I understand that in a research lab or in academia, this is common practice. But in the more menial coding industry that most of us are probably in, how do you find time for this? Do people read papers in their spare time and discuss over lunch, or are there enlightened managers who support this during working hours?
Good question. Most people read the paper on their own time, and we meet over lunch. The meetings themselves are just an hour, so it's not a massive time block. I've found that the people who show up are the ones who are genuinely curious and would be reading this stuff anyway (and sometimes just need a commitment/accountability to do it). Having a group gives them a reason to do it on a schedule.
We usually start with quick overall impressions, then go around with a few prompts: "what's something new you learned?", "what didn't you like?", and "what didn't you fully understand?" (every paper has something, whether it's the evaluation methodology or some algorithm detail). That last question tends to drive most of the discussion because people chime in and build on each other's answers. Sometimes you get lucky with domain expertise in the room. For example, when we read "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"[1], one of the attendees was a former Intel engineer who spent their career in memory systems. They answered questions the rest of us wouldn't have even known to ask.
That implies that you have a fixed time for lunch and also chat during lunch. I may be the minority but I prefer to eat when I'm hungry and focus on the food instead of chatting. And there is also allergies, as a celiac, I have big troubles eating together with others - they may accidently contaminate my food
I’m actually curious here, not trying to question your experience but does other people’s food regularly contaminate your food when you eat at the same table as them?
I’ve lived with a celiac sufferer before and I’ve never heard of something that extreme, but everyone’s different.
The degree of sensitivity of allergies varies widely. For example there are people who only have a problem after consuming a large scoop of peanut butter but there are also those who will end up in the hospital from trace amounts that you'd have difficulty spotting with the naked eye.
I dated a woman with celiac sprue (which I guess was extreme.. her mother had to have a bowel resection due to celiac related issues) and she had sudden anaphylaxis at a restaurant that required the use of an epi-pen and an ambulance.
The reaction was caused by the micro-brewery that had opened next door and all the wheat dust in the ventilation system.
It sounds like you could get very high ROI from chilling out a little bit. If one social lunch per month is an unfathomable hardship then you're probably leaving a lot of other opportunities on the table. Do you have OCD or social anxiety or something?
I'm not sure what you mean by menial coding but all my employers have supported this in the past. This was a variety of companies, big tech, startups, etc. I think its more likely your employer is the outlier.
The groups I ran were scheduled during lunch. Technical management would look the other way if we ran over time or if people spent a certain amount of their work day reading the material.
Even if you have enlightened technical management, it's helpful if you don't force them to spend political capital justifying groups like this. Getting our enlightened CTO to spend a few hundred dollars on books was easy when we were a startup. Once we got acquired, making that argument to unreceptive higher-ups wasn't worth it for anybody.
In my experience it is a lot like finding time to work on "strategy". There's never really explicit time given, you have to make it in the day, and its often the most valuable time spent.
This is a very good question. I also struggle to find a good solution to process various signals (papers, tecniques, etc.) with my co-workers while maintaining proper work-life balance. Either you have to be a full time geek, or be left behind..
I sneak thirty minutes in here and there for it regardless of my manager. If you work, say, 40-45 hours a week, you’re probably doing 20 hours of true focused productivity. It’s easier to borrow here and there from the other half of the time to flip through a paper or two.
If it happens in the office and on the calendar then I can't imagine it being an issue? (vs. an extended jolly at the pub every lunch through the afternoon for unofficial 'reading group'!) Would take quite a micromanaging and anti-L&D employer/manager.
Speaking as a SWE manager who explicitly “mandates” (not actually mandatory but I strongly encourage following your passions and interests in an academic kind of way!) we do exist, I assume I’m not the only one :)
My team almost always can find an hour between tasks organically so I’ve never really had to push
Hi HN, I've been organizing a systems reading group at Microsoft for five years now. I wrote down some takeaways on what worked (and what didn't). I'd love to hear if anyone else has successfully kept an engineering reading group alive at their company, or if you have any favorite systems papers we should add to our list!
Congratulations on the five year mark! I co-run a similar paper reading group at Zalando (European e-commerce) and recently shared our learnings/experience[1] of running such a group for over a year and I'm happy to see so many similarities.
We focus our papers around distributed systems, software engineering and languages and try to cover more ground on the applications of the concepts discussed in the papers. The blog post also contains a "blueprint" for someone who is looking to start a similar group.
What has driven the meetups throughout the year is we being two organisers, driving the topic ourselves by preparing a presentation (not everyone would have the time to pre-read) and making the format conversational/open - very similar to what Armaan (op) shared.
One of our recent experiments was doing a collab with the Berlin Systems Group[2] where we organised an external-facing event in Berlin with attendees from outside our organisation. I was so happy to see a nice small group turn up for the event and thoroughly enjoy it!
I would be interested to hear others experiences with running these types of groups. We’ve tried this a couple of times at my current job and both times it’s petered out - people don’t do the assigned reading and then just stop attending.
Any suggestions on how to keep such a group alive?
I've seen such reading groups. I worked for Atlassian, and there was a reading group. My impression is it was organized only as a low effort just to demonstrate that IC is going extra mile for the company. The quality of such reading groups were quite low. And it was expected that you would attend this reading group at a lunch time. You're taking your lunch with you, and instead of enjoying your meal, you're cramped in a small room with coworkers who also got their sandwiches and sugar soda. Horrible experience, and zero value.
