November 2026
Beginner to intermediate
242 pages
5h 1m
English
Content preview from A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader
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Chapter 35. An Unreasonable Investment
Do you remember your first job? Correction: not your first job, but the first job you wanted. “This is my career. This is what I want to do. I don’t want to screw this up.”
I was a grocery store clerk, a butcher, a video store clerk, the guy who backed up the system onto tape drives on Saturday morning, and a bookseller before I landed my first job. A friend put a good word in at Symantec, and for a summer I was an intern working on a database product called Q&A. This was the summer after I’d just absolutely crushed my first year of computer science at UCSC, and I didn’t want to screw this up.
It was a long while ago. Like, pre-Facebook, pre-Netscape, and pre-Windows. A long while ago, the concept of new employee onboarding was “throw the intern in the deep end and see if they can swim.”
After a week of letting me get familiar with the product, my manager gave me the task of testing the natural language interface of the product. Natural language interface. This was 1989, and we were running software from a 3.5″ floppy drive. Q&A offered a natural language interface where you typed questions against your flat-file database, such as “How many invoices are greater than $500?” And it’d answer the question. No LLM required.
Magic in 1989. My responsibility to test. First job. Don’t screw it up.
The natural language portion of Q&A was written in Lisp, the solar system’s second-oldest programming language, specified in 1958. The oldest is Fortran ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.