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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
(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.
The thought experiment regarding diversity challenges the (typically) inconsistent implementation of it where it's more like a candy story where you pick what you like (or deem socially acceptable) and dismiss or even discourage anything else. That's not true diversity. It's equity.
Similarly, as you suggest that representation matters, and if you'd consistently believe that, then we should immediately reallocate a huge amount of women to do the shittiest, riskiest, lowest paid jobs that men currently do. Likewise, we should immediately deploy a huge amount of men in female-dominated professions, like HR, psychology, the like.
I bet quite a few would now lose their appetite for "representation". We might as well just stop pretending and admit that we have no principles or beliefs, we just want whatever is best for us or our "group", whatever that means.
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!
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.
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
I just wanted to say that this is an elegant and beautiful definition of a library:
"A library is a database of unstructured documents with structured metadata, which might need to be indexed, queried, and accessed in many different ways."
My degree covered everything from copyright law to NoSQL databases. Most modern programs are highly interdisciplinary and students have wide latitude to select courses that suit their own interests. I did learn a little Dewey, though.
I think that's a common assumption, but as the other commenter said, libraries (and archives and museums) are fundamentally concerned with applying structured metadata to unstructured information and organizing it. The tools for doing this have always been highly technical even before they were computerized.
You can definitely still pick a more "traditional" library career and avoid working with computers more than absolutely necessary if you want to, but the training will still expose you to a core set of technology concepts (database systems, digital resource management, metadata essentials, etc).
> My masters degree is Library Science. [...] I'm a sysadmin now.
The retroactive combination sounds a bit like an Informatics degree. (Which in my neck of the woods is taught by the same school/department that does MLISes.
I my chaotic corporation environment, where documentation does not exist and all documents are all over the place, I always tell people to hire a Librarian.
Stereotypically, a high-middle-age lady, who likes cats, drinks tea and has an urge/compulsion to sort things. A person who loses sleep if some serial numbers (e.g. ISBNs) are out of order.
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
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
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!?
Yea everyone is just replying to the title, not any of the sub-questions.
The first 5 or so are pretty standard (but definitely indicative of a terrible work environment). Then you get weirder ones ("would you hire their wife", "do you hire conservatives", etc.)
Your hysteric response isn't any less bizarre. Not every question has to have a profound meaning or be personally relevant.
For example, you consider even entertaining the possibility of hiring the wife of a top performer bizarre, based on your explicit opinion that this is a terrible idea. That doesn't mean the question is bizarre. It's a normal ethical question to which you have a clear answer. What's the problem?
I found the Internet got a lot more valuable for me when I decided to deliberately take the most charitable interpretation of what I read.
> > 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?
It's a thought experiment. You likely spend the majority of your waking day at work. It seems like if you're trying to optimize your total quality of life, it would be great to have that time also include some of your close friends or partners.
Now, if you're trying to entice a particular person to work at your company, is this a perk you would put on the table? Probably not. But I find it interesting to consider what ideas are just unthinkable (as in we don't even think to think it, not that we morally object to thinking it) because of a deeply ingrained notion of work/life separation.
My father and his wife own a business together. That experience is clearly profoundly valuable to both of them. Perhaps the nepotism makes this a negative experience for some of their own employees. But maybe not. There are plenty of other famous examples of partners working together. Should we deny people like my dad and stepmom even the possibility of this kind of life? What do we lose by having a black and white approach to nepotism?
> Why do friendship and professional life have to overlap at all?
Because the minutes of our life are finite. If we can spend some of those minutes at work and with close friends, we've enriched our lives and increased the number of experiences we can put in it.
Why do we assume that we should spend most of our waking lives with people we don't particularly care about? That goes against the way humans have lived for almost the entirety of our evolutionary history.
> 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.
The article isn't clear about this, but it's not necessary to strictly interpret all of these questions about the workplace.
> On the other hand, there are people literally advocating for genocide in the world.
Do any of those people know what you oppose them? You aren't their enemy if they don't know who you are.
Should they? What does it say about the causes you support if the people directly opposed to them don't even know you exist? Should they at least know about groups you support that oppose them?
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.
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
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.
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.
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”?
When you said "virtue signalling" my mind immediately went to Knuth. You know, my copies are jammed so tight in the slip case I don't even think they come out any more.
