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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

31–40 of 165 posts

Re: Does your office have a library?

#31
My current employer is a state agency. Yes there is a library. Most of the books in the library are legal books. All of the programming books are currently in our workgroup's offices. I've brought a few programming books from home, they're in my office.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#32

My last job was in a corporate library. My job title was "Librarian". I was technically a Records Manager. The people I worked with appreciated the work I did and the found the library, and me, useful and helpful. Corporate librarians are out there and do good work!

[deleted]

Re: Does your office have a library?

#33
My first tech job had a small bookshelf dedicated to programming resources and business perspectives. I remember some MySQL and PHP books, and also Edward De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" being in there

Another employer had a book sharing Slack channel where people would share ebooks related to programming and software development

Yet another one, which was completely remote, had an ebook service where you could request any ebook you wanted from Amazon, be it work-related or not, and they would order it for you for free. Everyone had a pretty healthy mix of work- and non-work-related items from what I remember

All in all, I think over half of my employers in the tech field have had some kind of library or book service of some kind

Re: Does your office have a library?

#34

My last job was in a corporate library. My job title was "Librarian". I was technically a Records Manager. The people I worked with appreciated the work I did and the found the library, and me, useful and helpful. Corporate librarians are out there and do good work!

Which corporation, if you don't mind me asking? And did you have a background in IR/library science specifically, or just a generalist?

It was actually in a power plant, which was not as interesting as it sounds. At least most days. My masters degree is Library Science. I've had a weird and winding career. I'm a sysadmin now.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#35
This is a great list of excellent questions. I think their value is when applied in large numbers, and not just one by one.

If one day you are pondering whether you want to make a career decision, or a life decision, questions like these could be really useful to start your thinking.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#36
Even if it did, would I use it to look things up, or would I use the internet? Because as much as I like the feel of a book, I'm not going to find a reference that's almost certainly already out of date for the things I need it for =/

(and if it's for personal development, doubling down on the "is this book even current?")

Re: Does your office have a library?

#38
> Would it be okay to sit and read a book at your job?

Never had a job where the answer was yes, which is a shame, because that's still by far the fastest way to really "get" anything. They'd much rather I spend weeks googling one-off questions and wasting other people's time than being "unproductive" for a few days just going through actual documentation. Very frustrating.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#39
post #13

Several of these questions are hinting at whether your company culture is overly stratified or not: e.g., do seniors ever ask juniors for help. I can sense the author has worked in places where he wished he asked those questions sooner, and I think they're good questions to be asking of a company. A couple of them highlighted, at least for me, how lonely it is to be one of the very few competent software developers i…

spousal hires exist in academia

Re: Does your office have a library?

#40
I have worked at a place which had a library (maybe still does). It was great to go and sit there reading a journal or borrow one of their copies of Horowitz and Hill. But also I can understand why these days companies probably shouldn't have libraries. They should instead simply have quiet reading places and allow people to go off and research topics without pressure.
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