This has been my experience too. However, I found that changing the book club to “article club” where we all read one interesting technical article worked quite well. I have been running such a club with fortnightly meetings for over 3 years now.
Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings?
I guess that wouldn't be unreasonable if the content is work related and certainly helps with attendance, but I'm not sure if that would fly within all corporations.
> Are you able to organize that on company time? Are you guys clocked in during your meetings?
I've approved or started (or both) this sort of thing on company time before, at more than one place.
For context, this was typically early stage R&D, and many/most of the employees had some academic background, though that ranged from "decades ago" to "we just hired you after a masters degree".
In this setting, it's a pretty natural continuation of the common "journal club" approach in academic research groups. It spreads the effort around, helps the team stay on top of new work, and generally improves professional development - if done well. It does take a bit of effort to keep fresh.
I think most technology companies should have that, and I've been promoting that workplaces.
The trick to make it sustainable is to make at 3-month calendar of covered papers from multiple sub-areas (e.g. data management to machine learning, new programming languages to compiler topics) and share that widely. Not every topic is relevant to everyone, so naturally each topics will only attract a subset of the crowd beyond a small number of open-minded champions, but that's okay.
(Not OP) We tried launching a book club at one of our previous companies, where we were told "no worries, take your time to read a chapter a week and take an hour to talk about it.
While in theory, everybody thought it's a good idea, not everyone had time to read it, and when it came down to it, everybody just preferred to work on their regular tasks. In the end, nobody wants to risk delaying a promised deadline because of a book club.
>where we were told "no worries, take your time to read a chapter a week and take an hour to talk about it.
Maybe because I've been a reader my whole life, but I can't imagine getting value out of reading a chapter a week. It's rare for me to read less than 1 book per week. Even if it were a technical or educational book, one chapter at a time is a miserable way to read something.
If you're a relatively senior engineer, any reasonable company will want you to be doing knowledge sharing (or outright mentoring - which this isn't, but it falls vaguely enough in the same bucket that you can usually get positive attention for it.)
(In a previous startup, we had cross-department tech talks, partly because we had some really specialized problems, so it was useful for, say, releng to hear about what the ML team thought was interesting, and vice versa, just for generally improving communication and reducing friction. We even threw in an occasional "lightning talk" session, which was popular, though it was as much for getting people comfortable giving talks so they could level up to bigger ones.)
Not OP, but I have worked at a few companies that would't mind, as long as the articles are relevant to your work. You could even sell it as a way to enrich everyone's expertise because of the deeper technical discussion.
Yeah. The company has a general culture of enabling learning, so this fits right in. The company also does a wider book club that focuses on more non-technical topics.
We tried different models. One book every two months, one or more chapters of a book every month (thus finishing a whole book over a few months), and one article/video (generally requiring an hour of reading/watching time) every two weeks. My thoughts below are based on experience of those three models.
1. Reading a whole book every one or two months works well when everyone has a regular reading habit. Without that people realize that they need to read a whole book in a few days before the meeting. That either led to poor quality discussions or people showing up without reading.
2. Reading book chapters every month was less demanding but the frequency of meetings was still too low for people to build reading into their routines.
3. At two weeks the frequency was high enough that it became a routine for the engineers.
4. We also reminded everyone one day before to read the article. Even if they had forgotten to read till then it is easy to find and hour in the day to read up.
5. If the reminder was too far in advance (say 3 days before) then people ignored the reminder.
It’s crowdsourced. People add to the list things they find interesting and would like discussed more widely. We also have round robin turns setup to decide who picks the next article to read from the pool.
There’s another interesting dimension to it especially in the context of getting feedback from people you regularly interact in life. Regardless of whether the particular feedback was helpful appreciating it as a gift encourages the person to give feedback in the future. This ensures that you continue to get feedback from the person in the future some of which may be very valuable.
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