Old Coder Guy Book 1

A Book Review (of sorts)

As a fan of the OCG tiktok, and an early backer of this book, I felt like it would be a fun one to toss into our monthly book review.

@kylelarryevansthe book review you've been asking for #booktok #coding

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If you’re not familiar with with Old Coder Guy, you definitely need to be. As someone who has worked in tech nearly twice as long as I have, he’s seen at least twice as much bullshit and captures it amazingly well in his videos.

@oldcoderguyThe main reason projects fail: communication. #communication #projectmanagement #tech #agile #scrum #traylor #tayvis #swelce #fyp

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So what about his book? As you can imagine, it is a no-holds-barred whirlwind of lessons and stories through a career in coding and technology. From working at big finance companies to working at startups and founding companies.

The book winds in many directions, and sometimes leaves you wondering, “what the hell did I just read?” But let’s talk about some of my favorite parts.

Key Takeaways

Develop Shared Understanding

This is a theme that we’ve talked about frequently in this newsletter and is always one of my favorites, because it is so critical to the success of any product or project and is always so easy to mess up. The book acknowledges this:

Group dynamics create an enormous pressure not to not know what you’re talking about. That wording is intentional: there’s almost zero innate pressure to know what you’re talking about. Plenty of people sit in hours of meetings every day with absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on and feel no anxiety whatsoever.

So we need to help everyone get on the same page. According to the author, we do this by:

So be nice. But also, when it is inarguable and emphatically necessary, be able to tell everyone to go fuck themselves and proceed to burn it all down.