5 ms·

> Doing it at your company likely won't go well This has been my experience. I led a book club at one of my jobs and it was poorly attended and those who did a

> Doing it at your company likely won't go well This has been my experience. I led a book club at one of my jobs and it was poorly attended and those who did attend hadn't read the book. My guess is that there is just a low percentage of people who meet all the criteria: 1) interested, 2) have the time to read the book, 3) have the commitment to read the book, and 4) social enough to attend the book club meeting. I understand that many people are busy and may not have time to read the book or have a schedule conflict the day the book club meeting happens. So unless your company is huge, you'll not have enough to keep a book club going. There also may be pressure to avoid using company communication tools to promote the club.

mysto 2y ago
This has been my experience too. However, I found that changing the book club to “article club” where we all read one interesting technical article worked quite well. I have been running such a club with fortnightly meetings for over 3 years now.
- islewis 2y ago
  Interested to hear more about this. What works well? What didn't?
  - mysto 2y ago
    We tried different models. One book every two months, one or more chapters of a book every month (thus finishing a whole book over a few months), and one article/video (generally requiring an hour of reading/watching time) every two weeks. My thoughts below are based on experience of those three models. 1. Reading a whole book every one or two months works well when everyone has a regular reading habit. Without that people realize that they need to read a whole book in a few days before the meeting. That either led to poor quality discussions or people showing up without reading. 2. Reading book chapters every month was less demanding but the frequency of meetings was still too low for people to build reading into their routines. 3. At two weeks the frequency was high enough that it became a routine for the engineers. 4. We also reminded everyone one day before to read the article. Even if they had forgotten to read till then it is easy to find and hour in the day to read up. 5. If the reminder was too far in advance (say 3 days before) then people ignored the reminder.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  Sounds fun. How do you get your list of articles?
  - mysto 2y ago
    It’s crowdsourced. People add to the list things they find interesting and would like discussed more widely. We also have round robin turns setup to decide who picks the next article to read from the pool.
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings? I guess that wouldn't be unreasonable if the content is work related and certainly helps with attendance, but I'm not sure if that would fly within all corporations.
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    Not OP, but I have worked at a few companies that would't mind, as long as the articles are relevant to your work. You could even sell it as a way to enrich everyone's expertise because of the deeper technical discussion.
  - mysto 2y ago
    Yeah. The company has a general culture of enabling learning, so this fits right in. The company also does a wider book club that focuses on more non-technical topics.
  - ska 2y ago
    > Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings? I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on company time before, at more than one place. For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and many/most of the employees had some academic background, though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you after a masters degree". In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the common "journal club" approach in academic research groups. It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of new work, and generally improves professional development - if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.
    - jll29 2y ago
      I think most technology companies should have that, and I've been promoting that workplaces. The trick to make it sustainable is to make at 3-month calendar of covered papers from multiple sub-areas (e.g. data management to machine learning, new programming languages to compiler topics) and share that widely. Not every topic is relevant to everyone, so naturally each topics will only attract a subset of the crowd beyond a small number of open-minded champions, but that's okay.
henrik_w 2y ago
I ran a book club for 7 years when I worked at TriOptima. We were maybe 40 developers in total at the company, and around 10 would join when we picked a new book. Towards the end of one book, some people would always drop off, but there were still enough people to make it useful. One of the key (unexpexted) benefits of it was how it facilitated discussions about SW development practices between the different teams at the company. The content was usually good for giving us new ideas to try etc, but the usefullness of the discussions surprised me. I've written more about it here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/ https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/
- stemos 2y ago
  Thanks Henrik! Your blog post inspired me back then to start a book club at my company. It’s still running :-)
  - henrik_w 2y ago
    Great to hear!!
magicalhippo 2y ago
And 5) get something out of reading software books. Not sure what it is, but in general software books just don't do much for me. Only one I truly liked and got a lot out of was Physically Based Rendering[1]. It had a great blend of explaining the concepts but also showing how to implement them, and for me the literal programming style worked very well in this case. But apart from that I struggle with getting something out of software books. Not fiction though, I read tons of sci-fi (especially hard) in my 20s. [1]: https://www.pbrt.org/ https://www.pbrt.org/
g9yuayon 2y ago
My experience as well. I tried it a couple of times more than 10 years ago, one is covering Nancy Lynch's Distributed Algorithms, and one is Maurice Herlihy's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. We finished about 1/4 of each of the books before running out of momentum. People simply lost interest as the content became increasingly challenging. We talked about the reasons, and the overwhelming feedback was that people lost interest because they failed to see what they learned could be applied to the job in short term, so it looked to them that the effort of learning the hard stuff wouldn't pay off.
Mainsail 2y ago
We just started doing this and it was awesome to start but slowly I could tell people started becoming disinterested. We are contemplating another round which I think will be the deciding factor.
yencabulator 2y ago
We ran a journal club at work, and it worked ok. The commitment boundary is significantly lower, and you can learn a lot from e.g. USENIX papers.
nicolas_t 2y ago
We did a book club at my previous company. We voted on the first book, Despair by Nabokov. The interesting thing is that the ones who voted on this book didn't end up reading it. The ones who did read that book had voted on something else and, at least in my case, forced themselves to read Despair. My guess is that a lot of those people who voted on Despair and proposed it were trying to show off how smart and educated they were but those type of people don't actually follow through because it's work.
- akuchling 2y ago
  In the book club I run, we voted on books for a few years. I kept hoping the non-attending voters would choose the right books to bring them to a meeting, but the choices sometimes felt aspirational like that -- people voted for a heavy title but still didn't attend, and it was irritating to be reading dull books chosen by someone else. So we switched to making selections in person at a session; if you can't come, you can submit suggestions, but the people who actually bother to show up make the final choices. We choose a monthly book for a whole year at a time, so we just do an hour-long discussion in December and pick 11 titles. In a monthly group you could probably do it in 10 minutes after the regular discussion. Also, as the organizer feel free to put your thumb on the scale: pick 3 books you'd personally like to read, and ask them to choose one. You may want to be completely democratic about it, but people often appreciate someone else reading reviews and limiting the choices (avoiding the paradox of choice).