I ran reading groups over several years a medium-sized startup I worked for and for an open source community I was a part of. The groups were targeted not only at engineering staff but also semi-technical positions such as product management and low-skilled data pipeline specialists, with the aim of building bridges between departments and internal recruitment.
Running those reading groups was basically how I acquired a lot of knowledge I didn't get because I didn't major in Comp Sci as an undergrad.
Books/MOOCs we went through:
* Pro Git (Chacon) [three times]
* Programming Language Pragmatics (Scott)
* Calculus first semester (Coursera/OSU/Fowler)
* Eloquent JavaScript (Haverbeke)
* Learning Perl (Schwartz/Foy) [two or three times]
* Coding the Matrix (Coursera/Brown/Klein) [didn't finish]
* Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach (Cox)
* Learning Core Audio (Adamson/Avila)
The level of commitment from the participants was mixed. Nobody came for the free lunch (although arranging free lunch was essential in getting people to show up). Many people had ambitions that outstripped their commitment. But there were plenty of people who took advantage and learned tons.
One fellow, who I feel immensely fortunate to have known, went from zero experience to arguably our most productive IC within 2 years, and eventually landed at a FAANG. He also took a turn leading the discussion group.
Another participant was a Product Manager who became much better able to communicate with Engineering after improving her understanding of programming fundamentals.
The sessions were generally organized around questions that people would bring about the material — my motto was "we'll struggle through together". I preferred questions posed by others but always had enough of my own to fill space.
The tips I would have for people running such groups:
First you need a discussion leader. You need someone who can get the group unstuck and who knows the material. It's the same dynamic as having a good TA for a college discussion section.
Second, remove all friction. Corporate won't buy books? Screw it, I bought 'em myself. Corporate won't arrange for lunch? Screw it, I bought it for everybody. (Our CTO was highly supportive but once the company got acquired we couldn't get budget approved anymore). The total outlay I made leading the group was a few thousand dollars — far less than I would have paid for formal courses where I would have learned less.
54 comments
> The meetings themselves are just an hour, so it's not a massive time block
How exactly are the meetings structured? I.e is someone leading discussions? Does each person go around and share thoughts? Etc
[1] https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf
I’ve lived with a celiac sufferer before and I’ve never heard of something that extreme, but everyone’s different.
The reaction was caused by the micro-brewery that had opened next door and all the wheat dust in the ventilation system.
Even if you have enlightened technical management, it's helpful if you don't force them to spend political capital justifying groups like this. Getting our enlightened CTO to spend a few hundred dollars on books was easy when we were a startup. Once we got acquired, making that argument to unreceptive higher-ups wasn't worth it for anybody.
My team almost always can find an hour between tasks organically so I’ve never really had to push
If I had my time again I'd honestly just apply for job 1 make ends meet then continously apply to get a job like this where you can go deep.
Money is probably good but just for the interestingness. That DCOM and SOAP shit I did is worthless now. Most tech is non compounding.
We focus our papers around distributed systems, software engineering and languages and try to cover more ground on the applications of the concepts discussed in the papers. The blog post also contains a "blueprint" for someone who is looking to start a similar group.
What has driven the meetups throughout the year is we being two organisers, driving the topic ourselves by preparing a presentation (not everyone would have the time to pre-read) and making the format conversational/open - very similar to what Armaan (op) shared.
One of our recent experiments was doing a collab with the Berlin Systems Group[2] where we organised an external-facing event in Berlin with attendees from outside our organisation. I was so happy to see a nice small group turn up for the event and thoroughly enjoy it!
[1] https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2026/01/running-an-eng... [2] https://luma.com/y9edbih7
Any suggestions on how to keep such a group alive?
Running those reading groups was basically how I acquired a lot of knowledge I didn't get because I didn't major in Comp Sci as an undergrad.
Books/MOOCs we went through:
* Pro Git (Chacon) [three times]
* Programming Language Pragmatics (Scott)
* Calculus first semester (Coursera/OSU/Fowler)
* Eloquent JavaScript (Haverbeke)
* Learning Perl (Schwartz/Foy) [two or three times]
* Coding the Matrix (Coursera/Brown/Klein) [didn't finish]
* Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach (Cox)
* Learning Core Audio (Adamson/Avila)
The level of commitment from the participants was mixed. Nobody came for the free lunch (although arranging free lunch was essential in getting people to show up). Many people had ambitions that outstripped their commitment. But there were plenty of people who took advantage and learned tons.
One fellow, who I feel immensely fortunate to have known, went from zero experience to arguably our most productive IC within 2 years, and eventually landed at a FAANG. He also took a turn leading the discussion group.
Another participant was a Product Manager who became much better able to communicate with Engineering after improving her understanding of programming fundamentals.
The sessions were generally organized around questions that people would bring about the material — my motto was "we'll struggle through together". I preferred questions posed by others but always had enough of my own to fill space.
The tips I would have for people running such groups:
First you need a discussion leader. You need someone who can get the group unstuck and who knows the material. It's the same dynamic as having a good TA for a college discussion section.
Second, remove all friction. Corporate won't buy books? Screw it, I bought 'em myself. Corporate won't arrange for lunch? Screw it, I bought it for everybody. (Our CTO was highly supportive but once the company got acquired we couldn't get budget approved anymore). The total outlay I made leading the group was a few thousand dollars — far less than I would have paid for formal courses where I would have learned less.