Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft

Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft(armaansood.com)

219 points by Foe 60 days ago | 54 comments

smokel 60 days ago |

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?

Foe 60 days ago | |

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.

oa335 60 days ago | | |

> 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

zihotki 60 days ago | | |

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

eldenring 60 days ago | |

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.

nico 60 days ago | | |

I’ve been scolded for reading books and documentation for the tasks and software I was asked to build (at a startup) during my regular work hours

No company I’ve worked at has ever had dedicated time for reading papers or articles

Maybe I’ve only worked at outliers?

smokel 59 days ago | | |

Interestingly, the person at Microsoft states in a reply that even most of them have to pick this up in their spare time. Judging from other replies, it seems that there are quite some differences in how companies approach this.

What I meant with "menial coding" is those jobs where people have to submit TPS reports on how much hours they spend for each customer. Reading a paper such as this one [1] is typically not directly necessary for being a good frontend developer, but it might stimulate someone to develop into a more fruitful employee in the long run. Managers would have to explain to their customer why time is being spent on that, and that requires some vision and creativity, which is not always a given.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

thi2 60 days ago | | |

Thats my experience as well. Of course not ten paper a day but some learning is always encouraged.

One company had a +1 day. You worked 4 days, had 1 day for learning - everything relevant for the job was fine.

rectang 59 days ago | |

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.

yellow_postit 59 days ago | |

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.

zihotki 60 days ago | |

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..

munchbunny 59 days ago | |

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.

OJFord 59 days ago | |

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.

markn951 60 days ago | |

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

Insanity 59 days ago | | |

I'm a SWE manager as well. I always tell my team that learning is part of the job, and so it can happen on the job. To be honest, it worked out pretty well. and I lead by example, I'll read something interesting during work and share it with the team.

vasco 59 days ago | |

You could realistically read 2-3 papers per visit to HackerNews if you were doing that instead. Me too.

Foe 60 days ago |

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!

mememememememo 59 days ago |

I am so jealous. 25 years of crud and framework chasing and I'd never get close to that. I am slightly closer now but not much.

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.

rrgok 59 days ago | |

I agree with you. I spend me free time deep-diving in such topics. I find hard to use this knowledge in a useful way at my job. The job market for deep topics is hard to penetrate.

mohitk05 59 days ago |

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!

[1] https://engineering.zalando.com/posts/2026/01/running-an-eng... [2] https://luma.com/y9edbih7

oa335 60 days ago |

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?

3eb7988a1663 60 days ago | |

I lead a book club once (Designing Data Intensive Applications)- read a chapter and meet every two weeks. Was a real flop. Attendance remained high, but only one other person actually finished the book.

What was a real slap in the face - maybe a year after that book had concluded, someone told me I should lead another one about this other topic. She had not finished the first book, and she wanted me to regurgitate another to the group?

_kulang 59 days ago | | |

Maybe there was value in the discussions that didn’t require the reading? But running seminars isn’t hobby material. If this was happening at my work, I may skim or not even read parts of the book, and still attend discussions.

mohitk05 59 days ago | |

I co-run a similar group at my company (added a comment above), what has worked for us and we realised this early on: not everyone will have the time to read and hence the sessions need to have a driver/lead. Assigning reading does not work unfortunately as many attend such groups voluntarily in addition to their primary work.

We as organisers (better to have at least 2) prepared before hand, either a presentation or a document, and then presented it in the group. While doing this, the group is free to discuss and interrupt at any time (we chose a slighly informal venue in the office).

Gradually, after about 10 sessions, we started seeing voluntary interest from the attendees to present a paper. And honestly this was an amazing feeling. So I'd suggest first finding a co-organiser who is interested in doing this and then pushing through the initial sessions by driving the topic yourself. That said, since you are preparing, you are free to choose the papers. We saw that if you choose papers related to a common larger theme that you are interested in, people would show up. Initially the attendance would be low, but with regular meetings, you'd start seeing regulars.

RomanPushkin 59 days ago |

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.

elankart 59 days ago | |

What a buzzkill and a super negative comment.

adampunk 59 days ago | | |

I’m sorry that you find the modal experience in reading groups to be bad?

It seems like the reading group that the OP put together was really successful. Most are not. That’s not really the fault of someone else for sharing their experience.

rectang 59 days ago |

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.