Not a book or course per say, but based on a book:

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" by Venkat [0]

Other contenders:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [1]

Haseeb qureshi's articles on Negotiating [2]

These along with er... mind-altering substances, helped me see that reality as we live it (careers, status, institutions, ect) is like software: built/programmed by humans and can be changed by shifting your perspective.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLfc2WtGuVP...

[2] https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...

Two books I read after 9/11 shaped my path greatly:

1.) Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police

ISBN #: 0813337445

2.) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

ISBN #: 9780671728694

Both should be available in most public libraries, but with the ISBN you can usually get almost anything via inter-library loan.

To answer the question as I misread it:

  What's the most career altering *course of action* you've gone through?

I was an IT guy, and I took a job making gears in a job shop. The pay and commute were horrible, but it was immensely satisfying. Some of the gears I helped make will still be in service in a century.

"The Annotated Turing" - I didn't know you could meaningfully intertwine biography and technical analysis like that.

A/B testing.

I learned how to write high performance JavaScript code directly to the DOM without a bunch of abstraction bullshit. Turns out this proved to be a bias because our experiment code frequently executed faster and failed far less than the actual production code that went out later.

Programming Perl, 1st Ed. from Larry Wall. The three great virtues of a programmer were enlightening for a fresh-outta-college beginner.

Data Smart, by John Foreman. Out of print, but you can get it from Abe Books: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/data-smart-using-...

Why it is cool?

Because instead of R, Gadoop, Spark, Python, whatever... it started explaining data science with excel.

The best part for me was optimization.

The Boy's Second book of Electronics by Alfred Morgan(1957) introduced me to electronics circa 1975, and lead to a technical mindset and lifestyle.

"The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie.

A digital electronics design course I took at the local science museum when I was 11. It was free, so what the heck, I took it on a whim. I didn't know it at the time, but it set the course of my career for the rest of my life even though I'm a software, not electronic, engineer.

for me it was learning devops

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