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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#151

Post by lordnacho »

Every trading firm I've visited has a shelf of books. There's always some coding books: Python, C++ (Always Herb Sutter and Alexandrescu), Java.

There's always a bible there: Security Analysis. Just like the bible, nobody has read it but everybody thinks they know what's in there. For the quant firms I tend to know people at, it's not very relevant, but it's always there, a big, recognizable lump.

Liar's Poker is always there as well, along with Market Wizards. People have actually read those, they know the stories.

Hull's Options book is there, sometimes Wilmott.

Taleb's Black Swan is always there. Sometimes Dynamic Hedging.

And then there's a whole bunch of books about obscure topics. These are why I go through people's libraries. There'll be some book about copulas or something like that. Information theory, various electrical engineering topics, that kind of thing is useful for inspiration.

But yeah basically there's a library at every place, and they have mostly the same books.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#152

Post by DocTomoe »

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?

> Did you read all of them?

To say it with Umberto Eco[1]: A library is a research tool. A library of books you've all read is worthless.

[1] I have read that directly from Eco, I guess in some old book about how to write scientific papers. I can't find that anymore. The thought is reference in Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan", though.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#153

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

flir wrote: post #122
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.

Even just Volume 1 is amazing (as long as you use the new assembly language he wrote). I made it through this after I got laid off, and it was super helpful.

I've only flicked through the other volumes though, to be fair.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#154

Post by DavidPeiffer »

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…

My noise canceling headphones were originally a nice to have while working in my own huge private office. I switched to a company with an open floorplan, and now they're a must-have every day.

I've been going into the office 3+ times per week since early 2022. We went from about 6 people to 30 or so in the room every day. The noise levels can get overwhelming after a few hours, and someone has an annoying tacky ringtone. I thought people stopped with annoying ringtones 10+ years ago?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#155

Post by NoNameHaveI »

Does my current employer have a library? Yes. Both physical and virtual. I have use the virtual to browse industry periodicals which have hefty subscription fees. I have never set foot in the physical. I used to keep LOTS of physical books at the office. At each job over, I started keeping fewer. Now, at my current job I have zero, because that is exactly how many times I have needed a reference at my last job.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#156

Post by LeifCarrotson »

fhd2 wrote: post #136
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…

Did you really not miss anything from the physical books? I tend to buy the most highly recommended books for areas I'm interested in, and the quality of explanation and structure routinely beats anything I can find about the topic online. And that's not niche knowledge, goes for undergrad level maths and physics even.

I agree! I think there's a level of didactic intentionality that the effort of publishing a book mandates. A blogpost or Stack Overflow answer or wiki page is typically more like a reference for a particular topic; finding 300 contiguous, organized pages that cover the breadth and depth of a topic on the Internet is not common. The only thing that comes close in my experience is a subset of online courses, the ones that seek to give a foundational understanding more than a step-by-step tutorial of how to make something happen.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#157

Post by rhaway84773 »

> If so are they hiring conservatives, the religious, or people with unrelated degrees?

This is so weird. The vast majority of people who are hired are religious. That’s because the vast majority of people in the world are religious. What the author seems to mean is if your company are hiring those who are aggressively and publicly religious and evangelistic, and no company should be hiring them for the same reason they shouldn’t be hiring militant atheists.

Also, companies are almost all institutionally conservative. It doesn’t take a tenuous to figure out why companies are not socialist.

Finally, I’m not sure what it means to hire someone from an unrelated degree. The author seems to suggest a good company would hire someone who has a degree in marketing and someone else with a degree in computer science, and make the former code the software and the latter sell it.

The thing is, most companies don’t hire people with “unrelated degrees” because most people don’t want to do work that is unrelated to their degrees. There’s a reason they decided to spend so much of their time getting that degree in the first place.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#158

Post by somedangedname »

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…

> R.V. Jones' Most Secret War

Added to my reading list.

Have you read Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks? It's quite good.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#159

Post by marcosdumay »

flir wrote: post #123
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.

So, the opposite of building things would be building things?

That's the problem with the concept of "opposite". The opposite of something always tends to be very similar to the thing. If you want to get any kind of diversity out of your ideas, you should steer clear of it.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#160

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

> When I left the company they let me buy my books for $5, so I took them with me, and took them to my next two jobs. I stopped carrying them when everything the contained could be found online.

Not just online but also more up to date.

This is a drawback of books, they don't auto-update and upgrades are quite expensive. In IT I don't see a point to keeping them archived anymore.

I still use them for learning new topics though.

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