Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth & Change

By Scott J. Pearson | January 30, 2025January 30, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

A lot of people enter software development because they don’t want their primary job task to consist of interacting with people. However, career progressions often define management as the next step after being a senior developer. To those who don’t want to be with people full-time, this hierarchy can make a dead end. In recent years, the pathway of a staff engineer has opened up. Staff engineers are in charge of the technical direction of…

Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People

By Scott J. Pearson | January 29, 2025January 29, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Today’s world is increasingly dependent on technology to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our businesses. Yet assessing which technical person to hire can be a tall task. Do you just hire the one that is most like you? Or do you hire the one with the most accolades? And how do you advertise? Johanna Rothman’s book empowers readers to figure out their own answers. Although the technology of hiring has changed significantly since its…

Management-Business Psychology

Active Listening by Carl Rogers

By Scott J. Pearson | January 22, 2025January 22, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This short book, originally penned in 1957, addresses an important topic that’s become an expected leadership competency today. Active listening is a core expectation for managers in almost every field. Although it sounds easy to do, the practice actually requires a great deal of discipline and mental acuity. Fortunately, by encouraging the self-worth of the speaker, it unleashes a world of creative energy that can multiply any team’s accomplishments. As the authors contend, it simply…

Leadership

Trust & Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others

By Scott J. Pearson | January 20, 2025January 20, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Today’s leadership, as practiced, often includes an approach borrowed from the Industrial Age and popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management.” It seeks to have a leader in complete “command and control” of all aspects of production. However, in the postmodern age, interdisciplinary knowledge workers often conduct every step along the way, and any leader does not and cannot know every step of the journey. Coupled with human nature, command and control tactics inhibit productivity…

Presentation Visualization

Visual Explanations: Images & Quantities, Evidence & Narrative

By Scott J. Pearson | January 19, 2025January 19, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” so the saying goes. Thus, an effective visualization, enriched by information, must count for so much more. But a misconstrued visualization, unfortunately, can lead to horrific outcomes from misinterpretations. How can we refine our visual thinking so that we can infer correct deductions while ignoring misplaced sketches? Visualization guru Edward Tufte teaches us how to reason about our world through informative displays in this helpful guide, replete with…

Software-Technology

Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures

By Scott J. Pearson | January 13, 2025January 13, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

A software architect foresees potential issues in a design and judges which way will instill the most business success in the long run. Unfortunately, in almost every scenario, trade offs permeate every option. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Learning to anticipate problems with wisdom set great software architects apart from merely experienced ones. In this book, several experienced authors look at those trade offs in the context of distributed software…

Presentation Visualization

Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte

By Scott J. Pearson | January 12, 2025January 12, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

All the way back to Galileo sharing about Jupiter’s moons, science has relied upon visualizations to communicate its findings. Some things are just better depicted visually instead of through words. In contemporary society, information graphics have played an increasingly larger role as computers quickly translate data into a more accessible format. Newspapers and Internet websites have made them commonplace. Even though this book was written in 1990, before ubiquitous computing, it identifies the philosophical and…

Fiction-Stories

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

By Scott J. Pearson | January 11, 2025January 11, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

In 1920s America, George Babbitt has it all. He lives in an up-and-coming, prosperous town. He has a family and two children. He has a successful job. He’s not a superman. No, he’s neither a CEO of a large corporation, nor a super-rich business tycoon, nor a famous celebrity. Nonetheless, he’s living a good life. But something suddenly happens to one of his close friends, and he calls his entire life into question. Today, we…

Management-Business

Interviewing & Selecting High Performers: Every Manager’s Guide to Effective Interviewing Techniques

By Scott J. Pearson | January 4, 2025January 4, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This book was recommended to me as a solid work about the fundamentals of the hiring process. It delivered what was promised. It’s not a book focused on a recent management trend, but instead is a work built upon classical psychology – the art of reading people quickly and effectively. It attempts to minimize the amount of bias that interviewers inevitably put into an interview and maximize the observed items that interviewers extract from an…

Healthcare History Research-Education

Meharry Medical College

By Scott J. Pearson | January 1, 2025January 1, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Soon after Emancipation, large efforts were required to meet the needs of formerly enslaved people. A medical college was founded in Nashville as a department of Central Tennessee College to train black doctors to address the needs of the underserved blacks across the country. Now called Meharry Medical College almost 150 years later, the school continues to educate healthcare professionals and advance “the worship of God through service to man.” This book chronicles its history…