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Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

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Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#41

Post by rectang »

Foe wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I've been organizing a systems reading group at Microsoft for five years now. I wrote down some takeaways on what worked (and what didn't). I'd love to hear if anyone else has successfully kept an engineering reading group alive at their company, or if you have any favorite systems papers we should add to our list!

I gave a long post at the top level about running a book-focused reading group at a company, but your group sounds more like a Papers We Love[1] chapter.

I used to co-host the San Diego chapter of Papers We Love[2], and here's my secret sauce: I offered to meet with every presenter in advance for a dry run of their presentation. Probably two thirds of the presenters took me up on the offer.

For the group and the presenter, going through a dry run had the positive impact you would expect on presentation quality.

The benefit for me was that I got one-on-one discussion/learning with a wide variety of people passionate about a broad range of papers, and I also got to go through the material twice. So I learned much more and retained it better.

[1] https://paperswelove.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYPNnoVAQqb2Mue9v9f2euA

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#42

Post by rectang »

smokel wrote: post #5

I understand that in a research lab or in academia, this is common practice. But in the more menial coding industry that most of us are probably in, how do you find time for this? Do people read papers in their spare time and discuss over lunch, or are there enlightened managers who support this during working hours?

The groups I ran were scheduled during lunch. Technical management would look the other way if we ran over time or if people spent a certain amount of their work day reading the material.

Even if you have enlightened technical management, it's helpful if you don't force them to spend political capital justifying groups like this. Getting our enlightened CTO to spend a few hundred dollars on books was easy when we were a startup. Once we got acquired, making that argument to unreceptive higher-ups wasn't worth it for anybody.

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#43

Post by jshier »

rectang wrote: post #39

I ran reading groups over several years a medium-sized startup I worked for and for an open source community I was a part of. The groups were targeted not only at engineering staff but also semi-technical positions such as product management and low-skilled data pipeline specialists, with the aim of building bridges between departments and internal recruitment. Running those reading groups was basically how I acquire…

Wow, Cox's original Objective-C book? Interesting historically, but it's hard to imagine it was of much pragmatic use, even if you're working in Obj-C as your day-to-day. Still, it's an interesting artifact of the early OO age, and the metaphor of libraries of objects as integrated circuits was interesting.

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#44

Post by rectang »

jshier wrote: post #43
rectang wrote: post #39

I ran reading groups over several years a medium-sized startup I worked for and for an open source community I was a part of. The groups were targeted not only at engineering staff but also semi-technical positions such as product management and low-skilled data pipeline specialists, with the aim of building bridges between departments and internal recruitment. Running those reading groups was basically how I acquire…

Wow, Cox's original Objective-C book? Interesting historically, but it's hard to imagine it was of much pragmatic use, even if you're working in Obj-C as your day-to-day. Still, it's an interesting artifact of the early OO age, and the metaphor of libraries of objects as integrated circuits was interesting.

Yes! And I wouldn't have picked it, but I went along with it when someone else wanted to read it.

The "software IC" metaphor may not have caught on, but these artifacts of early experimentation, competitors against what evolved into mainstream OOP, are many times more interesting to read than the Nth "OOP sux" article.

EDIT: I just went back over some of my notes... Cox predicted that companies would compete to provide different implementations of common interfaces ("software ICs"). In restrospect, that didn't happen but Cox's prediction was wrong in such an interesting way: software orgs rather than customers assumed control over interfaces.

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#45

Post by Foe »

rectang wrote: post #41
Foe wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I've been organizing a systems reading group at Microsoft for five years now. I wrote down some takeaways on what worked (and what didn't). I'd love to hear if anyone else has successfully kept an engineering reading group alive at their company, or if you have any favorite systems papers we should add to our list!

I gave a long post at the top level about running a book-focused reading group at a company, but your group sounds more like a Papers We Love[1] chapter. I used to co-host the San Diego chapter of Papers We Love[2], and here's my secret sauce: I offered to meet with every presenter in advance for a dry run of their presentation. Probably two thirds of the presenters took me up on the offer. For the group and the pres…

The dry run idea is really smart. We've done something similar, where we had Niv Dayan[1] lead a session on Diva[2] (before it won Best Paper at VLDB 2025!). I had worked with him in the past and thought it would be cool to have him present to the group. Having the author in the room completely changed the quality of the discussion. Most of our sessions right now aren't presenter-led, but I'd like to do more of that.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vdMOvmIAAAAJ [2] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p3923-eslami.pdf

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#46

Post by vasco »

smokel wrote: post #5

I understand that in a research lab or in academia, this is common practice. But in the more menial coding industry that most of us are probably in, how do you find time for this? Do people read papers in their spare time and discuss over lunch, or are there enlightened managers who support this during working hours?

You could realistically read 2-3 papers per visit to HackerNews if you were doing that instead. Me too.

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#47

Post by mememememememo »

I am so jealous. 25 years of crud and framework chasing and I'd never get close to that. I am slightly closer now but not much.

If I had my time again I'd honestly just apply for job 1 make ends meet then continously apply to get a job like this where you can go deep.

Money is probably good but just for the interestingness. That DCOM and SOAP shit I did is worthless now. Most tech is non compounding.

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#48

Post by rrgok »

mememememememo wrote: post #47

I am so jealous. 25 years of crud and framework chasing and I'd never get close to that. I am slightly closer now but not much. If I had my time again I'd honestly just apply for job 1 make ends meet then continously apply to get a job like this where you can go deep. Money is probably good but just for the interestingness. That DCOM and SOAP shit I did is worthless now. Most tech is non compounding.

I agree with you. I spend me free time deep-diving in such topics. I find hard to use this knowledge in a useful way at my job. The job market for deep topics is hard to penetrate.

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#49

Post by titanomachy »

zihotki wrote: post #16
Foe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Most people read the paper on their own time, and we meet over lunch. The meetings themselves are just an hour, so it's not a massive time block. I've found that the people who show up are the ones who are genuinely curious and would be reading this stuff anyway (and sometimes just need a commitment/accountability to do it). Having a group gives them a reason to do it on a schedule.

That implies that you have a fixed time for lunch and also chat during lunch. I may be the minority but I prefer to eat when I'm hungry and focus on the food instead of chatting. And there is also allergies, as a celiac, I have big troubles eating together with others - they may accidently contaminate my food

It sounds like you could get very high ROI from chilling out a little bit. If one social lunch per month is an unfathomable hardship then you're probably leaving a lot of other opportunities on the table. Do you have OCD or social anxiety or something?

Re: Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

#50

Post by mohitk05 »

Congratulations on the five year mark! I co-run a similar paper reading group at Zalando (European e-commerce) and recently shared our learnings/experience[1] of running such a group for over a year and I'm happy to see so many similarities.

We focus our papers around distributed systems, software engineering and languages and try to cover more ground on the applications of the concepts discussed in the papers. The blog post also contains a "blueprint" for someone who is looking to start a similar group.

What has driven the meetups throughout the year is we being two organisers, driving the topic ourselves by preparing a presentation (not everyone would have the time to pre-read) and making the format conversational/open - very similar to what Armaan (op) shared.

One of our recent experiments was doing a collab with the Berlin Systems Group[2] where we organised an external-facing event in Berlin with attendees from outside our organisation. I was so happy to see a nice small group turn up for the event and thoroughly enjoy it!

[1] https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2026/01/running-an-eng... [2] https://luma.com/y9edbih7

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