Even just Volume 1 is amazing (as long as you use the new assembly language he wrote). I made it through this after I got laid off, and it was super helpful.
I've only flicked through the other volumes though, to be fair.
> 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).
My company essentially deletes all that. They migrate from intranet portal to intranet portal periodically, and each migration is advertised as an opportunity to "clean up" all that documentation that hasn't been recently updated about legacy systems that we still need to run.
The people who run the portal are technically in HR or something like that, and I think they have know idea how it's actually used, and mentally model it as a place for announcements.
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...
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?")
> 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.
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.
Here in Blighty, I've never had a job where taking time to research and read up wasn't expected. Personally, every employer I've had has also allocated several days a year to staff training; either classroom training or self-study as needed.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I would even push back on the "higher utilization" claims; you could easily build very tiny private offices with not much efficiency loss, and a one time additional expense of the buildout, but that's marginal in the scheme of things.
It’s funny how the “open” plans are never what I would consider open, something along the lines of an airplane hangar where the ceilings are out of the way.
My last job was in an open plan office with a constant noise level of 70db, peaking into 80db several times an hour. After about a year of it I noticed that it was affecting me mentally in a really bad way.
I would get super irritated at people for small insignificant things, be as adversarial/hostile as possible and try to turn every discussion into an argument, I saw slights everywhere, and everyone was stupid.
Once I noticed and figured out it was the noise that made me go crazy I bought noise canceling headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), wore them every day all day either listening to nothing or calming rain (using the Rainy Mood app on iPhone).
After a few weeks I was completely back to my normal happy self. All the perceived slights disappeared, other people were smart and reasonable again, small things were small things easily forgiven and meetings went much smother.
It's absolutely wild how the noise of an open plan office can affect you mentally. I was not the only one going crazy from it, earlier, shortly after we moved to the open plan office one of my colleagues was let go for having gone crazy in much the same way (he was more exposed to upper management).
My noise canceling headphones were originally a nice to have while working in my own huge private office. I switched to a company with an open floorplan, and now they're a must-have every day.
I've been going into the office 3+ times per week since early 2022. We went from about 6 people to 30 or so in the room every day. The noise levels can get overwhelming after a few hours, and someone has an annoying tacky ringtone. I thought people stopped with annoying ringtones 10+ years ago?
I scrolled down looking for someone mentioning the Microsoft library. I used it to teach myself Typescript, on the job, there. One of the regrets I had after leaving Microsoft is that I didn't make greater use of the library.
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.
I carried around an impressive software engineering personal library, through various jobs and grad school. And it had a few benefits.
Even when I was poor and sleeping on the floor because I didn't own furniture, and didn't have health insurance, I'd still buy books (and cheap lunches with the team). I'd also print out a lot of tech docs from the Internet, and put them in discarded binders that I labeled neatly.
In addition to what I learned from the books and could reference from my library, there might've also been a signaling benefit. Early in my career, I was a kid with no degree, working as an intern at a hardcore software&hardware engineering company. I suspect that, on occasion, the impressive library signaled to people coming by my work space that at least I had interest/ambition/hustle (or maybe just presumptuousness).
Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, posturing, and self-promoting. But, before I get too judgmental, I should remember when I was starting out, and at least had an inkling of awareness that colleagues seeing my books couldn't hurt my opportunities.
> Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, posturing, and self-promoting
I think this can be sifted through. Strange and unusual tech or adjacent books suggest that the person has exhausted all the common ones or that they started getting the books mentioned in other books and kept doing that process. You can even ask them why they have one.
For instance I've got a copy of the 1926 text The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker because of Jim McCarthy's praise for the text in his book Dynamics of Software Development.
Then again, with books people tend to have either 0, about a dozen, or hundreds. I'm in group 3, maybe it's a problem.
For what? I think everyone that programs should read Tracy Kiddars Soul of a New Machine, Ries&Trout The 22 immutable laws of marketing,
My #3 is way lower, which follows one of the 22 laws, but probably Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons.
Those are three enjoyable books that are pretty easy to read and have pretty valuable lessons in them that can take quite a long time to truly appreciate.
The task of a programmer is to create efficient and elegant machines based on thoughts by using imagination. Human creations by human hands, programming is a social product. Algorithms and data structures are actually the more shallow lesson. Creating something that finds place in the world is the true challenge.
