Does your office have a library? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does your office have a library?

#121

Post by kristopolous » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:13 AM UTC

rvba wrote: post #115

kristopolous wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

For what? I think everyone that programs should read Tracy Kiddars Soul of a New Machine, Ries&Trout The 22 immutable laws of marketing,

My #3 is way lower, which follows one of the 22 laws, but probably Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons.

Those are three enjoyable books that are pretty easy to read and have pretty valuable lessons in them that can take quite a long time to truly appreciate.

The task of a programmer is to create efficient and elegant machines based on thoughts by using imagination. Human creations by human hands, programming is a social product. Algorithms and data structures are actually the more shallow lesson. Creating something that finds place in the world is the true challenge.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#122

Post by flir » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:14 AM UTC

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…

When you said "virtue signalling" my mind immediately went to Knuth. You know, my copies are jammed so tight in the slip case I don't even think they come out any more.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#123

Post by flir » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:26 AM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #99

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?

Programming is building models in an abstract environment, and mostly using fine motor control to manipulate those models.

Opposite might be a builder? Making concrete things in the real world with gross motor control.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#124

Post by 752963e64 » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:29 AM UTC

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#125

Post by robotresearcher » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

rqtwteye wrote: post #104

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 have to say, I do sometimes miss learning tech stuff from books. While it's all online and in theory up to date, there is something to be said for the curated experience of a book." I miss the times when you could read K&R, one of Stroustroup's books and an STL book and you pretty much knew most of what there was to know.

Along with Stevens’ Programming in the UNIX environment, a few volumes of the X Window System and Inside Macintosh.

My dojo.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#126

Post by jamesfinlayson » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:47 AM UTC

I think my previous job had a few books on a shelf but it was a hardly a library. I don't think any of the books were particularly up to date - maybe some old O'Reilly stuff?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#127

Post by maCDzP » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:47 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #73

Many of these questions, I've thought about, and seen "good answers" in various places I've worked. I also have a tiny "bad answer" about the one in the title. One place had a technical library room, with lots of academic journals (ACM, IEEE, etc.) and books, IIRC mostly belonging to the technical co-founders. So, in this established company, someone probably outside of engineering started giving out "Quality Awards"…

Thank you for putting that in writing. The colleagues you speak of are so important. They make work less dull, more playful.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#128

Post by jonnycoder » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:48 AM UTC

ixtli wrote: post #30

Some of these really speak to me, but others, like the conflation of “diversity” with modern American political conservatism, are frustrating.

It means it's the right question, that is of course if you are the type of person who is open to growing as an individual. They are individual thought experiment questions, not suggesting policy, and if it bothers you then it's a red flag that you are bigoted.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#129

Post by __d » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

flir wrote: post #116

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…

I guess my buckets are different.

I have CPU books (eg. Programming the Z80), language books (eg. K&R), sysadmin books (a bunch of old O'Reilly), operating systems (VMS, Multics, Unix, Windows, BeOS, QNX, etc), a heap of GUI toolkit books (X11, Qt, Tk).

History and culture (Soul of a New Machine, Fire in the Valley, etc), craft books (Hackers Delight, Knuth, GoF, etc).

A few manuals (eg. NeXTstep), some hardware (USB, Ethernet, LTE), networks, etc.

These days I mostly buy language and history/culture books.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#130

Post by tablespoon » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:08 AM UTC

Our office has a library--but the librarians were reassigned 10 years (or so) ago, and the collection has been unmaintained (as far as I can tell), ever since.

You used to be able to tell them a book you needed, they'd usually order it, and when you were done they'd put it in the collection.

I think someone still tidies it up and (randomly) rotates the books into these little stands to "feature" them. It's kind of funny to see an O'Reilly Java 1.6 book "featured" in 2023.