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Ask HN: Recommend books that give you insight into other professions

154 points by unklefolk ↗ HN
I want to read books that give me insights into other professions preferably something unrelated to and far from working in technology. For example, what is it like to work on a container ship or the life of a forest ranger. Memoirs with a bit of adventure are a bonus. Thanks!

76 comments

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mellosouls
This is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay

Memoirs of a Doctor in the UK. Very funny at times and moving as well. Useful insights for outsiders into the medical profession and a light read. NHS based, but presumably relevant to other health systems and countries.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Going_to_Hurt

statusanxiety
Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell is an excellent insight into the life of a parisian dishwasher in the 1920s. Its also a great exploration of the lives of the working class in that time period.

Just Kids by Patti Smith is a beautiful look into the life of a poet and artist.

ju-st
Uncommon Carriers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA64LQ "a collection of six excursions across the United States in various vehicles: coal train; barge-pushing towboat; a canoe on the Concord and Merrimack River, following John and Henry Thoreau's excursion in August, 1839; a UPS sorting station and truck; a five-axle, sixty-five foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker. " (quote from an Amazon review)
klenwell
Not exactly what you asked for but something in a similar vein are profession-specific Reddit forms. I'm not sure they fully qualify as professions but I've found these two regularly odd and insightful:

- https://old.reddit.com/r/InstacartShoppers/

- https://old.reddit.com/r/McDonaldsEmployees/

I guess you could also add these to the list:

- https://old.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/

- https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromRetail/

I'm always looking out for curious little subreddits like these that give you a glimpse into a different way of living or working. If anyone has any other recommendations, please share.

swyx
Ex finance guy here - Liar's Poker for 1980s Wall Street, When Genius Failed for 1990s, More Money Than God for 2000s, Flash Boys for 2010s

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys

obviously these do not represent all of finance but its a nice decade-by-decade recap of talking points, i figured i'd try to do it and was surprised how nicely it broke out

cambalache
Those are all good recommendations, but if anything tech/SV is resembling every day more and more to 1980s WS.
swyx
yep. i'm merely one of many finance bros that escaped to tech. if you work in martech, then you absolutely outpaced wallstreet haha.
ghaff
I think it's different in that you do have some subset of people who think they're doing things for the common good, and some actually are, but...

"Greed is good" Gordon Gecko

cambalache
Lots of finance people, rightly or wrongly justify their work as giving a valuable service to humanity: From "providing liquidity" to "absorbing risk" and "helping your pension grow" the list of supposed goods provided by finance is very long.
ghaff
And they're not entirely wrong. Although there are benefits provided by other industries on net (probably including tech) that are greater.
ghaff
Monkey Business was a pretty funny read too--for certain definitions of funny.
travmatt
If you like books on finance and history, “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” by Edwin Lefèvre is also an excellent book, and an interesting view into early Wall Street.
fossuser
Patio11 specifically calls out flash boys as bad and inaccurate.

He recommends: https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-...

Which I’ve had on my shelf for a while, but haven’t yet read.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10
May I ask why you left finance for tech? I'm considering going into trading instead of SWE because the environment may be more social. I also spend a lot time analyzing current events, so why not get paid for it, too?
ghufran_syed
I made a career change into sales and trading for a while, then went back into full-time medicine - finance is a really interesting subject, but the proportion of assholes in sales and trading is much higher than in software, medicine, or most corporate jobs (all of which of course have some proportion of assholes).

That's not to say that people in that industry can't be charming - they totally can be, but they will also do whatever it takes to boost up their reputation (and therefore their annual bonus) at your expense. "Liar's poker" is a pretty accurate description of the culture, but it's much worse when you have to deal with it every day.

My experience was on the sell-side, things may be different on the buy-side. Feel free to message me if you want to chat.

giantg2
I work as a dev at a financial company. I can say that I agree with you. The people (both business side and dev side) in the trading portion of the company were much more likely to be assholes than in the non-trading areas, such as client facing areas. It seemed like the closer people got to being a trader or portfolio manager, the more likely they were to have a mindset of "I'm better than you. I know more than you, so do what I say.", even when they don't know what they're doing.
kippinitreal
“When Genius Failed” is really good. Lot of parallels to tech where folks are visionaries right up until the day that they’re not and how things that we don’t truly understand can go haywire
billfruit
Would "Bonfire of the Vanities" make a good introduction to 80s Wall Street as well?
omosubi
It's a good insight into the mind of a banker/master of the universe but it doesn't go into too much detail about the actual job IIRC, though tbh I haven't read it in a few years
NothingIsReal
1. How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling, Bettger

A good intro to sales, and a very good book on self-development.

2. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Lowenstein

A story about LTCM, one of the early and most notorious "quant" hedge funds. A cheeky nod to intellectualism.

3. Liar's Poker, Lewis

Investment banking through a trader's eyes. Yes, the absurdity is only partly dramatized.

4. Pimp: The Story of My Life, Iceberg Slim

No pithy blurb can summarize this; read it if you want a look into human nature.

5. The Six-Month Fix: Adventures in Rescuing Failing Companies, Sutton

Written by a friend and a mentor; may he rest. Gives you a sobering account of what really goes behind the scenes of many companies, along with their management.

Apologies; I know this list isn't focused on more humbling professions like the examples you gave.

ghaff
Historical but Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse on old-style political journalism. (Although I imagine a lot is still true.) There's a lot about journalism, photojournalism, and so forth (perhaps unsurprisingly) although so much has changed in the past 10-20 years it probably isn't that relevant to those professions today.
potions
Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is really entertaining and lucid if you are interested in a 'casual'(in tone) explanation of the global financial crisis.

It's a set of interviews with "n+1 magazine" from the course of the year later expanded and collated.

shortandsweet
Nine pints by Rose George. While not entirely about leechers, a chapter is dedicated to the raising and using of leeches in modern medicine. Very fascinating.
legitster
"First Do No Harm" - A memoir from a brain surgeon.
dangets
I'll plug 'When Breath Becomes Air', also for brain surgeon.
randcraw
And I'll add Atul Gawande's “Better” and “Complications” on general surgery in particular and medicine in general.
rscho
For something a touch more down to earth regarding medicine:

House of God, by Samuel Shem. It might be difficult to believe, but this book is very realistic. Much more so than many other insufferable navel-gazing books about medical work taking grand philosophical stances.

Tade0
Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia, Ronald K. Siegel

A collection of stories showing some of the ugly parts of being a psychopharmacologist, based on the author's own experiences.

paulgb
> what is it like to work on a container ship

You might like The Shipping Man by Matthew McCleery. It's fiction, but the author is in the shipping financing industry and the book is a fun way to learn about (a caricaturized version of) that world.

embit
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat By neurologist Oliver Sacks is a great book describing some of his very interesting cases. More importantly, his writing style is brilliant.
varenc
Check out “Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs”

It’s fascinating and covers a very wide range of professions. Sorta of like a more modern remake of Stud Terkel’s 1974 book “Working”

fluxic
Editing: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg

>>> Max Perkins was the editor of Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, and other famous 20th century writers. Great, great, book.

Bartending: Cosmopolitan by Toby Cecchini

>>> Very well-written memoir of a bartender in New York in the late 1980s. He invented the Cosmo in NYC while working at the Odeon — on a lark, without thinking much of it. The drink took off, but I think he's still a working bartender in NYC.

Cooking: Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain

Painting: Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

Music: Meet me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman

Tech: Chaos Monkeys by AGM

And seconding swyx's recommendations for all things Michael Lewis, who can spin a good yarn about any profession — whether it's baseball managers, junk bond salesmen, or high frequency traders, etc.

I've also picked up lots of good recommendations from this thread https://ask.metafilter.com/243036/Recommend-a-nonfiction-aut... (I, too, like "insidery" type business books. I'm currently reading "The Emperor of Scent" about the world of perfume and it's pretty good! Also looking forward to reading "Ninety Percent of Everything" about the shipping industry.)

why5s
Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs

https://www.amazon.com/Gig-Americans-Talk-About-Their/dp/060...

It's basically a series of interviews with people across various industries talking about their jobs. Not exactly "memoir"-style but more of an anthology.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...

A personal favorite that I read alongside the first recommendation. Just puts a lot of things in perspective with respect to finding meaningful work.

shicky
With bullshit jobs, could you expand on finding meaningful work? It's something that has eaten me up the last while (non meaningful work and being unsure what direction to head to find it)

I've searched a few reviews of the book but largely seemed to focus on how many jobs are pointless rather than finding non pointless stuff

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Jugurtha
Here's a reply[0] to a question that asked about directory structure.

Ignore the programming/technology part.

Military books (such as "One Bullet Away" by Nathaniel Fick or "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO). Field manuals can be interesting and you can learn a lot from them.

Knot books.

"Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" by Robert Gates is interesting.

"The Art of Intelligence", by Henry Crumpton.

"Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger is an interesting read. It starts with the balance of power in Europe, raison d'état, Richelieu, "U.S. exceptionalism". It is well written.

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17593922

wmoser
Since you called out working on a container ship, a lot of these have a nautical bent but that’s an area of my personal interest as well.

Looking for a ship, John McPhee, Book about a sailor looking for work and eventually catching a ship.