mysto 2y ago

This has been my experience too. However, I found that changing the book club to “article club” where we all read one interesting technical article worked quite well. I have been running such a club with fortnightly meetings for over 3 years now.

islewis 2y ago
Interested to hear more about this. What works well? What didn't?
- mysto 2y ago
  We tried different models. One book every two months, one or more chapters of a book every month (thus finishing a whole book over a few months), and one article/video (generally requiring an hour of reading/watching time) every two weeks. My thoughts below are based on experience of those three models. 1. Reading a whole book every one or two months works well when everyone has a regular reading habit. Without that people realize that they need to read a whole book in a few days before the meeting. That either led to poor quality discussions or people showing up without reading. 2. Reading book chapters every month was less demanding but the frequency of meetings was still too low for people to build reading into their routines. 3. At two weeks the frequency was high enough that it became a routine for the engineers. 4. We also reminded everyone one day before to read the article. Even if they had forgotten to read till then it is easy to find and hour in the day to read up. 5. If the reminder was too far in advance (say 3 days before) then people ignored the reminder.
zeroCalories 2y ago
Sounds fun. How do you get your list of articles?
- mysto 2y ago
  It’s crowdsourced. People add to the list things they find interesting and would like discussed more widely. We also have round robin turns setup to decide who picks the next article to read from the pool.
KeplerBoy 2y ago
Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings? I guess that wouldn't be unreasonable if the content is work related and certainly helps with attendance, but I'm not sure if that would fly within all corporations.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Not OP, but I have worked at a few companies that would't mind, as long as the articles are relevant to your work. You could even sell it as a way to enrich everyone's expertise because of the deeper technical discussion.
- mysto 2y ago
  Yeah. The company has a general culture of enabling learning, so this fits right in. The company also does a wider book club that focuses on more non-technical topics.
- ska 2y ago
  > Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings? I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on company time before, at more than one place. For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and many/most of the employees had some academic background, though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you after a masters degree". In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the common "journal club" approach in academic research groups. It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of new work, and generally improves professional development - if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.
  - jll29 2y ago
    I think most technology companies should have that, and I've been promoting that workplaces. The trick to make it sustainable is to make at 3-month calendar of covered papers from multiple sub-areas (e.g. data management to machine learning, new programming languages to compiler topics) and share that widely. Not every topic is relevant to everyone, so naturally each topics will only attract a subset of the crowd beyond a small number of open-minded champions, but that's okay.

