13 ms·

Does your office have a library?

• haskellandchill 4y ago
  Last office job I had a chunk of my library at work, maybe $5k worth out of a $25k library. I ended up getting fired due to politics and of course wasn't allowed to collect my books personally. Had to play telephone over email to get them shipped to me, with a few gems missing that I still have to replace. Still I'd do it all again because it stimulated our engineering team and led to some fun discussions.
• zwayhowder 4y ago
  Some good questions there, for reflection or the dreaded "do you have questions for us" bit in the interview. With regards the library. Yes, but I paid for every book in it. And most are never touched. It's frankly a little depressing.
  • quantumsequoia 4y ago
    Maybe if the books in your library aren't touched, that's a sign that the chosen books aren't the most valuable
    • sritchie 4y ago
      Haha, I think that's what the parent was hinting at with the "depressing" title. But I disagree with the diagnosis! As Patrick Collison says, > I guess I fall somewhere in the middle in the Umberto Eco theory of the library[0]. [0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Travel_with_a_Salmon/_ntDTaMUys8C?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT124&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Travel_with_a_Sa... (Quote from https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf)
    • karaterobot 4y ago
      On the other hand, my bookshelves are almost entirely full of books I haven't read. I get rid of most books after reading them to make room for more. In that sense asking whether I'd read every book on the shelf would be like seeing a refrigerator full of food and asking if I'd already eaten everything in it.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        I have a ton of books I might want to refer to though and there are things I do want to re-read now and then. (And a lot of new stuff is digital.) I've pretty much hit steady state though. No more bookcases/piles of books. I don't have a lot of incentive to go beyond that for now, though I'll probably donate at least a few more bags to my library's book sale at some point over the coming months.
  • rjsw 4y ago
    I found it a bit depressing that I was the first person to borrow most of the books that I got out of a university library.
  • jppope 4y ago
    (OP) Never considered the "do you have questions for us"... thats an interesting thought.
• systems_glitch 4y ago
  Yes, and it's all tech-heavy stuff, lots of equipment manuals, architecture handbooks, language manuals, etc. All stuff I've bought because I use it. I've had a few other on-and-off contract workers on site over the past few years. Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual. Oh well, at least the pages don't get dog-eared!
  • michaelt 4y ago
    > Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual. In my experience, a system is never really fully documented until it's been used widely enough that everything's been documented 5 times over by different people. For example, I'm sure your favourite language's developers did a great job at documenting the regular expression system. They've probably given you 5,000 words of documentation, maybe 10,000, on regular expressions alone. But if you want to remove all the emojis from a text file - does the documentation tell you how to do that? If you're using Python or Java or sed it doesn't.
    • systems_glitch 4y ago
      The vast majority of the stuff in our dead tree library pertains to what would now be considered ancient tech, computer-wise going back as far as the PDP-8. The problem with searching for Internet answers on that stuff is, most of the time, you'll at best find someone who's interested in diligently hacking on it. What you often run into is someone looking for answers to homework (e.g. the Intel 8085 is still used in a lot of Indian colleges, apparently) or trying to make something "just work" for Internet cool points.
• bee_rider 4y ago
  It is an interesting list, some of the questions seem good, I like the ones that basically get at “are you learning from experienced employees.” On the other hand, > 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? This seems like kind of an annoying political gotcha question. If asked this question, I’d probably say “I don’t really like to talk politics and religion at work” and I’d be a little worried that the person who asked it might like to talk politics and religion at work. Edit: I mean I’m not a robot, I know the political alignment of some of my close colleagues, but obviously no company in their right minds is collecting the data required to answer this question on a company-wide statistical level.
  • Notorious_BLT 4y ago
    The questions are meant to be asked of yourself, unless I'm mistaken. So I'm not really sure what you mean about "the person who asked it". I would speculate that the point of the question is that "diversity", in the corporate world, has some very specific meaning, and in my experience, it doesn't include these categories. My own employer does a lot of lip service to how important it is to have people from diverse backgrounds, and yet, somehow that seems to translate to "young people from many different ethnic groups who all lean liberal, have never mentioned their faith in the time I've known them, and have degrees".
    • bee_rider 4y ago
      I think you are right. I was looking at it through the lens of potential “now do you have any questions” type questions, like in an interview, as some of the other comments here have mentioned. But that isn’t mentioned in the article. They are probably just for introspection that sort of question makes more sense.
      • jppope 4y ago
        (OP) Correct. The first couple sentences stress this, the questions are just mini thought experiments. Not an assertion of anything. Have fun with them, don't belabor them. If all or none of the questions aren't your cup of tea, who cares.
