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Does your office have a library?

jonpauluritis.com

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Re: Does your office have a library?

#51

Post by commandlinefan »

superfrank wrote: post #46
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.

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.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#52

Post by jedberg »

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 juniors descended on his cube like vultures, negotiating and trading all of his books to start building up our own libraries.

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.

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.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#54

Post by CSSer »

superfrank wrote: post #46
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.

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.

I've had the same experience. Obviously there's a balance here. You have to know what percentage of something does actually need to get done from day to day, but when things are slower I definitely spend my time reading. It's paid off too many times not to do so.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#55

Post by CSSer »

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.

What if you were reading about something relevant to one of those pre-approved buckets?

Re: Does your office have a library?

#56

Post by sjsanc »

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 feel like I've read this before some here...

Re: Does your office have a library?

#57

Post by sjsanc »

sjsanc wrote: post #56
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 feel like I've read this before some here...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403174 I have!!

Re: Does your office have a library?

#58

Post by ewhanley »

My first job had domain-specific libraries on certain floors, primarily geoscience and reservoir engineering. About a year after I started, they decided to liquidate the libraries to make room for more offices, and we all got to grab a few books. I still have a copy of "Statistical Methods in Research & Production" with a call number tag on the spine and ARCO ALASKA INC., LIBRARY stamped across the edge of the pages. It was cool to have a library available at work, and realistically most of the petroleum engineering stuff isn't available online.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#59

Post by blakesterz »

mysterydip wrote: post #47
blakesterz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually in a power plant, which was not as interesting as it sounds. At least most days. My masters degree is Library Science. I've had a weird and winding career. I'm a sysadmin now.

Library Science sounds fascinating. I always assumed you master dewey decimal and you collect your certificate as a librarian. What other (broad) topics does such a degree cover?

If there's a bad Dewey Decimal joke, I ain't heard it! I got mine in the late 90s, right when the web was taking over, so it was pretty different then. I was pretty lucky, I saw the web and went for it. I was a web master for one of the first ever online classes, and just kind of stuck with it over the years. The degrees are pretty tech heavy now, people end up doing all sorts of different things.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#60

Post by pcthrowaway »

mysterydip wrote: post #47
blakesterz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually in a power plant, which was not as interesting as it sounds. At least most days. My masters degree is Library Science. I've had a weird and winding career. I'm a sysadmin now.

Library Science sounds fascinating. I always assumed you master dewey decimal and you collect your certificate as a librarian. What other (broad) topics does such a degree cover?

It's a part of information science.

Libraries are systems to organize large amounts of information (not necessarily physical locations, there are digital libraries now). So I imagine you learn sorting and indexing techniques, processes for getting information and metadata in and out of the system, and much more

A library is a database of unstructured documents with structured metadata, which might need to be indexed, queried, and accessed in many different ways

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