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Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

495 points by zachlatta ↗ HN
Seeking recommendations for books about how hard things got done. I like the Acquired podcast, but am looking for reading deeper than it.

I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.

Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.

452 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] thread
bobheadmaker
You can find documentaries also on youtube, for example. There was one interesting about Dubai's development
jrflowers
“Check out something other than books” is a hilarious response to a request for book recommendations, though I would have included a specific example of a non-book, like “I see you mentioned private equity, have you listened to the songs of Jim Croce? He often writes about love and getting into bar fights, which are things that some people have difficulty with”
throwaway81523
I remember a few years ago Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters rock band died unexpectedly and the cause of death was not immediately revealed. I was disappointed to learn sometime later that the cause had been heart failure. If I were a member of the Foo Fighters and had to die at the relatively early age of 50, of course I would have wanted it to be in a bar fight. Come to think of it, Bar Fighters might be a good name for a tribute band.

So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?

pjmorris
> So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?

That might depend on how you feel about 'Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991', which is a book about bands starting.

jrflowers
Instead of reading that book there is a painting called Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image by Gerard van Honthorst that’s worth checking out
aaron695
Extra points for not linking said docos.

Creating an account to post this and this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506, what's the game plan?

Trying to pollute HN like TLAs did 4chan or just a misfiring brain?

I'll call it aaron695s adage, it's now impossible to tell mental illness and TLAs apart on the internet.

ahazred8ta
Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd

peterldowns
I'm extremely excited to read Exactly, thanks for the recommendation.
HeyLaughingBoy
The thing about Boyd that really resonated with me was.

1) Realizing that he was better at something than everyone else around him.

2) Figuring out what it was that was making him better.

3) Reducing it to practice, so it could be taught to others and refined to become even better.

Amazing story.

wbl
Boyd gets far too much credit for the F-16. If he had his way it wouldn't work at night or honestly at all in the face of the current threat environment.
__alexander
Boyd’s contributions might seem impressive but he seemed like a disgusting human being. He was confrontational, chewed his nails, smoked cigars, made his family live in a tiny apartment so he could be close to work, etc. I can’t remember it all but I quit reading his biography 3/4s in because he just sounded like horrendous person.
squeedles
I loved Longitude, and Harrison was a determined guy, but the most interesting part for me was seeing the “rewrite from scratch” and “never ship” dynamics are old indeed! He had a MVP with his first iteration.
thruway516
Unfortunately I got this as an audiobook and the author, who is born in the Bronx, decided for some reason to read it in a British accent which made it really hard for me to get through. Might have to get the book itself and give it another try.
uncomplexity_
how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me
readyplayernull
The Soul of a New Machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

markus_zhang
This is a good one. I read it twice just to experience the 70-80s development atmosphere. The daughter of Tom West did complain on Reddit a few years ago that Tom neglected them during the period, but I still admire such personality. The same admiration goes to David Cutler in "Showstopper".
ghaff
Tom was very intense. Dotted line worked for him for a while. Latterly he had an internet-related effort that didn't pan out (welcome to the crowd) but also was fairly instrumental in CLARiiON RAID disk arrays and an early NUMA architecture, neither of which ultimately saved Data General but probably helped keep it running for longer than it otherwise would have.
Gooblebrai
Feels like season 1 of Halt And Catch Fire
ghaff
Different segment of the industry but about the same time period (HaCF is maybe set a few years later).
superconduct123
My main takeaway from reading that book was that working in tech in the late 70s was not that different from now days

Just different technology/hardware/timescale

Same workplace problems, personality types, company politics, etc...

Did not expect to find it so relatable in 2024

throwawayohio
Curious -- To me it just seemed pretty standard (for any industry). Did you think the tech work environment today was somehow more enlightened than previous generations general working environments?
jbullock35
There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different, at least in the USA: worker compensation.

In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a world that's very far from the FAANG of today, at least were compensation is concerned.

withinboredom
I worked for a guy that converted half the office into a store with windows so shoppers could "watch us work" ... things haven't changed much, for non-FAANG.
silvestrov
Is a windowless basement that much worse than the open officies of Facebook?

I'd rather have a small room with silence than work in a well lit factory with tons of noise like this: https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

There isn't any dividers or other stuff that blocks noise.

ghaff
Offices were pretty much for managers. The standard was (high-walled) cubicles. Although a lot of the people involved here were in hardware so a lot of their work was in open labs.
jbullock35
I worked there a few years ago. It was almost always easy to reserve a room if you wanted more quiet or more privacy.
adamc
People are mostly the same. It's just the cultural context that shifts, and mostly that changes slowly, even when tech changes rapidly.
adamc
This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It's great simply as a piece of writing -- and the story it tells is an interesting one.

I liked it enough that after I listened to it on Audible I went out and bought a hardback version to re-read. That almost never happens.

rednafi
“South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition, 1914–1917” by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Here, Shackleton documents the journey of the Endurance expedition, which aimed to traverse Antarctica but instead became a legendary tale of survival after the ship was trapped and destroyed by pack ice.
RGamma
I haven't verified the info in this video myself, but it's making a point about Shackleton actually being somewhat incompetent/overeager and getting himself and crew into more trouble than necessary (as compared to Amundsen): https://youtube.com/watch?v=DU06c7f9fzc (TED talk, sorry)
tamersalama
I'm currently listening to "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing". I've also heard of some of the arguments against Shackleton (I haven't watched the talk).

I have to think of what Shackleton, as a leader (boss), was going through and with uncertainties abound.

28 people who he hired based not only on capability alone, but also for crew (team) fit.

He apparently cared deeply for them, and they in-turn cared for one another.

They managed to work together in the harshest of environments. They all made it.

