Leverage Notes #8: Don’t Recommend The Art Of War To Engineers

I wrapped up reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It ended up being what I expected: an outdated manual on war tactics with some eastern philosophy mixed in. The book didn’t quite live up to the hype of it being a good study for how to live life. While the emphasis on knowing yourself is a useful reminder, approaching major life areas that do not require competition with an adversarial mindset is counterproductive. Viewing life as a zero-sum game can be off-putting for meaningful connections while raising children, in a relationship, or with coworkers.

The book being a bit underwhelming reminded me of when I finished my Computer Science degree. It turned out that CS is not software engineering. The theory-heavy nature of the degree was in stark contrast with the action-oriented pace of software development. While the broad skills that the degree taught were valuable, the skills that employers value are not the primary focus. It took a couple of botched software interviews during my first job search for me to figure that out.

But not meeting the hype does not make the book not have value. It’s just a matter of realigning expectations and allowing appreciation to set in for what it is. As I continue my engineering career, I’ll remember the lessons around knowing your weaknesses the next time I am doing cybersecurity threat modeling. I’ll also appreciate how learning to delete a node from a binary search tree in my algorithms course helps me analyze a legacy system’s implicit invariants.

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