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Comment by Foe | Hacker News Reader

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!

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I gave a long post at the top level about running a book-focused reading group at a company, but your group sounds more like a Papers We Love[1] chapter.

I used to co-host the San Diego chapter of Papers We Love[2], and here's my secret sauce: I offered to meet with every presenter in advance for a dry run of their presentation. Probably two thirds of the presenters took me up on the offer.

For the group and the presenter, going through a dry run had the positive impact you would expect on presentation quality.

The benefit for me was that I got one-on-one discussion/learning with a wide variety of people passionate about a broad range of papers, and I also got to go through the material twice. So I learned much more and retained it better.

[1] https://paperswelove.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYPNnoVAQqb2Mue9v9f2euA

The dry run idea is really smart. We've done something similar, where we had Niv Dayan[1] lead a session on Diva[2] (before it won Best Paper at VLDB 2025!). I had worked with him in the past and thought it would be cool to have him present to the group. Having the author in the room completely changed the quality of the discussion. Most of our sessions right now aren't presenter-led, but I'd like to do more of that.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vdMOvmIAAAAJ [2] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p3923-eslami.pdf

This is great and congrats on the success. Many years ago I tried starting a cybersecurity reading group in my city since the startup I was working at was small and people there weren’t interested in that topic. I got a lot of very green, aspiring and non-professionals to show up. We couldn’t really agree on where to start and people had different ideas of where to focus or even how much they wanted to contribute. Mostly people wanted to hear a summary and didn’t really put in the kind of effort that I had hoped. It didn’t last long. Congrats again on making it 5 years and covering so much ground.

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.

> 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.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

How do you suss out peoples technical aptitude, and what was the minimum level you were looking for?

How were your discussions structured?

The group is open to anyone at Microsoft and I don't gatekeep. The papers themselves act as a natural filter. If someone finds the material interesting, they attend and keep coming back. If it's not their thing, they self-select out. Over time, it's led to a core group of regular attendees as well as many who will join ad-hoc.

Interesting. We don't have an engineering culture, so definitely no. Did you find similar groups within MSFT?

BTW heard about this paper[1] a few weeks ago, but not completely aligned with database and probably a bit too introductory for your group.

[1]https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~awang/courses/cop5611_s2024/vnode.pd...

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

Thanks for the references!

Any tipps on finding interesting and valuable papers?

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!

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