• srinathkrishna 4y ago
  At my previous job, I ran a small-ish library at my desk. Just brought up all my books and had them under my desk for people to peruse and take. At current job, I do have a good enough library - but I hardly go into the office ;D
• blakesterz 4y ago
  My last job was in a corporate library. My job title was "Librarian". I was technically a Records Manager. The people I worked with appreciated the work I did and the found the library, and me, useful and helpful. Corporate librarians are out there and do good work!
  • apetresc 4y ago
    Which corporation, if you don't mind me asking? And did you have a background in IR/library science specifically, or just a generalist?
    • blakesterz 4y ago
      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.
      • mysterydip 4y ago
        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?
        • blakesterz 4y ago
          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.
        • pcthrowaway 4y ago
          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
• bmitc 4y ago
  At one previous employer, yes, and it was lovely. It was huge, and we could of course request books for interlibrary loan, request the library to purchase, or request personal purchases to keep at our desks. Checkouts were indefinite until someone else requested it except for newly purchased books. I loved going there and relaxing with a book. I have a rather extensive personal library, filled woth books I haven't read yet. It creates the same feeling of a lot of stuff still to discover
• CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  > 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.
  • RheingoldRiver 4y ago
    In 7th grade I had a question once and my teacher said he didn't know and he'd get back to me. And then he did! And I was so excited that he'd gotten back to me, but I'd also forgotten entirely that I'd asked the question in the first place; it was just a passing idle curiosity. For some reason he got really upset about this, and looking back I guess he must have put considerable time and research into finding out the answer, for something that I was really just spur-of-the-moment wondering & completely forgot about 20 minutes later. Although I think he didn't realize that the fact that I'd forgotten the question didn't really diminish the joy I had at receiving the answer days later. Anyway, it was during us studying the U.S. constitution and the question was about the order of succession in the case of the concurrent deaths of the president, V.P., Speaker of the House, and President Pro Tem of the Senate, so that it went to the Cabinet; I was wondering what order the Cabinet officials succeeded in. The answer is the order in which the positions were created, so Sec of State first, then Sec of Treasury, etc. I didn't remember this all these years later; you can find the info here: https://www.usa.gov/presidents#item-35877 https://www.usa.gov/presidents#item-35877
  • fleddr 4y ago
    No need to get back to you when "putting a pin in it", going forward.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• curiousDog 4y ago
  Microsoft HQ has an awesome library. Every big tech should have such a space for some quiet reading
• feoren 4y ago
  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.
• breck 4y ago
  Microsoft has an amazing library in Redmond. I used to spend a lot of time there. You also could request any book and it would be waiting for you at your desk or reception, usually within a day. BG clearly values reading. I loved that.
• Arainach 4y ago
  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.
  • bobobob420 4y ago
    Can you elaborate more on the architecture of your single query system. Is everything in one source or are you searching multiple sources with one query
    • Arainach 4y ago
      Searching multiple sources with one query. It's really just an internal search engine.
  • 4y ago
• mindcrime 4y ago
  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...
  • bicx 4y ago
    Do you read books as you put them in your library, or is it more of a collection of books that you are working your way through?
    • mindcrime 4y ago
      It's a mixture of both, but I will say that while I read fairly fast, I can still buy books faster than I can read them. So the unread portion is always getting larger. Which is kinda sad, but I'm at a point where I'm OK with it. :-)
• cafard 4y ago
  At my first tech job, the programmers' office had a shelf of manuals. (I was not then a programmer.) At the next, every new version of Oracle produced three or four feet of manuals for the shelves. A brief stint at another contractor's offices in Virginia showed a real library, by which I suppose I mean that they had copies of IEEE and ACM journals and books by authors I had heard of. My office at work has an assortment of books, mostly ones that I bought. I don't know of a tech library there.
• ixtli 4y ago
  Some of these really speak to me, but others, like the conflation of “diversity” with modern American political conservatism, are frustrating.
  • commandlinefan 4y ago
    Seems like a fair question to me. If not managed carefully, diversity is just simple racial bias (which has been illegal for a long time). These initiatives are usually justified as avoiding a monoculture that builds the wrong products or fails to understand its target audience - in which case considering American political conservatives seems reasonable.
  • fleddr 4y ago
    That means its an ethically sound question, so you're clearly not getting the point of these questions.
  • jonnycoder 4y ago
    It means it's the right question, that is of course if you are the type of person who is open to growing as an individual. They are individual thought experiment questions, not suggesting policy, and if it bothers you then it's a red flag that you are bigoted.