Born A Crime, Trevor Noah, not about another career but Apertheid South Africa, I enjoyed it and wished I would have read it before traveling through S.A. For work.

Don’t Tell mum I work on the rigs, she thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse, by Paul Carter, read this one awhile ago but it’s about an oil well driller. The industry has changed quite a bit since this book was written but I remember really enjoying it.

Salvage: a personal odyssey by Ian Tew. I enjoyed this book about a a salvage master out of Singapore

The ride of a lifetime by Robert Iger, book about Iger’s journey to being CEO of Walt Disney Company. A bit of insight to what the company executives are doing/ supposed to be doing?

Quench Your Own Thirst, Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer company. He discusses some of the mistakes he made along the way too.

Good clean fun, Nick offerman

wdewind
> "Generation Kill" by Evan Wright which was turned into a mini-series on HBO)

I haven't read the book but I've seen the miniseries many times, it is one of my favorites. It has a TON of great lessons about how large groups of people organize themselves and how the individuals within those groups behave and why that are very pertinent to tech and management in general.

Jugurtha
I have read the book simultaneously with Nathaniel Fick's book to get two versions and styles. Funny thing, Fick's story about a picture in a news outlet changes: sometimes it's his girlfriend, and sometimes it's his mom who tells him something along the lines of "Thank god you're not involved in that" about a photograph of Marines going on a mission to Pakistan.

>how the individuals within those groups behave and why that are very pertinent to tech and management in general.

One anecdote is Staff Sergeant Eric Kocher talking about Gunnery Sgt. Ray 'Casey Kasem' Griego being a nightmare when he was helping "Encino Man", but great when his job was training them for the second tour. This is a reminder that a person in different contexts can act differently and have different "performances". Similar to "Wartime Churchill vs. Peacetime PM Churchill"

pjmorris
I found 'The Prize', a history of the development of the oil industry, by Daniel Yergin, to be fascinating.

Perhaps closer to your request, 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain comes the closest to describing life in a restaurant kitchen in a very entertaining way. (Source: Was once a dishwasher and cook in a couple places.) If you like Bourdain, his friend, Michael Ruhlman has several books on being, and becoming, a chef.

huge87
Kitchen Confidential was really fun. The audiobook happens to be narrated by Bourdain, too.
ghaff
Anthony Sampson's The Seven Sisters about the oil industry was also good although pretty old at this point. It does go into how the powers split things up post-WWI though.
mikhailfranco
On the kitchen thread, try Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, which describes his experience as a dishwasher in 1930's Paris.

For an interesting study of casual labor in the gig economy for house painters in the 1910's, see The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell,

secfirstmd
The Secret Barrister. A little bit UK-centric but a lot of what is mentioned is really true of most modern criminal justice systems.
noodlesUK
The secret barrister and its sequel, Fake Law, are just fantastic introductions to the British criminal (and civil to an extent) justice system and its current failings, and where improvements can be made. I’d recommend it to anyone, even outside the UK, as so many of its lessons are generally applicable. Further, to a US audience, it might shatter some ingrained beliefs that all justice systems are the same globally (driven largely by tv and movie narratives).
vmurthy
Never split the difference : Chris Voss [0] & Start with No : Jim Camp [1] opened my eyes to tactics used by sales/"business" folks when they negotiate with me and provided some tips which help me in my own negotiations. Case in point: A car dealer mentioned to me casually that a car whose MRP is AUD 38800 would never be discounted below 34000. I took it as a psychological "anchor" that had to be explored and negotiated rather than agreed upon without discussion. Started with a random figure of 32349 and ended up with getting the car for 33500 ( given that it was my first negotiation, I think it's a win :-) )

Influence by Cialdini is a timeless classic that helps me appreciate the fascinating world of human psychology

[0] https://www.amazon.in/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Dep...

[1] https://www.amazon.in/Start-No-Negotiating-Tools-That/dp/060...

e15ctr0n
Save Me the Plums, a memoir by a former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, that chronicles the golden age of print media before the Internet turned the world of publishing upside down. https://www.amzn.com/081298238X
cafard
Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana is about a way of life long gone, but it is well worth reading. As for the more recent merchant marine, Christopher Buckley's Steaming to Bamboola is very funny, and I suppose fairly accurate. For forest rangers, Norman Maclean's novella "USFS 1919", collected in A River Runs Through It, gives a picture of how it was then.

August Fruge, longtime director of the University of California Press, wrote an excellent memoir, A Skeptic Among Scholars. There are many academic novels and memoirs, but I think very well of Alvin Kernan's In Plato's Cave. Also there is Herbert Simon's Models of My Life, which touches on academia and computing.