Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.
I lent “Peopleware” [affiliate link] to a friend at some point but never got it back. I supposed they valued it as much as I do. I should probably buy the newer edition at some point.
I’m not sure if this book was the epiphany or it just happened around the same time, but at worst it was a major influence. The epiphany was that the really hard challenges in computer science were not the technical ones but the ones around people. It doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to work on technical problems or solve them. But the challenges organising and getting people to communicate and work together effectively and build the right thing (rather than the interesting thing that we want to build) are also important, possibly more important.
I don’t have the book to reference right now (see above), but there are many memorable parts. I like the part about the lighting in an office. They performed an experiment by raising and lowering the lighting levels to see what was optimal. But each change they made, productivity went up. You’ll have to read the book to find out why.
In many ways, the depressing thing about this book is how little has changed. Companies are still stuffing people into poor offices “to aid collaboration” but without considering the factors we knew about decades ago.