• Tangurena2 4y ago
  My current employer is a state agency. Yes there is a library. Most of the books in the library are legal books. All of the programming books are currently in our workgroup's offices. I've brought a few programming books from home, they're in my office.
• Minor49er 4y ago
  My first tech job had a small bookshelf dedicated to programming resources and business perspectives. I remember some MySQL and PHP books, and also Edward De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" being in there Another employer had a book sharing Slack channel where people would share ebooks related to programming and software development Yet another one, which was completely remote, had an ebook service where you could request any ebook you wanted from Amazon, be it work-related or not, and they would order it for you for free. Everyone had a pretty healthy mix of work- and non-work-related items from what I remember All in all, I think over half of my employers in the tech field have had some kind of library or book service of some kind
• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  This is a great list of excellent questions. I think their value is when applied in large numbers, and not just one by one. If one day you are pondering whether you want to make a career decision, or a life decision, questions like these could be really useful to start your thinking.
• TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Even if it did, would I use it to look things up, or would I use the internet? Because as much as I like the feel of a book, I'm not going to find a reference that's almost certainly already out of date for the things I need it for =/ (and if it's for personal development, doubling down on the "is this book even current?")
• rolenthedeep 4y ago
  Not yet but I'm starting one!
• commandlinefan 4y ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • superfrank 4y ago
    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.
    • commandlinefan 4y ago
      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.
      • CSSer 4y ago
        What if you were reading about something relevant to one of those pre-approved buckets?
      • LemmyInThePub 4y ago
        > 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.
    • 4y ago
• rwmj 4y ago
  I have worked at a place which had a library (maybe still does). It was great to go and sit there reading a journal or borrow one of their copies of Horowitz and Hill. But also I can understand why these days companies probably shouldn't have libraries. They should instead simply have quiet reading places and allow people to go off and research topics without pressure.
• pradn 4y ago
  This is one of those old school things I missed when I moved from Microsoft to Google, another being having a private office. (Though Microsoft is switching to open plan offices as well as a cost saving measure.) The Microsoft library had tons of books, subscriptions to scholarly journals, and made it easy to order new books.
  • scrlk 4y ago
    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.
    • calvinmorrison 4y ago
      What a throw back... what is this 2015? Are we arguing about open offices? Guess I will spout my thoughts. I love my cubicle. It's my personal private space. I hate open desks. I really did like an in between I had once - which was a cubicle in a room with no windows, and the other 4 people on my team. I would only overhear relevant things, nobody walked into our room for no reason, and it made it easy to say ' hey can someone look at this' and usually you'd get help. ( no windows - great for programming, I also had a desk job that was sun facing at 4pm with crappy blinds... swear I lost some vision permanently from that).
      • eddsh1994 4y ago
        If you didn't have windows were you mainly on Linux or OS X?
        • calvinmorrison 4y ago
          Good as a joke, but even better - we were all on Linux
    • 4y ago
• animanoir 4y ago
  No, but my home, where I work, does!
• jedberg 4y ago
  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.
  • kerpotgh 4y ago
    Have you made this comment before? Strong sense of deja vu with this one.
    • jedberg 4y ago
      It wasn’t a copy/paste but I’ve told this story before. See the sibling comment for the link. :)
  • sjsanc 4y ago
    I feel like I've read this before some here...
    • sjsanc 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403174 I have!!
      • jedberg 4y ago
        Hah! Well it was relevant again!
• abc20230215 4y ago
  It would be good enough to create a pair-programming-free and no-tap-on-shoulder and no-approach-if-in-headphones environment...
• ewhanley 4y ago
  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.
• jhallenworld 4y ago
  My current company has the "hall of knowledge". I've contributed a few shelves to it. Previous company had a science fiction library.
• wonderwonder 4y ago
  "What would you take a pay cut for? What would you work on for free that makes money for someone else?" I thought about this and my first response was nothing. But then considered what if my kid had a disease and a company was working on the cure. I would take a pay cut or work for them for free to attempt to expedite the cure. If I'm willing to do that for my kid then would I be willing to do that for other kids? Probably not work for free as I need to eat and retire one day but I think I would probably be willing to take a pay cut working for a company whose product is a tangible net good for the world. Actually produce something of lasting value instead of widgets. I used to work for a company that had a book shelf. I borrowed Design Patterns one day and just forgot to return it. Still have it all these years later. I appreciate these questions as some of them make me take a step back and think about things.
  • yellow_lead 4y ago
    I also indefinitely borrowed design patterns from my previous company
• CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
  Yup! https://library.stanford.edu https://library.stanford.edu I was once interested in reading "The best of 2600 : a hacker odyssey" by Goldstein (https://www.worldcat.org/title/191809593 https://www.worldcat.org/title/191809593). Although Worldcat says that Stanford has a copy, that's not correct. But I had no problem using Interlibrary Loan to get a copy for a few weeks.