To say it with Umberto Eco[1]: A library is a research tool. A library of books you've all read is worthless.
[1] I have read that directly from Eco, I guess in some old book about how to write scientific papers. I can't find that anymore. The thought is reference in Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan", though.
> For instance I've got a copy of the 1926 text The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker because of Jim McCarthy's praise for the text in his book Dynamics of Software Development.
I still learn and teach (informally) from books. You can find everything online, but there’s something specifically useful about the long form survey or completion of ideas that comes from a well written book as well as the physical reference. I don’t think books are a till I’ll ever take out of my bag.
Presently working on getting my feet wet with machine learning and primarily with a book. Of course it’s out of date the second it’s printed with a fast moving topic but it has still been incredibly useful as a survey and basics.
"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."
I miss the times when you could read K&R, one of Stroustroup's books and an STL book and you pretty much knew most of what there was to know.
I keep 4 shelves of technical books on my bookshelf behind my home office desk. Some are "old," from the 70s. Many were thrifted. And then I have, I don't know, about 300+ pounds of (mostly) technical books in storage boxes in the garage.
For technical stuff I prefer to have both physical and digital copies of some books. For non-technical, I tend to go fully digital (except reference material, like my D&D books). I like going analog to read technical stuff, I'm not exactly sure why.
Anyway, I believe that reading is a super power that's helped me throughout my life. I try very hard to impress this on others, especially people that I mentor. I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!
> I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!
So much this. I can't get smarter, I was born with the brain I was born with, but I can easily fill up time reading and remembering all kinds of crap someone else won't put the time for.
>> I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!
Once I had a manager challenging on making things up regarding a rather thick white paper he forwarded me, because there is no way I could have read it that fast. Once he saw I commented the whole thing beginning to end in Word, well, his face was priceless. Side effect was me looking for a new job a couple of months later.
Totally agree on reading as kind of a super power. Reading in the sense of reading and understanding, do so rather quickly, and be able to condense the relevant parts out of whatever text you. And remember the rest well enough to be able to look it up when needed. Same goes for handbooks, people, read your damn handbooks!
It's funny so, that for RPG stuff I went all digital with the exception of the existing pre-PDF era collection I have. And for technical stuff I am like you, preferably paper. For English literature India is a really good source to get those books at affordable prices through Amazon. Pretty sure those sellers are not supposed, or even allowed, to sell internationally, but they do. Worst case print quality is somewhat sub-par, from what I saw with some of my colleagues, or the cover is somewhat generic (in case of the majority of my library). The editions are the same so, content wise.
Did you really not miss anything from the physical books? I tend to buy the most highly recommended books for areas I'm interested in, and the quality of explanation and structure routinely beats anything I can find about the topic online. And that's not niche knowledge, goes for undergrad level maths and physics even.
I agree! I think there's a level of didactic intentionality that the effort of publishing a book mandates. A blogpost or Stack Overflow answer or wiki page is typically more like a reference for a particular topic; finding 300 contiguous, organized pages that cover the breadth and depth of a topic on the Internet is not common. The only thing that comes close in my experience is a subset of online courses, the ones that seek to give a foundational understanding more than a step-by-step tutorial of how to make something happen.
> 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.
Not just online but also more up to date.
This is a drawback of books, they don't auto-update and upgrades are quite expensive. In IT I don't see a point to keeping them archived anymore.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadWith regards the library. Yes, but I paid for every book in it. And most are never touched. It's frankly a little depressing.
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_Sa...
(Quote from https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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".
It's a fun position to be in where whether you get a job or not is just a thought experiment.
The thought experiment regarding diversity challenges the (typically) inconsistent implementation of it where it's more like a candy story where you pick what you like (or deem socially acceptable) and dismiss or even discourage anything else. That's not true diversity. It's equity.
Similarly, as you suggest that representation matters, and if you'd consistently believe that, then we should immediately reallocate a huge amount of women to do the shittiest, riskiest, lowest paid jobs that men currently do. Likewise, we should immediately deploy a huge amount of men in female-dominated professions, like HR, psychology, the like.
I bet quite a few would now lose their appetite for "representation". We might as well just stop pretending and admit that we have no principles or beliefs, we just want whatever is best for us or our "group", whatever that means.