That in and of itself, is a remarkable feat.

carlosjobim
You have a mistaken perspective on the whole thing. These men were seafaring adventurers, not people who will call their lawyer if there isn't a gluten free option in their restaurant.

Every crew member was fully informed that they were more likely to die than survive the journey – before even sending in their applications.

And Shackleton is dead since long, so you can't cancel him anymore.

digikata
Related and also a good read is "The Roald Amundsen Diaries : The South Pole Expedition 1910-1912". You can see the ship he used on the expedition, the Fram at the appropriately named, Fram Museum in Oslo. It's an incredible experience to see and contemplate the expeditions these explorers mounted, and what equipment and resources they assembled to do it at a very early time.

https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9788282350105?cm_sp=b...

fiftyacorn
I didnt realise the ship was in a museum - Dundee has the discovery museum for Scotts ship which is good for a visit too
fifilura
Moreover, you can walk around inside the ship and see the cabins they lived in, indeed an incredible, immersive experience.

Came here to say that Amundsen is a great example of someone who did hard things and made them look easy. Nansen also. And Shackleton, although he didn't make them look easy...

Basically everything written by Roland Huntford about polar exploration is great inspiration. The Last Place on Earth covers Amundsen and Scott (the latter who did difficult things and made them look hard and died.)

anfractuosity
I rather liked 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation'
Blackstrat
Agreed. Just finished it a couple of weeks ago. Hackers by Levy and fire in the Valley may also fit the bill.
dyingkneepad
> hard things

How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years?

"The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.

Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.

willmarch
Freedom's Forge
jamestimmins
Second this. It do a great job explaining how the WW2 armament buildup required both legislative and mindset changes on behalf of the government about what a good working relationship between business and government looked like.

10/10 book.

teleforce
Richard Hamming's book on AT&T Bell Labs R&D culture in inventing and solving many of the important problems [1].

Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2].

[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

[2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:

https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...

lnwlebjel
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner is similarly great for some of the earlier/origin stories of Bell Labs.
marcklingen
The Innovators, Walter Isaacson

It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.

f2000
Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen

"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "

shivaraj1996
"Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts. This book mostly follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve to Elon praise too much. There is a continuation to this book called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.
austin-cheney
> Less interested in people and character studies.

If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:

1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence.

2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost.

3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done.

4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else.

People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.

random3
Not bad advice, but the ask was for books - do you have any?
austin-cheney
No, the only real answer to this is character studies the op did not want those I won’t recommend them.
cindycindy
Thank you so much for putting these heuristics into words. My only question here is that a lot of what you wrote seems like best practice from the perspective of a person within the tech industry. Outsiders might call it common sense. So if everyone knows what they 'should' be doing, then why do so few actually follow through?

One answer to that question might be character. Angela Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit". It is a lot like character study, which the OG explicitly expressed their disinterest for. My intuition is no matter how well you can describe the steps for success, success is not replicable. If true, that would explain why there are hundreds of self books, thousands of coaches, and only a handful of people who can consistently excel.

Having said that, I hesitate to say that there are only a few people in the world who are exceptional due to a constraint I would describe as "genuine article". How depressing a thought that would be.

Carpe diem! Floor the gas pedal, and see how fast you can go. Maybe you'll break all expectations and fly into space.

llamaimperative
Luck is a massive, massive factor. There are plenty of exceptionally smart and gritty people who fail, and plenty of far less-so who succeed.

Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people “having the answers,” no one can replicate it reliably. And even the ones who can likely wouldn’t be able to if you removed capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.

But of course luck tends to strike when you’re working hard and consistently, so it’s not totally out of one’s hands.

austin-cheney
I suspect there are a number of factors that eliminate people from these steps like objectivity, persistence, and other virtues.

The biggest single discriminator that the Y Combinator people talk about, which I agree with, is doing the right things first without regard for scale. Most developers will immediately jump to some framework so that they can prop up some web app in the shortest time and immediately go into promotions and then struggle with scale when they need to scale.

I had this big app that tried to solve for full decentralization of universal file system access from a browser. I wrote my own end-to-end test automation tool and focused all my energy on software execution performance. These things allowed me to prove out new ideas and identify regression in about 8 seconds on a single machine or about 2 minutes on 5 machines talking to each other. Most people won't invest in that. I could perform a massive refactor across dozens for files and hundreds of lines without regression in about 2 hours. At work, at that job at that time, I spending more than 2 weeks for tiny refactors that were littered with regressions and having to clean up other people's messes.

Worse, is that most people recognize when they are not performing well, especially if it is anywhere from 10-100x less well. The normal go to place is either sympathy or an echo chamber. High performers don't do that. They aren't trying to impress people with their awesomeness or seeking sympathy when it falls apart. They just build what they need at great expense because its something they can have that others won't have.

cpach
You might like Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It’s written by Jessica Livingston, who founded Y Combinator.
intpx
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
pololeono
House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox

In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.

djkivi
Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation of id Software.
zooweemama
I loved MoD! The audio book read by Will Wheaton is also pretty good.
shortrounddev2
Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake, when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics. His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot. There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack
Steffajos
Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes does a great job covering the rivalry between Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse over electrifying the world. I liked how it broke down the technical and business challenges and showed the impact on everyday life and industry.
zem
dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent
peterldowns
I read these three books last year and I believe that each would be interesting to you:

Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage

This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.

How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512

This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies.

The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...

This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.

deanebarker
+1 for "How Big Things Get Done." Great book.
iainmerrick
Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one of Levin’s strengths) but also plenty of details about the incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all together.
liendolucas
Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that describes how the Apollo computer was developed.

Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from.

Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week.

Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.

rasse
You might want to look into books about H. Tracy Hall. He's one of the inventors of lab-grown diamonds, the hardest things ever done.