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.
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!
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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!
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.
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.
Every trading firm I've visited has a shelf of books. There's always some coding books: Python, C++ (Always Herb Sutter and Alexandrescu), Java.
There's always a bible there: Security Analysis. Just like the bible, nobody has read it but everybody thinks they know what's in there. For the quant firms I tend to know people at, it's not very relevant, but it's always there, a big, recognizable lump.
Liar's Poker is always there as well, along with Market Wizards. People have actually read those, they know the stories.
Hull's Options book is there, sometimes Wilmott.
Taleb's Black Swan is always there. Sometimes Dynamic Hedging.
And then there's a whole bunch of books about obscure topics. These are why I go through people's libraries. There'll be some book about copulas or something like that. Information theory, various electrical engineering topics, that kind of thing is useful for inspiration.
But yeah basically there's a library at every place, and they have mostly the same books.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
Many of these questions, I've thought about, and seen "good answers" in various places I've worked. I also have a tiny "bad answer" about the one in the title.
One place had a technical library room, with lots of academic journals (ACM, IEEE, etc.) and books, IIRC mostly belonging to the technical co-founders.
So, in this established company, someone probably outside of engineering started giving out "Quality Awards". At one company meeting, they gave a Quality Award to an intern, for organizing the library.
Shortly after, one of the co-founders remarked to me in passing -- amused, and lowered voice -- something about that organizing the library for Quality... seemed to involve packing the co-founder's journal subscriptions on the shelves so tightly, that there was no room to insert new issues of each journal.
Though I suspect that the co-founder was skeptical of whatever chain of events led to their company giving out Quality Awards at all, it's good that they had a sense of humor about it.
That a sense of humor is compatible with being serious and driven, is one of the things I learned from various colleagues.
"What would you take a pay cut for? What would you work on for free that makes money for someone else?" I thought about this and my first response was nothing. But then considered what if my kid had a disease and a company was working on the cure. I would take a pay cut or work for them for free to attempt to expedite the cure. If I'm willing to do that for my kid then would I be willing to do that for other kids? Probably not work for free as I need to eat and retire one day but I think I would probably be willing to take a pay cut working for a company whose product is a tangible net good for the world. Actually produce something of lasting value instead of widgets.
I used to work for a company that had a book shelf. I borrowed Design Patterns one day and just forgot to return it. Still have it all these years later.
I appreciate these questions as some of them make me take a step back and think about things.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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
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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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
yes, and every old version going back, all completely up to those dates too
Corporate librarians are out there and do good work!
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.
Deleted Comment
There's always a bible there: Security Analysis. Just like the bible, nobody has read it but everybody thinks they know what's in there. For the quant firms I tend to know people at, it's not very relevant, but it's always there, a big, recognizable lump.
Liar's Poker is always there as well, along with Market Wizards. People have actually read those, they know the stories.
Hull's Options book is there, sometimes Wilmott.
Taleb's Black Swan is always there. Sometimes Dynamic Hedging.
And then there's a whole bunch of books about obscure topics. These are why I go through people's libraries. There'll be some book about copulas or something like that. Information theory, various electrical engineering topics, that kind of thing is useful for inspiration.
But yeah basically there's a library at every place, and they have mostly the same books.
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.
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.
I've only flicked through the other volumes though, to be fair.
One place had a technical library room, with lots of academic journals (ACM, IEEE, etc.) and books, IIRC mostly belonging to the technical co-founders.
So, in this established company, someone probably outside of engineering started giving out "Quality Awards". At one company meeting, they gave a Quality Award to an intern, for organizing the library.
Shortly after, one of the co-founders remarked to me in passing -- amused, and lowered voice -- something about that organizing the library for Quality... seemed to involve packing the co-founder's journal subscriptions on the shelves so tightly, that there was no room to insert new issues of each journal.
Though I suspect that the co-founder was skeptical of whatever chain of events led to their company giving out Quality Awards at all, it's good that they had a sense of humor about it.
That a sense of humor is compatible with being serious and driven, is one of the things I learned from various colleagues.
I used to work for a company that had a book shelf. I borrowed Design Patterns one day and just forgot to return it. Still have it all these years later.
I appreciate these questions as some of them make me take a step back and think about things.
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 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 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 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