• kafrofrite 4y ago
  We actually have two libraries in the office :) The first library has, for the biggest part, engineering books. Everyone can order books and everyone can borrow them. Most modern books also exist internally as e-books so the physical library currently is a mix of books, 3D prints, random music collections etc. The second library is everything else. Multiple copies of various titles are available to take and keep, for free. Only requirement is to inform someone if the copy you picked up is the last one. Many employees are totally oblivious about this library.
• rbanffy 4y ago
  I’m working on that, but a lot of technical books become obsolete shortly after being printed, and those are, sadly, the easiest to justify to the bean-counters.
• neilv 4y ago
  Many of these questions, I've thought about, and seen "good answers" in various places I've worked. I also have a tiny "bad answer" about the one in the title. One place had a technical library room, with lots of academic journals (ACM, IEEE, etc.) and books, IIRC mostly belonging to the technical co-founders. So, in this established company, someone probably outside of engineering started giving out "Quality Awards". At one company meeting, they gave a Quality Award to an intern, for organizing the library. Shortly after, one of the co-founders remarked to me in passing -- amused, and lowered voice -- something about that organizing the library for Quality... seemed to involve packing the co-founder's journal subscriptions on the shelves so tightly, that there was no room to insert new issues of each journal. Though I suspect that the co-founder was skeptical of whatever chain of events led to their company giving out Quality Awards at all, it's good that they had a sense of humor about it. That a sense of humor is compatible with being serious and driven, is one of the things I learned from various colleagues.
  • maCDzP 4y ago
    Thank you for putting that in writing. The colleagues you speak of are so important. They make work less dull, more playful.
• malcolmgreaves 4y ago
  This posts starts off alright, then unfortunately quickly devolves into presenting trolling-level questions as something insightful.
  • jppope 4y ago
    (OP) Sorry! I was just riffing late at night. It wasn't meant to be that deep. Which questions didn't you like?
• pram 4y ago
  One of my recent jobs had a “library room” that was more form over function. It had books, and it was superficially like a library, but the actual purpose was just to be a “quiet area” for people to work. The book portion was just decoration, I never saw anyone using them.
• thegjp210 4y ago
  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.
  • bewuethr 4y ago
    I love the site for Stripe Press, with the floating books! So smooth. https://press.stripe.com/ https://press.stripe.com/
    • robocat 4y ago
      Crashes iPadOS 16.3 for me! Mobile Safari fails badly quite regularly.
• atdrummond 4y ago
  Best investment a growing company can make is in somebody with a library science degree or proven research skills. The force multiplier this can create is huge and their value has only increased with technology.
• AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
  My answer is yes to all of the questions.
• jojobas 4y ago
  >When was the last time your senior manager said: "I don't know the answer, but I'll research and get back to you" That would be a bad manager. The right answer is "you go research it and present me the options by tomorrow". The rest are just screaming "I'm a troublemaker" - sure, if that's your thing.
• quanticle 4y ago
  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?
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    Cigarette/Alcohol ads, maybe?
    • LemmyInThePub 4y ago
      Technically, he is already studying to be a drug dealer.
  • tobyjsullivan 4y ago
    The question certainly has "the sound of one hand clapping" vibes. Nevertheless, that doesn't preclude at least attempting to answer it. For my job, software engineering, the job is essentially creating things that must adhere to the strict laws of software physics. Most often, someone (read: a product manager) comes to me with something they want to exist. I need to distill what I know about the system and it's internal mechanics to map the idea to a possible reality, then ship it. What's the opposite of that? Maybe no concrete constraints, no creative problem solving, no creation of new stuff at all. Also, not working on a computer. Given my job is 50/50 on teamwork and solo-work, I'm not sure what the opposite is there. Maybe I could say the teamwork is on coordination and the solo is on delivery; so the opposite may be solo coordination and interfacing on delivery. So, my opposite profession is a door-to-door salesman? /shrug/
    • jppope 4y ago
      Perhaps something like sales, counseling, maybe something in early education?
  • flir 4y ago
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Interesting about being allowed reading a book. This is a special case of letting your employees work the best way possible to solve problems without having to be a “productivity actress” staring angrily at a screen all day furiously typing at an IDE to look busy. Hire the best get out of their way seems to apply here. In addition to a library how about a cinema room, where you can catch up on the enormous amount of conference content on youtube.
  • jppope 4y ago
    I love the idea of having a movie theater at work.
