[KeplerBoy]

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.

[ska]

> 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.

[jll29]

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.

[serial_dev]

(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.

So it all fizzled out within a month...

[Suppafly]

>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.

[eichin]

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.)

[ASalazarMX]

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.

[mysto]

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.