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The question about the library isn’t really answered by “we have an internal wiki”. It was asking “Do you devote company resources to research, or do you think

The question about the library isn’t really answered by “we have an internal wiki”. It was asking “Do you devote company resources to research, or do you think you already know everything necessary?” Internal docs/wikis are the expression of what your company already knows. We’re talking about recognising what it doesn’t know. The instinct to visit a library and read a book about something you don’t know about is not something everyone has from birth. A lot of people out there are pretending to understand a lot of stuff. You would only have a corporate library if the leaders understood anything well enough to know that sometimes you do need a book to go any deeper. So the question is also asking you “Does your company respect real depth of knowledge or does pretending suffice?” All that isn’t a comment on your company, which as you say, has a library. But I don’t want people to come away with the impression that any old “store of knowledge” qualifies as a library.

Arainach 4y ago
Almost no one is doing research these days. Not most companies, not most profitable companies, not most profitable teams on profitable companies. Most of business boils down to taking existing pieces and putting them together in the way that delivers the most customer value, or putting them together in an adequate manner and hiring a sales team to convince customers they deliver a lot of value. That's it. To be clear, I don't mean "no one is doing research and that's a shame". I mean "no one is doing research because there's no reason for them to". Telling a developer at nearly any company to go read a research paper on databases is silly; just go grab a database written by someone who specializes in that and use it. Reading about specialized 3D rendering techniques isn't going to save you anything that just using Unity/Unreal wouldn't. And so on and so on. It is dramatically more valuable to be able to answer "what are the available tree data structures in this language in our codebase" than to be able to answer "what's the algorithm to correctly implement my own red/black tree". If research is being done at your company it's probably being done by a handful (literally, fewer than 5) of people who know what they need to find and what they're doing. For most other folks it's a mistake. I saw multiple instances at large tech companies where some new college hire sat down, wrote a beautiful data structure that was algorithmically fine and well-researched.....and was immediately rejected and thrown away because we had equivalents already that they hadn't looked for or hadn't been able to find and no one wants to maintain multiple. Even at companies with real libraries (Microsoft etc.) the folks using the libraries weren't using them for research, they were using them for standard technical reading material.
- cormacrelf 4y ago
  That’s exactly the attitude the question was asking about. You have written a few human-decades’ worth of learned experience into a codebase and a wiki, and you want new hires to look at that stuff first. Sure; I have no problem with that, every company does it because not going elsewhere to learn stuff your organisation already knows (and has recorded extra details about its experience) is obviously good and efficient. But… “a few human-decades of learned experience” is what books are. Not all books are lists of RBTree algorithms! It’s just other people’s experience. The question was whether you think there is value in other people’s experience and what they’ve learned. Apparently your answer is “no”. This is a normal amount of arrogance for a profitable company, but it is still arrogance. It says to me that you don’t know what you don’t know. Being comfortable with identifying and admitting the things you don’t know is the opposite of arrogance and is a good thing to cultivate. Imagine your boss announces they’re going to start hiring in the Philippines to save money. There’s no internal wiki entry for “the time we tried hiring people in the Philippines to save money, and how that went”. You are a manager and your instinct (especially self-preservation instinct) says that it probably won’t work but you don’t know why. What do you do? Does anyone ever say “let me read a book about this and come back to you next week”?

Arainach 4y ago

Almost no one is doing research these days. Not most companies, not most profitable companies, not most profitable teams on profitable companies. Most of business boils down to taking existing pieces and putting them together in the way that delivers the most customer value, or putting them together in an adequate manner and hiring a sales team to convince customers they deliver a lot of value. That's it. To be clear, I don't mean "no one is doing research and that's a shame". I mean "no one is doing research because there's no reason for them to". Telling a developer at nearly any company to go read a research paper on databases is silly; just go grab a database written by someone who specializes in that and use it. Reading about specialized 3D rendering techniques isn't going to save you anything that just using Unity/Unreal wouldn't. And so on and so on. It is dramatically more valuable to be able to answer "what are the available tree data structures in this language in our codebase" than to be able to answer "what's the algorithm to correctly implement my own red/black tree". If research is being done at your company it's probably being done by a handful (literally, fewer than 5) of people who know what they need to find and what they're doing. For most other folks it's a mistake. I saw multiple instances at large tech companies where some new college hire sat down, wrote a beautiful data structure that was algorithmically fine and well-researched.....and was immediately rejected and thrown away because we had equivalents already that they hadn't looked for or hadn't been able to find and no one wants to maintain multiple. Even at companies with real libraries (Microsoft etc.) the folks using the libraries weren't using them for research, they were using them for standard technical reading material.

cormacrelf 4y ago
That’s exactly the attitude the question was asking about. You have written a few human-decades’ worth of learned experience into a codebase and a wiki, and you want new hires to look at that stuff first. Sure; I have no problem with that, every company does it because not going elsewhere to learn stuff your organisation already knows (and has recorded extra details about its experience) is obviously good and efficient. But… “a few human-decades of learned experience” is what books are. Not all books are lists of RBTree algorithms! It’s just other people’s experience. The question was whether you think there is value in other people’s experience and what they’ve learned. Apparently your answer is “no”. This is a normal amount of arrogance for a profitable company, but it is still arrogance. It says to me that you don’t know what you don’t know. Being comfortable with identifying and admitting the things you don’t know is the opposite of arrogance and is a good thing to cultivate. Imagine your boss announces they’re going to start hiring in the Philippines to save money. There’s no internal wiki entry for “the time we tried hiring people in the Philippines to save money, and how that went”. You are a manager and your instinct (especially self-preservation instinct) says that it probably won’t work but you don’t know why. What do you do? Does anyone ever say “let me read a book about this and come back to you next week”?