“Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual” by John Sonmez of Simple Programmer fame started out very slow and way too obvious for my tastes. After the first chapter or two I wondered what possessed me to pick up a book that bills itself as “a guide to a well-rounded, satisfying life as a technology professional”. I started to think of the author as Captain Obvious. I imagined him with a foam bat in his hand that he would earnestly use to punctuate each of his points with a gentle whack to my head. “You need people skills”, whack! “Be picky about where you work”, whack! “Have a specialty”, whack! I stuck with it, though, and ended up glad that I did. Yes, some of the advice is obvious and facile. After all, the book is covering an awful lot of territory. Some of it is aimed at people with far less than the 30 years of experience I have in my career. However, the book offers solid advice and a good starting point for deeper exploration on most of the topics it covers.
The book consists of 70 short chapters broken into seven sections: career, marketing yourself, learning, productivity, financial, fitness and spirit. The short chapters create a nice rhythm when listening via Audible since you can always finish a chapter before getting out of your car or otherwise turning off the audio. Later in the book I learned the short chapters were both a motivational technique for the author and an intentional choice to let readers digest the material in bite-sized chunks.
Personally, I found the sections on productivity, fitness and spirit to be most interesting as I am starting to delve deeper into those areas myself. The productivity section was particularly well done. The author’s personal experience of how disciplined use of time changed his life clearly gives him a passion for the topic. He ties planning, pomodoro time management and training techniques together to form an interesting and very practical way to get more done than you ever thought possible. He also takes on notorious time wasters like TV and video games based on his personal experience. It is very compelling advice. His advice on fitness is similarly personal, impassioned and effective.
His advice on investing is equally passionate but edges out into very dangerous territory advocating things like option trading and highly-leverage real estate investing. Although he briefly notes the risks involved, he down plays them quite a bit. He also advocates “good debt”, like the million dollars or so in mortgages he says he currently holds on his rental properties. On the upside, he references “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki and spends a little time clearly explaining the key differences between things that make you money, like stocks and bonds, and things that waste your money, like buying cars with “easy monthly payments”. All in all, his financial advice is a strong net positive though I would advise people to take on less risk than the author advocates, avoid debt of all kinds and generally follow more of Dave Ramsey’s advice on money.
I would recommend this book to almost any technology professional. It’s likely that almost every reader will find several ideas in the book they can use to improve their life and career. I would especially recommend the book for someone just starting out in their career. You can think of the book almost like a very inexpensive mentor. At the very least, it can put you on a path of continual self-improvement.
Tom Cabanski 