We'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'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'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!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJZnF_L5KI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJZnF_L5KI</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8VTCSbYQg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H8VTCSbYQg</a><p>Also, How APIs Work <a href="https://medium.com/@tyteen4a03/how-apis-work-an-analogy-for-dummies-ac6ee1d1671b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@tyteen4a03/how-apis-work-an-analogy-for-...</a>
I would highly recommend this book:<p>Technology Made Simple for the Technical Recruiter: A Technical Skills Primer <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1450216463/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1450216463/</a><p>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.
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!