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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#91

Post by eddsh1994 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #78
scrlk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a throw back... what is this 2015? Are we arguing about open offices? Guess I will spout my thoughts. I love my cubicle. It's my personal private space. I hate open desks. I really did like an in between I had once - which was a cubicle in a room with no windows, and the other 4 people on my team. I would only overhear relevant things, nobody walked into our room for no reason, and it made it easy to say ' hey c…

If you didn't have windows were you mainly on Linux or OS X?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#92

Post by abudabi123 »

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.

The open plan office layout suffers productivity loss when a coworker with recreational drug problems and relationship problems brings that to work.

I've heard the story of tennis enthusiasts being the prime movers of the open plan layout.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#94

Post by cormacrelf »

Arainach wrote: post #87
cormacrelf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s exactly the attitude the question was asking about. You have written a few human-decades’ worth of learned experience into a codebase and a wiki, and you want new hires to look at that stuff first. Sure; I have no problem with that, every company does it because not going elsewhere to learn stuff your organisation already knows (and has recorded extra details about its experience) is obviously good and efficient.

But… “a few human-decades of learned experience” is what books are. Not all books are lists of RBTree algorithms! It’s just other people’s experience. The question was whether you think there is value in other people’s experience and what they’ve learned. Apparently your answer is “no”. This is a normal amount of arrogance for a profitable company, but it is still arrogance. It says to me that you don’t know what you don’t know. Being comfortable with identifying and admitting the things you don’t know is the opposite of arrogance and is a good thing to cultivate.

Imagine your boss announces they’re going to start hiring in the Philippines to save money. There’s no internal wiki entry for “the time we tried hiring people in the Philippines to save money, and how that went”. You are a manager and your instinct (especially self-preservation instinct) says that it probably won’t work but you don’t know why. What do you do? Does anyone ever say “let me read a book about this and come back to you next week”?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#96

Post by jojobas »

>When was the last time your senior manager said: "I don't know the answer, but I'll research and get back to you"

That would be a bad manager. The right answer is "you go research it and present me the options by tomorrow".

The rest are just screaming "I'm a troublemaker" - sure, if that's your thing.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#97

Post by colechristensen »

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 still learn and teach (informally) from books. You can find everything online, but there’s something specifically useful about the long form survey or completion of ideas that comes from a well written book as well as the physical reference. I don’t think books are a till I’ll ever take out of my bag.

Presently working on getting my feet wet with machine learning and primarily with a book. Of course it’s out of date the second it’s printed with a fast moving topic but it has still been incredibly useful as a survey and basics.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#98

Post by quanticle »

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.

I scrolled down looking for someone mentioning the Microsoft library. I used it to teach myself Typescript, on the job, there. One of the regrets I had after leaving Microsoft is that I didn't make greater use of the library.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#99

Post by quanticle » 

    How long would it take you to 180 and go into the your opposite profession?
    What is your opposite profession? Do you have any friends in that
    profession?
I'm not even sure how to answer that question. Do professions have "opposites"? One of my relatives is in medical school right now, studying to be a doctor. What's the "opposite" of that? Professional assassin?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#100

Post by quickthrower2 »

Interesting about being allowed reading a book. This is a special case of letting your employees work the best way possible to solve problems without having to be a “productivity actress” staring angrily at a screen all day furiously typing at an IDE to look busy.

Hire the best get out of their way seems to apply here.

In addition to a library how about a cinema room, where you can catch up on the enormous amount of conference content on youtube.

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