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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#81

Post by fnordpiglet »

jedberg wrote: post #52

Lots of good questions in this, but to answer the question in the title: When I started working corporate in 1999, every engineer had their own library of tech books. We would all share books with each other. You could tell how senior someone was by how big their book collection was. At once point, one of our senior people got laid off. Since the books were bought by the company he had to leave them all behind. Us ju…

I did the same until recently. A lot of the Rust books are worth owning the paper version.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#82

Post by joe5150 »

richwater wrote: post #79
joe5150 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My degree covered everything from copyright law to NoSQL databases. Most modern programs are highly interdisciplinary and students have wide latitude to select courses that suit their own interests. I did learn a little Dewey, though.

This is so interesting because I definitely imagined "Library Science" as something as a relic/old but clearly that's not the case.

I think that's a common assumption, but as the other commenter said, libraries (and archives and museums) are fundamentally concerned with applying structured metadata to unstructured information and organizing it. The tools for doing this have always been highly technical even before they were computerized.

You can definitely still pick a more "traditional" library career and avoid working with computers more than absolutely necessary if you want to, but the training will still expose you to a core set of technology concepts (database systems, digital resource management, metadata essentials, etc).

Re: Does your office have a library?

#83

Post by cormacrelf »

Arainach wrote: post #15

It depends on how abstract you consider a "library". My employer does have a library of physical books, but they're almost never used. On the other hand they have an enormous amount of digital internal data - Wikis, API docs, design docs, Stack Overflow-esque Q&A, and more - that's well indexed and can be collectively searched via one query. Those assets are used constantly every day by everyone (and even moreso if y…

The question about the library isn’t really answered by “we have an internal wiki”. It was asking “Do you devote company resources to research, or do you think you already know everything necessary?” Internal docs/wikis are the expression of what your company already knows. We’re talking about recognising what it doesn’t know.

The instinct to visit a library and read a book about something you don’t know about is not something everyone has from birth. A lot of people out there are pretending to understand a lot of stuff. You would only have a corporate library if the leaders understood anything well enough to know that sometimes you do need a book to go any deeper. So the question is also asking you “Does your company respect real depth of knowledge or does pretending suffice?”

All that isn’t a comment on your company, which as you say, has a library. But I don’t want people to come away with the impression that any old “store of knowledge” qualifies as a library.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#84

Post by pram »

One of my recent jobs had a “library room” that was more form over function. It had books, and it was superficially like a library, but the actual purpose was just to be a “quiet area” for people to work. The book portion was just decoration, I never saw anyone using them.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#85

Post by michaelt »

systems_glitch wrote: post #4

Yes, and it's all tech-heavy stuff, lots of equipment manuals, architecture handbooks, language manuals, etc. All stuff I've bought because I use it. I've had a few other on-and-off contract workers on site over the past few years. Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual. Oh well, at least the pages don't get dog-eared!

> Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual.

In my experience, a system is never really fully documented until it's been used widely enough that everything's been documented 5 times over by different people.

For example, I'm sure your favourite language's developers did a great job at documenting the regular expression system. They've probably given you 5,000 words of documentation, maybe 10,000, on regular expressions alone.

But if you want to remove all the emojis from a text file - does the documentation tell you how to do that? If you're using Python or Java or sed it doesn't.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#87

Post by Arainach »

cormacrelf wrote: post #83
Arainach wrote: post #15

It depends on how abstract you consider a "library". My employer does have a library of physical books, but they're almost never used. On the other hand they have an enormous amount of digital internal data - Wikis, API docs, design docs, Stack Overflow-esque Q&A, and more - that's well indexed and can be collectively searched via one query. Those assets are used constantly every day by everyone (and even moreso if y…

The question about the library isn’t really answered by “we have an internal wiki”. It was asking “Do you devote company resources to research, or do you think you already know everything necessary?” Internal docs/wikis are the expression of what your company already knows. We’re talking about recognising what it doesn’t know. The instinct to visit a library and read a book about something you don’t know about is not…

Almost no one is doing research these days. Not most companies, not most profitable companies, not most profitable teams on profitable companies. Most of business boils down to taking existing pieces and putting them together in the way that delivers the most customer value, or putting them together in an adequate manner and hiring a sales team to convince customers they deliver a lot of value. That's it.

To be clear, I don't mean "no one is doing research and that's a shame". I mean "no one is doing research because there's no reason for them to". Telling a developer at nearly any company to go read a research paper on databases is silly; just go grab a database written by someone who specializes in that and use it. Reading about specialized 3D rendering techniques isn't going to save you anything that just using Unity/Unreal wouldn't. And so on and so on.

It is dramatically more valuable to be able to answer "what are the available tree data structures in this language in our codebase" than to be able to answer "what's the algorithm to correctly implement my own red/black tree".

If research is being done at your company it's probably being done by a handful (literally, fewer than 5) of people who know what they need to find and what they're doing. For most other folks it's a mistake. I saw multiple instances at large tech companies where some new college hire sat down, wrote a beautiful data structure that was algorithmically fine and well-researched.....and was immediately rejected and thrown away because we had equivalents already that they hadn't looked for or hadn't been able to find and no one wants to maintain multiple.

Even at companies with real libraries (Microsoft etc.) the folks using the libraries weren't using them for research, they were using them for standard technical reading material.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#88

Post by bewuethr »

thegjp210 wrote: post #86

The company that by far does this the best is Stripe. They even have an in house press (Stripe Press) to publish out of print / small runs of books the Collision bros particularly like.

I love the site for Stripe Press, with the floating books! So smooth. https://press.stripe.com/

Re: Does your office have a library?

#89

Post by kristopolous »

neilv wrote: post #66
jedberg wrote: post #52

Lots of good questions in this, but to answer the question in the title: When I started working corporate in 1999, every engineer had their own library of tech books. We would all share books with each other. You could tell how senior someone was by how big their book collection was. At once point, one of our senior people got laid off. Since the books were bought by the company he had to leave them all behind. Us ju…

I carried around an impressive software engineering personal library, through various jobs and grad school. And it had a few benefits. Even when I was poor and sleeping on the floor because I didn't own furniture, and didn't have health insurance, I'd still buy books (and cheap lunches with the team). I'd also print out a lot of tech docs from the Internet, and put them in discarded binders that I labeled neatly. In…

> Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, posturing, and self-promoting

I think this can be sifted through. Strange and unusual tech or adjacent books suggest that the person has exhausted all the common ones or that they started getting the books mentioned in other books and kept doing that process. You can even ask them why they have one.

For instance I've got a copy of the 1926 text The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker because of Jim McCarthy's praise for the text in his book Dynamics of Software Development.

Then again, with books people tend to have either 0, about a dozen, or hundreds. I'm in group 3, maybe it's a problem.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#90

Post by Zetice »

scrlk wrote: post #75
pradn wrote: post #45

This is one of those old school things I missed when I moved from Microsoft to Google, another being having a private office. (Though Microsoft is switching to open plan offices as well as a cost saving measure.) The Microsoft library had tons of books, subscriptions to scholarly journals, and made it easy to order new books.

It's easy for bean counters to measure the cost savings of open plan layouts (e.g. higher utilization of office space). I wonder if anyone has tried to measure the productivity loss of open plan vs private offices, which might tilt it back towards private offices. There is no substitute for having a door to close to isolate noise, and being able to do some intensive work.

I would even push back on the "higher utilization" claims; you could easily build very tiny private offices with not much efficiency loss, and a one time additional expense of the buildout, but that's marginal in the scheme of things.
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