Sapiens

Not an engineering book, but it changed how I think about why large organisations work at all.

What it's about

Yuval Noah Harari tells the history of our species through a few big turns: the Cognitive Revolution, when humans began to share imagined stories; the Agricultural Revolution; the unification of humankind through money, empires, and religions; and the Scientific Revolution, driven by admitting ignorance and investing in finding out.

What stuck

Shared fictions are the superpower. Humans cooperate in huge numbers with strangers because we believe the same stories: money, laws, nations, companies. None of them exist in the physical world, yet they coordinate millions of people. A company is a legal and social agreement that outlives everyone who founded it.

Progress for the species is not always progress for the person. Harari's provocative take on agriculture is that it let populations grow while making many individual lives harder. It is a useful reminder that a system can succeed on its own metric while failing the people inside it.

Money is a system of trust. Money works because everyone believes everyone else will accept it. That framing makes a lot of financial infrastructure, including the custody and payment systems I have built, feel less like plumbing and more like maintaining a shared belief.

Science starts with "we don't know". The Scientific Revolution is framed as a willingness to admit ignorance and fund the search. It is the healthiest engineering culture in one sentence.

What I'd apply

• Treat team norms, APIs, and architecture principles as shared stories. They only work if people keep believing them, so they need retelling.
• Check whether a metric that is improving is improving for the people it is supposed to serve.