed, I would focus on the lack of magic involved. Everything has to be spelled out.

It's not really digital 101, but since you have this group assembled you are obligated to go over the Mythical Man Month with them.

You might also show them The Expert for a laugh.