Does your office have a library?

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

This is not an interesting question. An interesting question is whether they ever got back to you.

Several of these questions are hinting at whether your company culture is overly stratified or not: e.g., do seniors ever ask juniors for help. I can sense the author has worked in places where he wished he asked those questions sooner, and I think they're good questions to be asking of a company.

A couple of them highlighted, at least for me, how lonely it is to be one of the very few competent software developers in an enormous (non-software) company. I literally can't ever find someone who has actually done anything I'm working on, outside of my small team.

But most of them are utterly bizarre.

> If someone is really really good would you hire their wife? How about their friends?

What!? Why on Earth would you ever even entertain the possibility of institutionalized nepotism? Not only is there absolutely no reason to believe their performance in your job would be related to your star employee's, but other employees in the company will see this happening and either become completely disillusioned toward the idea that your company is a meritocracy (because it's obviously not), or they'll get pissed when you don't hire their spouses and friends too. No, I've never thought of this, because it's a horrible idea. (Note that this is not the same as considering a husband/wife pair that want to be hired together; in that case you'd evaluate each on their own merits and do it only if they're both good.) Have you ever thought of showing appreciation for your star employee by shitting on her desk? No? Well then you're not a DEEP THINKER like this author is!!

> If someone is really really good why are or aren't they working with their friends?

Is "their friends" a static set of people? Why can't they make friends at work? Why do friendship and professional life have to overlap at all? Is this like handing out Nerf guns to all new employees to make your office seem more fun?

> Do you have any enemies? Why doesn't someone out there dislike your strongest beliefs? What do you value about your enemies?

"Don't be a pussy, stand up and have some beliefs. If nobody is disagreeing with you, that means you're not taking a stand!" says the shitty high-school debate teacher sick of seeing his students check out in his class. This is a childish, black-and-white, lazy take, and it has no place in the professional world. You should not have "enemies" at work.

On the other hand, there are people literally advocating for genocide in the world. So from that point of view, this should also be a tautology. I thought we were talking about work?

> How often do you turn around and ask your self what aren't you asking yourself?

"Dude, nobody ever just stops and thinks anymore. I'm the only one who gazes out of a bus window and actually thinks about the world, man. Everyone is just sheep, man. Sheep people, man. Sheeple, man. But not me, man. Man. No, man. Dude. Man. I'm the only deep thinker in the world, dude."

- This author

> What would you take a pay cut for? What would you work on for free that makes money for someone else?

If you're making money for someone else, you're either getting paid or getting taken advantage of. This sounds like some half-baked inspirational poster: "what are you so passionate about that you'd do it even while I was hitting you with a rusty chain?" What? Why the fuck are you hitting me with a rusty chain!?

Utterly bizarre.

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 you consider code search part of your library).

Books have a higher cost to entry - you have to buy them, you have to store them, you have to get out of your chair and go get them, and you have to find the relevant data point in them. They're not suited to topics where the answer or the state of the art changes every few months.

I have a library in my home office, but there's nothing in it that I consult every week or even every month. Broadly, my library can be broken down into a few themes:

1. Books that I found valuable and lend out often (but don't necessarily need to reference) - things like "The Design of Everyday Things", "Working Effectively With Legacy Code", "Staff Engineer", "Peopleware", etc.

2. Books that contain information that is not easily and immediately available in an internet search (most often non-technical history books)

3. Subjects I reference on occasion but need detailed information from (Skiena - Algorithm Design Manual, CLRS, etc.)

4. Things that bring me joy to reread or even just look at and reminisce about reading (this is for anyone a personal list - for me it's things such as Ignition!, R.V. Jones' Most Secret War, the works of Neal Stephenson and Robert Caro, and more)

There are of course exceptions, such as the unspoken category 5 (virtue signaling) - I'm probably never actually going to read those Knuth tomes or even finish that Dostoyevsky, but they look impressive on the shelf behind me in video calls - but over time I've gotten better about eliminating those.

Yea everyone is just replying to the title, not any of the sub-questions.

The first 5 or so are pretty standard (but definitely indicative of a terrible work environment). Then you get weirder ones ("would you hire their wife", "do you hire conservatives", etc.)

Well, since the Fogbeam Labs offices are my home at the moment, the answer is "yes" as a I have pretty extensive personal library. I don't have all my books cataloged (shame, shame, I know) so I don't have an exact count of how many books I have, but it's somewhere over 1000 based on the last "back of the envelope" calculation I did. And I've bought more than a few book since I did that calculation.

Sadly I'm pretty much out of room for books at this point, and I've actually had to pack up a few and put them in a storage unit. My "dream" home would include a library large enough for all of my books and some room to grow. :-)

And when we finally have an actual corporate office, there will probably be a library there as well. One day...