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  > 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.
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    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.
• flir 4y ago
  I miss the shelf full of O'Reilly books, though I only saw it a couple of times. Some kind of subscription thing, wasn't it? The O'Reilly books looked great en masse, when compared with jumbled shelves full of noisy Learn Java in 15 Femtoseconds-style doorstops. O'Reilly was really smart to go thinner when the rest of the publishing industry was in "never mind the quality, feel the weight" mode. Most of my books are purged but the ones that survived tend to fall into three categories. Code but at a higher level of abstraction (The Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Architecture, Design Patterns), hobby programming (Crafting Interpreters, Introduction to Evolutionary Computing, A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics) and those that are only tangentially related (The Hacker Crackdown, What Just Happened, What The Dormouse Said). I don't know if other people's libraries fit into those same craft/hobby/culture buckets? I guess I've got a nostalgia bucket too - not much call for 6502 programming manuals these days, but they mean a lot to me.
  • __d 4y ago
    I guess my buckets are different. I have CPU books (eg. Programming the Z80), language books (eg. K&R), sysadmin books (a bunch of old O'Reilly), operating systems (VMS, Multics, Unix, Windows, BeOS, QNX, etc), a heap of GUI toolkit books (X11, Qt, Tk). History and culture (Soul of a New Machine, Fire in the Valley, etc), craft books (Hackers Delight, Knuth, GoF, etc). A few manuals (eg. NeXTstep), some hardware (USB, Ethernet, LTE), networks, etc. These days I mostly buy language and history/culture books.
• argo_navis 4y ago
  A few months before corona came, my employer started giving every team a monthly budget to spend on technical books, which were then avaliable to everyone in the office. Then we moved to work from home indefinitely and the idea was forgotten. I visited the office recently, for the first time since. The last book I had was still on my abandoned desk, cover bleached and ruined by sunlight. Felt symbolic somehow. I don't want to give up all the convenience of work from home but I do miss the office sometimes.
• 752963e64 4y ago
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• jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  I think my previous job had a few books on a shelf but it was a hardly a library. I don't think any of the books were particularly up to date - maybe some old O'Reilly stuff?
• tablespoon 4y ago
  Our office has a library--but the librarians were reassigned 10 years (or so) ago, and the collection has been unmaintained (as far as I can tell), ever since. You used to be able to tell them a book you needed, they'd usually order it, and when you were done they'd put it in the collection. I think someone still tidies it up and (randomly) rotates the books into these little stands to "feature" them. It's kind of funny to see an O'Reilly Java 1.6 book "featured" in 2023.
• ivolimmen 4y ago
  Well we don't have an office so a library would be difficult to have. My employer does offer the ability to reimburst any bought book. They also offer a Safari subscription. I personally don't need it; I use "the web". I do miss the old days when we had MSDN a huge collection of books. Later (90s?) we had the MSDN lokally installed. I also remember when you bought a computer you got books with it. Getting to know the operating systems. MS-DOS came with a nice manual for GWBASIC. The book made me interested in programming. Since we now get nothing with it I does not inspire as much as well...
• hbogert 4y ago
  We didn't even have whiteboards till 2.5y ago because the cto thought they're ugly in such a nice office like ours
• himanshuy 4y ago
  Home office yes.
• yxhuvud 4y ago
  I work at a publisher that has been around for 200 years. Of course there is a library. There are also books lying around all over the place. I haven't seen any technical litterature though.
• suction 4y ago
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• throwaway742 4y ago
  I have a book I accidentally stole from the library. Does that count?
• lordnacho 4y ago
  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.
• NoNameHaveI 4y ago
  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.
• rhaway84773 4y ago
  > 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.
• evilbob93 4y ago
  I worked for Oracle in their Broomfield, Colorado campus. There was an alcove off a hallway that had bookshelves and a library that had been apparently inherited from StorageTek, an acquisition of Sun Microsystems before Sun was in turn bought by Oracle. It was a fascinating snapshot of mid-90s (mostly) tech books, but there were some interesting cultural books including African American studies. Basic HTML books, several O'Reilly books with the bear postcard in them still (I stole one =) ) but the best one for me was a book about OpenVMS Digital Command Language, on which I cut my teeth in the 1980s. It was a favorite place for me to spend a few minutes after lunch in the cafeteria on my way back to my desk. I currently work for Western Digital and recently someone put a bunch of tech books out on a credenza in one of the collaboration areas with a note inviting people to borrow them. Not exactly a library, but it reminded me of the nostalgia people are expressing here about the big batches of books we used to lug around from cubicle to cubicle (often using an office chair).