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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#111

Post by jedberg »

kerpotgh wrote: post #110
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…

Have you made this comment before? Strong sense of deja vu with this one.

It wasn’t a copy/paste but I’ve told this story before. See the sibling comment for the link. :)

Re: Does your office have a library?

#112

Post by idiocrat »

blakesterz wrote: post #9

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!

I my chaotic corporation environment, where documentation does not exist and all documents are all over the place, I always tell people to hire a Librarian.

Stereotypically, a high-middle-age lady, who likes cats, drinks tea and has an urge/compulsion to sort things. A person who loses sleep if some serial numbers (e.g. ISBNs) are out of order.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#113

Post by idiocrat »

idiocrat wrote: post #112
blakesterz wrote: post #9

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!

I my chaotic corporation environment, where documentation does not exist and all documents are all over the place, I always tell people to hire a Librarian. Stereotypically, a high-middle-age lady, who likes cats, drinks tea and has an urge/compulsion to sort things. A person who loses sleep if some serial numbers (e.g. ISBNs) are out of order.

Sorry, I mean a Librarian from a physical library.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#114

Post by chillfox »

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 buy books and have a nice little library of tech books. I try to only buy books for things that don’t change much.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#115

Post by rvba »

kristopolous wrote: post #89
neilv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you read all of them?

Can be so kind to you recommend one or perhaps top5?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#116

Post by flir »

I miss the shelf full of O'Reilly books, though I only saw it a couple of times. Some kind of subscription thing, wasn't it? The O'Reilly books looked great en masse, when compared with jumbled shelves full of noisy Learn Java in 15 Femtoseconds-style doorstops. O'Reilly was really smart to go thinner when the rest of the publishing industry was in "never mind the quality, feel the weight" mode.

Most of my books are purged but the ones that survived tend to fall into three categories. Code but at a higher level of abstraction (The Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Architecture, Design Patterns), hobby programming (Crafting Interpreters, Introduction to Evolutionary Computing, A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics) and those that are only tangentially related (The Hacker Crackdown, What Just Happened, What The Dormouse Said).

I don't know if other people's libraries fit into those same craft/hobby/culture buckets?

I guess I've got a nostalgia bucket too - not much call for 6502 programming manuals these days, but they mean a lot to me.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#117

Post by argo_navis »

A few months before corona came, my employer started giving every team a monthly budget to spend on technical books, which were then avaliable to everyone in the office. Then we moved to work from home indefinitely and the idea was forgotten. I visited the office recently, for the first time since. The last book I had was still on my abandoned desk, cover bleached and ruined by sunlight. Felt symbolic somehow. I don't want to give up all the convenience of work from home but I do miss the office sometimes.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#118

Post by chillfox »

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.

My last job was in an open plan office with a constant noise level of 70db, peaking into 80db several times an hour. After about a year of it I noticed that it was affecting me mentally in a really bad way.

I would get super irritated at people for small insignificant things, be as adversarial/hostile as possible and try to turn every discussion into an argument, I saw slights everywhere, and everyone was stupid.

Once I noticed and figured out it was the noise that made me go crazy I bought noise canceling headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), wore them every day all day either listening to nothing or calming rain (using the Rainy Mood app on iPhone).

After a few weeks I was completely back to my normal happy self. All the perceived slights disappeared, other people were smart and reasonable again, small things were small things easily forgiven and meetings went much smother.

It's absolutely wild how the noise of an open plan office can affect you mentally. I was not the only one going crazy from it, earlier, shortly after we moved to the open plan office one of my colleagues was let go for having gone crazy in much the same way (he was more exposed to upper management).

Re: Does your office have a library?

#119

Post by MrVandemar »

kristopolous wrote: post #89
neilv wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

If anyone is interested, here is the The Analysis of Art book on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/analysisofart00park/mode/2up

Re: Does your office have a library?

#120

Post by scruple »

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 keep 4 shelves of technical books on my bookshelf behind my home office desk. Some are "old," from the 70s. Many were thrifted. And then I have, I don't know, about 300+ pounds of (mostly) technical books in storage boxes in the garage.

For technical stuff I prefer to have both physical and digital copies of some books. For non-technical, I tend to go fully digital (except reference material, like my D&D books). I like going analog to read technical stuff, I'm not exactly sure why.

Anyway, I believe that reading is a super power that's helped me throughout my life. I try very hard to impress this on others, especially people that I mentor. I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!

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