At current job, I do have a good enough library - but I hardly go into the office ;D
Corporate librarians are out there and do good work!
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
"A library is a database of unstructured documents with structured metadata, which might need to be indexed, queried, and accessed in many different ways."
Thanks for that.
You can definitely still pick a more "traditional" library career and avoid working with computers more than absolutely necessary if you want to, but the training will still expose you to a core set of technology concepts (database systems, digital resource management, metadata essentials, etc).
The retroactive combination sounds a bit like an Informatics degree. (Which in my neck of the woods is taught by the same school/department that does MLISes.
Stereotypically, a high-middle-age lady, who likes cats, drinks tea and has an urge/compulsion to sort things. A person who loses sleep if some serial numbers (e.g. ISBNs) are out of order.
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
This is not an interesting question. An interesting question is whether they ever got back to you.
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
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.
The first 5 or so are pretty standard (but definitely indicative of a terrible work environment). Then you get weirder ones ("would you hire their wife", "do you hire conservatives", etc.)
For example, you consider even entertaining the possibility of hiring the wife of a top performer bizarre, based on your explicit opinion that this is a terrible idea. That doesn't mean the question is bizarre. It's a normal ethical question to which you have a clear answer. What's the problem?
> > 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?
It's a thought experiment. You likely spend the majority of your waking day at work. It seems like if you're trying to optimize your total quality of life, it would be great to have that time also include some of your close friends or partners.
Now, if you're trying to entice a particular person to work at your company, is this a perk you would put on the table? Probably not. But I find it interesting to consider what ideas are just unthinkable (as in we don't even think to think it, not that we morally object to thinking it) because of a deeply ingrained notion of work/life separation.
My father and his wife own a business together. That experience is clearly profoundly valuable to both of them. Perhaps the nepotism makes this a negative experience for some of their own employees. But maybe not. There are plenty of other famous examples of partners working together. Should we deny people like my dad and stepmom even the possibility of this kind of life? What do we lose by having a black and white approach to nepotism?
> Why do friendship and professional life have to overlap at all?
Because the minutes of our life are finite. If we can spend some of those minutes at work and with close friends, we've enriched our lives and increased the number of experiences we can put in it.
Why do we assume that we should spend most of our waking lives with people we don't particularly care about? That goes against the way humans have lived for almost the entirety of our evolutionary history.
> 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.
The article isn't clear about this, but it's not necessary to strictly interpret all of these questions about the workplace.
> On the other hand, there are people literally advocating for genocide in the world.
Do any of those people know what you oppose them? You aren't their enemy if they don't know who you are.
Should they? What does it say about the causes you support if the people directly opposed to them don't even know you exist? Should they at least know about groups you support that oppose them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
I've only flicked through the other volumes though, to be fair.
My company essentially deletes all that. They migrate from intranet portal to intranet portal periodically, and each migration is advertised as an opportunity to "clean up" all that documentation that hasn't been recently updated about legacy systems that we still need to run.
The people who run the portal are technically in HR or something like that, and I think they have know idea how it's actually used, and mentally model it as a place for announcements.
Added to my reading list.
Have you read Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks? It's quite good.
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...
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
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.
(and if it's for personal development, doubling down on the "is this book even current?")
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.
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.
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.
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.
I find this mind boggling.
Here in Blighty, I've never had a job where taking time to research and read up wasn't expected. Personally, every employer I've had has also allocated several days a year to staff training; either classroom training or self-study as needed.
The Microsoft library had tons of books, subscriptions to scholarly journals, and made it easy to order new books.
There is no substitute for having a door to close to isolate noise, and being able to do some intensive work.
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).
I've heard the story of tennis enthusiasts being the prime movers of the open plan layout.
I would get super irritated at people for small insignificant things, be as adversarial/hostile as possible and try to turn every discussion into an argument, I saw slights everywhere, and everyone was stupid.
Once I noticed and figured out it was the noise that made me go crazy I bought noise canceling headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), wore them every day all day either listening to nothing or calming rain (using the Rainy Mood app on iPhone).
After a few weeks I was completely back to my normal happy self. All the perceived slights disappeared, other people were smart and reasonable again, small things were small things easily forgiven and meetings went much smother.
It's absolutely wild how the noise of an open plan office can affect you mentally. I was not the only one going crazy from it, earlier, shortly after we moved to the open plan office one of my colleagues was let go for having gone crazy in much the same way (he was more exposed to upper management).
