That's what I had in mind! The whole post is a claim that evaluating knowledge work got more expensive because cheaper measures stopped correlating well with quality.
If someone was already evaluating the work output using a metric closer to the underlying quality then it might not have been a big shift for them (other than having much more work to evaluate).
Funny, I spent the last decade working in a strongly typed natively compiled language (OCaml) and for fun I’m venturing into Ruby more and more, so kinda opposite of what you did :)
I’d agree that I wouldn’t like to support a large Ruby codebase commercially but in team of 1-4 devs and codebase not much larger than 10k lines it’s very productive (numbers pulled from thin air ofc).
1. A Philosophy of Software Design is very good. Not the whole of it but it’s short and to the point.
2. Fiction, as diverse as possible. I apologise for making assumptions but many software engineers are secretly lacking in understanding other people, what kind of of life experiences that have, how they think about the world, what is important for them. If you work with people it is going to be useful.
Also, it’ll enrich your life and you’ll have more to talk about during coffee breaks :)
If someone was already evaluating the work output using a metric closer to the underlying quality then it might not have been a big shift for them (other than having much more work to evaluate).