> 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

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’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?

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.

Thank you! I think the biggest factor for us was that most attendees already had some technical baseline. That makes it way easier to pick papers and have productive discussions. A cross-experience group sounds much harder. We occasionally have non-technical people who attend (e.g., designers), but they usually are very eager to learn. The guided series format might have helped in your case, where you pick the topic and sequence upfront so there's less debate about direction each meeting. Honestly, just getting people to show up is hard at first, so the fact that you got it off the ground at all says something.

There are other groups within Microsoft, but they usually follow a presentation format rather than a collaborative discussion. Off the top of my head, Phil Bernstein[1] and Hanuma Kodavalla[2] run great database seminars for invited speakers. I regularly attend and have presented in both forums; Phil's crowd is mostly researchers, while Hanuma's is mostly full of SQL engineers. Different from a small reading group, but still great.

Appreciate the paper link! We like going back to the basics sometimes, so I'll definitely take a look.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Bernstein

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9eNQbZUAAAAJ&hl=en

It depends on the theme. If we're picking something in a space the group already knows well, like databases, I'll look at "Best Papers" from recent VLDB/ICDE/SIGMOD conferences. If we're exploring a topic most people are unfamiliar with, we'll go with something more foundational instead. For example, we're starting an arc on datacenters (servers, racks, networking, load balancing, power, cooling, failures, etc.), and most attendees don't have deep background there, so I found a book on the topic that we're going to read through[1].

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01761-2

Not author, but in the past I was just going through papers on biggest conferences for the last year and checked what sounded interesting for my own education. But it was a bit of a chore. What I tried now is use gemini thinking research and asked it to do just that, go through main software/hardware conferences for last 3 years, find me papers on the topics of interest and give summary and links. The result is pretty good!

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.