Quoting Nikhil Suresh on You Must Read At Least One Book To Ride

“There are the engineers who have read 1+ books on a given topic, and sometimes on several topics, and they all come off as extremely competent. These are, for the most part, the people that make up the audience of this blog. Of course, you do not literally need to read a book - a sufficiently high volume of technical blogs or courses are probably the equivalent at varying levels of efficiency - but take it for granted there is some Large Sum of information that someone has studied.

Then there are engineers (and people in every profession) who never try for the entirety of their careers, and this is the majority of every profession. I spoke to a reader who is employed as an extremely high-level engineer, Seth Newman - by the way, I’ll connect you if you want to hire a genius data engineer in the U.S - who described the average professional as sleepwalking through their working lives, and this rung true. Of course, they are not literally asleep so something else is going wrong, but the description still seemed apt. There is movement - enough movement to fall down a flight of stairs - but none of the awareness needed to avoid such an outcome.”

– Nikhil Suresh

An interesting perspective on how caring just a little can give you a significant advantage over “sleepwalkers”, competitors who do not have that care to invest in their skills. That and being somewhat discerning over what to learn and how, but that’s another topic altogether.

You can read the whole thing here.