Books for people starting from nothing
Written by Kuzzat Altay, from twelve years of teaching career changers to test software. Read & listen, because most people would rather scroll than sit down with a book.
The intro talk as a book: why office work is leaving, why checking software is the work that stays, and a deal where the school carries most of the risk.
Why 10 Good Days Don’t Pay for Day 11: The Discipline of Agentic Context, Skills, and Gates
Old software automated the task. The new software automates the role. Nine chapters on who gets paid to own the quality of the agents that do it.
Writing code got cheap and checking it did not. Seventeen chapters on why a prediction engine cannot tell you when it is wrong, and who pays.
You worked two hours to deserve a chocolate. What did you do to deserve your heart? Nine chapters on gratitude, money, and purpose with a direction.
Thirteen things about the six months in front of you that are not on the syllabus. From twelve years of teaching people who started with nothing.
A seed shows nothing at ten days and nothing at twenty. Nine chapters on why people leave a six-month change four months in, and what that costs.
Twenty-two ideas about how behaviour actually changes, in the order your year will hand them to you. Dopamine is not a plan, and it never was.
Twenty years of school taught you that failing is the thing to avoid. Nine chapters on why that leaves you hearing one rejection as a verdict.
You are the average of your five closest people. Nine chapters on the three times that number had to change, and what each change cost.
Kuzzat Altay, Cydeo
Twelve years in the room with people starting from nothing
I arrived in America with no connections, no engineering degree and no margin for error. Everything on this shelf started as something I said out loud to a room full of people in the same position.
None of it is lecture notes. It was worked out on whiteboards with warehouse workers, drivers and retail staff who had decided to change what they did for a living, and it is the same language I use when a cohort is stuck at eleven at night.
Every book here is free, and you can read it or listen to it. No account, nothing to buy.
- 14,000+
- graduates
- 36
- countries
- 12
- years teaching
- Every cohort
- still taught by him
The next date is being set
Kuzzat still teaches the class these books came from, live, every week. Watch the intro in the meantime. It is the same class, recorded, and it ends with how to reach a person.
The program these books come from
CYDEO’s AI QA Automation program runs live, taught by the person who wrote these books. Six months, from no background at all to testing software for a living.