I've been going into the office 3+ times per week since early 2022. We went from about 6 people to 30 or so in the room every day. The noise levels can get overwhelming after a few hours, and someone has an annoying tacky ringtone. I thought people stopped with annoying ringtones 10+ years ago?
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.
Even when I was poor and sleeping on the floor because I didn't own furniture, and didn't have health insurance, I'd still buy books (and cheap lunches with the team). I'd also print out a lot of tech docs from the Internet, and put them in discarded binders that I labeled neatly.
In addition to what I learned from the books and could reference from my library, there might've also been a signaling benefit. Early in my career, I was a kid with no degree, working as an intern at a hardcore software&hardware engineering company. I suspect that, on occasion, the impressive library signaled to people coming by my work space that at least I had interest/ambition/hustle (or maybe just presumptuousness).
Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, posturing, and self-promoting. But, before I get too judgmental, I should remember when I was starting out, and at least had an inkling of awareness that colleagues seeing my books couldn't hurt my opportunities.
I think this can be sifted through. Strange and unusual tech or adjacent books suggest that the person has exhausted all the common ones or that they started getting the books mentioned in other books and kept doing that process. You can even ask them why they have one.
For instance I've got a copy of the 1926 text The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker because of Jim McCarthy's praise for the text in his book Dynamics of Software Development.
Then again, with books people tend to have either 0, about a dozen, or hundreds. I'm in group 3, maybe it's a problem.
Can be so kind to you recommend one or perhaps top5?
My #3 is way lower, which follows one of the 22 laws, but probably Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons.
Those are three enjoyable books that are pretty easy to read and have pretty valuable lessons in them that can take quite a long time to truly appreciate.
The task of a programmer is to create efficient and elegant machines based on thoughts by using imagination. Human creations by human hands, programming is a social product. Algorithms and data structures are actually the more shallow lesson. Creating something that finds place in the world is the true challenge.
To say it with Umberto Eco[1]: A library is a research tool. A library of books you've all read is worthless.
[1] I have read that directly from Eco, I guess in some old book about how to write scientific papers. I can't find that anymore. The thought is reference in Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan", though.
If anyone is interested, here is the The Analysis of Art book on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/analysisofart00park/mode/2up
Presently working on getting my feet wet with machine learning and primarily with a book. Of course it’s out of date the second it’s printed with a fast moving topic but it has still been incredibly useful as a survey and basics.
I miss the times when you could read K&R, one of Stroustroup's books and an STL book and you pretty much knew most of what there was to know.
My dojo.
yes, and every old version going back, all completely up to those dates too
For technical stuff I prefer to have both physical and digital copies of some books. For non-technical, I tend to go fully digital (except reference material, like my D&D books). I like going analog to read technical stuff, I'm not exactly sure why.
Anyway, I believe that reading is a super power that's helped me throughout my life. I try very hard to impress this on others, especially people that I mentor. I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!
So much this. I can't get smarter, I was born with the brain I was born with, but I can easily fill up time reading and remembering all kinds of crap someone else won't put the time for.
Once I had a manager challenging on making things up regarding a rather thick white paper he forwarded me, because there is no way I could have read it that fast. Once he saw I commented the whole thing beginning to end in Word, well, his face was priceless. Side effect was me looking for a new job a couple of months later.
Totally agree on reading as kind of a super power. Reading in the sense of reading and understanding, do so rather quickly, and be able to condense the relevant parts out of whatever text you. And remember the rest well enough to be able to look it up when needed. Same goes for handbooks, people, read your damn handbooks!
It's funny so, that for RPG stuff I went all digital with the exception of the existing pre-PDF era collection I have. And for technical stuff I am like you, preferably paper. For English literature India is a really good source to get those books at affordable prices through Amazon. Pretty sure those sellers are not supposed, or even allowed, to sell internationally, but they do. Worst case print quality is somewhat sub-par, from what I saw with some of my colleagues, or the cover is somewhat generic (in case of the majority of my library). The editions are the same so, content wise.
Not just online but also more up to date.
This is a drawback of books, they don't auto-update and upgrades are quite expensive. In IT I don't see a point to keeping them archived anymore.
I still use them for learning new topics though.