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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#141

Post by hef19898 »

scruple wrote: post #120
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…

>> 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!

Once I had a manager challenging on making things up regarding a rather thick white paper he forwarded me, because there is no way I could have read it that fast. Once he saw I commented the whole thing beginning to end in Word, well, his face was priceless. Side effect was me looking for a new job a couple of months later.

Totally agree on reading as kind of a super power. Reading in the sense of reading and understanding, do so rather quickly, and be able to condense the relevant parts out of whatever text you. And remember the rest well enough to be able to look it up when needed. Same goes for handbooks, people, read your damn handbooks!

It's funny so, that for RPG stuff I went all digital with the exception of the existing pre-PDF era collection I have. And for technical stuff I am like you, preferably paper. For English literature India is a really good source to get those books at affordable prices through Amazon. Pretty sure those sellers are not supposed, or even allowed, to sell internationally, but they do. Worst case print quality is somewhat sub-par, from what I saw with some of my colleagues, or the cover is somewhat generic (in case of the majority of my library). The editions are the same so, content wise.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#142

Post by ironmagma »

abudabi123 wrote: post #92
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.

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.

It’s funny how the “open” plans are never what I would consider open, something along the lines of an airplane hangar where the ceilings are out of the way.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#144

Post by robocat »

bewuethr wrote: post #88
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/

Crashes iPadOS 16.3 for me! Mobile Safari fails badly quite regularly.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#145

Post by F-W-M »

chillfox wrote: post #118
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.

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. Onc…

I was going to get treatment for burnout. Turned out the best treatment was a private office.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#146

Post by LemmyInThePub »

bee_rider wrote: post #101
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?

Cigarette/Alcohol ads, maybe?

Technically, he is already studying to be a drug dealer.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#148

Post by LemmyInThePub »

commandlinefan wrote: post #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.

>Never had a job where the answer was yes

I find this mind boggling.

Here in Blighty, I've never had a job where taking time to research and read up wasn't expected. Personally, every employer I've had has also allocated several days a year to staff training; either classroom training or self-study as needed.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#149

Post by LemmyInThePub »

commandlinefan wrote: post #51
superfrank wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a stupid question, but what would happen if you did? I've never had a job explicitly tell me that I could just go read, but I've done just that at multiple jobs and no one has ever said anything about it.

Usually some form of snarky "we don't give you enough work to do?" from somebody who's not even my boss but one of those types who for some reason gets away with acting like he is. Of course, with work from home, things are different, but I'm still at the mercy of the time-tracking system: every hour has to be accounted for and charged to a pre-approved bucket... and reading isn't in one of those buckets.

> snarky "we don't give you enough work to do?"

No offense, but have you ever tried politely telling such people to fuck off?....

...something rather common in the UK, though part of me suspects this would offend American sensibilities.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#150

Post by robertlagrant »

nonethewiser wrote: post #107

> Does your company care about diversity? If so are they hiring conservatives, the religious, or people with unrelated degrees? Hell are they hiring people without degrees or from places with no major metro around? Should companies actively seek higher conservative representation? I mean how diverse is your company if diversity of thought is ignored? Seems like the only type of diversity that actually matters.

Diversity in the DEI sense is mostly about immutable characteristics such as sex, ethnicity, etc. It's not about different worldviews or perspectives directly, although that will sometimes happen indirectly.
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