henrik_w 2y ago

I ran a book club for 7 years when I worked at TriOptima. We were maybe 40 developers in total at the company, and around 10 would join when we picked a new book. Towards the end of one book, some people would always drop off, but there were still enough people to make it useful. One of the key (unexpexted) benefits of it was how it facilitated discussions about SW development practices between the different teams at the company. The content was usually good for giving us new ideas to try etc, but the usefullness of the discussions surprised me. I've written more about it here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/ https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/

stemos 2y ago
Thanks Henrik! Your blog post inspired me back then to start a book club at my company. It’s still running :-)
- henrik_w 2y ago
  Great to hear!!

magicalhippo 2y ago

And 5) get something out of reading software books. Not sure what it is, but in general software books just don't do much for me. Only one I truly liked and got a lot out of was Physically Based Rendering[1]. It had a great blend of explaining the concepts but also showing how to implement them, and for me the literal programming style worked very well in this case. But apart from that I struggle with getting something out of software books. Not fiction though, I read tons of sci-fi (especially hard) in my 20s. [1]: https://www.pbrt.org/ https://www.pbrt.org/

g9yuayon 2y ago

My experience as well. I tried it a couple of times more than 10 years ago, one is covering Nancy Lynch's Distributed Algorithms, and one is Maurice Herlihy's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. We finished about 1/4 of each of the books before running out of momentum. People simply lost interest as the content became increasingly challenging. We talked about the reasons, and the overwhelming feedback was that people lost interest because they failed to see what they learned could be applied to the job in short term, so it looked to them that the effort of learning the hard stuff wouldn't pay off.

Mainsail 2y ago

We just started doing this and it was awesome to start but slowly I could tell people started becoming disinterested. We are contemplating another round which I think will be the deciding factor.

yencabulator 2y ago

We ran a journal club at work, and it worked ok. The commitment boundary is significantly lower, and you can learn a lot from e.g. USENIX papers.

nicolas_t 2y ago

We did a book club at my previous company. We voted on the first book, Despair by Nabokov. The interesting thing is that the ones who voted on this book didn't end up reading it. The ones who did read that book had voted on something else and, at least in my case, forced themselves to read Despair. My guess is that a lot of those people who voted on Despair and proposed it were trying to show off how smart and educated they were but those type of people don't actually follow through because it's work.

akuchling 2y ago
In the book club I run, we voted on books for a few years. I kept hoping the non-attending voters would choose the right books to bring them to a meeting, but the choices sometimes felt aspirational like that -- people voted for a heavy title but still didn't attend, and it was irritating to be reading dull books chosen by someone else. So we switched to making selections in person at a session; if you can't come, you can submit suggestions, but the people who actually bother to show up make the final choices. We choose a monthly book for a whole year at a time, so we just do an hour-long discussion in December and pick 11 titles. In a monthly group you could probably do it in 10 minutes after the regular discussion. Also, as the organizer feel free to put your thumb on the scale: pick 3 books you'd personally like to read, and ask them to choose one. You may want to be completely democratic about it, but people often appreciate someone else reading reviews and limiting the choices (avoiding the paradox of choice).