The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully

Previous thread "I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316653 From that posting this comment seems useful: The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald Weinberg https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Suc... (https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Successfully/dp/0932633013/)

My three favorites from Gerald Weinberg: 1. 'The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully' I was put off for a decade by the click-bait title but this is a profound little book that helped me get perspective on problem solving in my work and myself. 2. 'Becoming a Technical Leader' The text is great; working the exercises for yourself will make you a stronger thinker. 3. 'An Introduction to General Systems Thinking' One of his densest, driest books, but a great summary of the highlights of the field with plenty of thought problems in the exercises and plenty of pointers for digging deeper.

How to win friends and influence people. Helped me solve some approaches to handling people in general and highlighted a few approaches that I had been taking that were actively causing me problems. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald Weiberg. [1] Helped me understand why technical problems are rarely just technical. Working effectively with legacy code by Michael Feathers [2]. Practicing some of the techniques in this helped me get my foot in the door in a job long ago where one of the interview scenarios was "This is broken, go ahead and fix it.". I recommend reading this for anyone working on a code base that's been around for a while. -- [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Suc... (https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Successfully-ebook/dp/B004J35LHQ/) [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Robert-Mar... (https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Robert-Martin-ebook/dp/B005OYHF0A/)