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Cube Farm
The book chronicles Blunden's travails as a fresh Cornell grad finding out his degree is useless. After waiting tables, he discovers Java is hot, and gets a job in the incredibly dysfunctional R&D department of Lawson Software, one of those companies that makes horribly dull but necessary business software. Young Blunden is shunted from one doomed project to the next as internal divisions compete with each other (and internally) for territory. The code base is millions of lines of ancient K&R C with all the comments stripped out (!) for speed of compilation. Only a few people understand the entire system to any degree, and these Illuminati crush any attempt to create or disseminate any documentation since that would erode their power base. Any projects that might threaten their monopoly are dispatched by the simple expedient of not responding to any emails or phone calls or attending meetings.
Cube Farm is written in a conversational, semi-edgy style that I found very easy to read, though occasionally annoying when it gets too hip. The subject is technical, but the theme is purely human foible, and Blunden makes an effort to make things understandable even by the non-geeky. So you don't have to be a nerd to understand the book - it would sure help you appreciate it, though.
Important characters are assigned descriptive names such as the Puppet Master, the Godfather, the Wax Master, Mike and Ike, and the Mad Hungarian. This may sound a bit cheap, but works well and makes it easy to keep track of the defectis personae. Everything is well partitioned, and Dance of Death woodcuts enliven the pages.
The obvious question, Why you would read something so horribly depressing? There are only negative lessons to be learned here. Well, in many ways Cube Farm is the informal, nasty version of what you'd get by reading books like Death March (Yourdon, 2003 2nd ed), Herding Cats (Rainwater, 2002), and Software Runaways (Glass, 1997). You can learn a lot from a bad example, like what it means if they won't say Yes or No. Perhaps it'll make you feel better about your own company, which is probably not quite this screwed up. Or there's always good ol' schadenfreude.
Would you give this book to an eager young programmer? Either it would be a bit like taking a sledgehammer to a kitten, or (more likely) it would just all cascade off, unheeded -- "obviously, this could never happen to me." For everyone else, if you've had at least one job or failed project under your belt you might find this horrifically fascinating, similar to watching Repligator. It might help with your next (knock on wood) fine project. Finally, it's a quick read, so I felt my time was well (or at least enjoyably) spent.
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Get a job at a college or university.
I ended up working full-time in the IT dept of the university I graduated from. I didn't plan on, it just kind of happened. The salary isn't as good as "corporate" IT salaries, but it does have other benefits. I can take classes at the school free of charge (not counting the textbook). I can take one class a semester (3 semesters in a year) at another local college for my Masters degree, tuition free. And the benefits are pretty good to. If I had any college age kids, they could go to school tuition free here as well. All in all, a good job without the stress that seems to go hand in hand with corporate IT jobs.
Bill Bluden is my data structures TA at UC Davis. I had him for discussion at 8am this morning. He spent about 10 mintues at the beginning of the quarter telling about his book. Small world.
I guess I had the good fortune of being taught be relatively smart people.
If you form your own company, good for you.
For me, I started off a company where I was being lead by people who were not trained in the field and whose senior programmer had decided that it was that time in his career when he didn't want to learn any major new technologies. I felt superior there because I was an OO programmer and the status quo was functional and kinda crappy. I couldn't go anywhere interesting there so I jumped ship and looked for a differant job letting my wife support me a bit.
I found a place where I quickly realized that I was a pretty bad programmer who had a whole lot to learn. That's what I've been doing since. I look back and I probably wasn't better than the senior programmer at job 1. I just had the ambition to be better than him and the environment wasn't conducive to me learning my weaknesses or improving.
That's what it's about for me. Find somewhere you, as a junior guy, will get some mentoring by capable people.
I would love to be artificial intelligence, for example. MIT would be a great place to study this... my school doesn't have anything decent for it. As I mentioned in another post, my AI class (the only one I could find that they offered) consisted of meaningless crap.
If you want to learn about anything, and you're smart enough to comprehend things without having them spoonfed, you're better off seeing what kind of books rank highest on that topic on amazon, and buying them. Get a good introductory AI book, then use the knowledge gleaned from that to decide which direction you want to go in. I picked up computational linguistics that way.
Schools are not meant to educate you, they are meant to give you credibility and reliability quality indicators in society, possible limited to certain knowledge sets (also known as degrees). The education is just a way for the school to keep up the reputation that the quality labels they stamp on you are sufficient.