In the New Year Lifehacker.ru and the publishing house "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber" continue to study the bookshelves of IT companies. We held a class competition in 2012, for which we were sent stories about the company's libraries from all over Russia.
Today we also have a story from a distant city. We had a chance to study the library of the company "SKB Kontur" in Yekaterinburg.
Perhaps all accountants and entrepreneurs in Russia are familiar with the developments of SKB Kontur. The company appeared in Yekaterinburg in 1988. The central office is located here, despite the fact that there are representative offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk and other cities.
Internal communications specialist Katya Shirokova tells us that the company has several libraries. In one of the kitchens there is a free bookcrossing area (we have met such cabinets in many companies, for example in Yandex). And professional literature is contained in independent libraries of different departments. They say the most interesting bookshelves are in the development department and in the user interface design department. We are going to look at them.
Our first stop is the library of designers. Her keeper, designer Masha Kovaleva, tells about her.
Masha: "Our library is the initiative of Sergey Solovyov, the head of the department. About once every six months we make a centralized order of books, but sometimes the guys themselves bring something to read. Basically, the library contains all the book classics about design and interfaces. We also try to keep track of new products, so when something new goes on sale, for example, another book by Yana Frank, we are already waiting for it and immediately buy it."
Masha believes that there are no "bibles" in the field of design: "This is an individual path for everyone, and reading good books is not an absolute guarantee that everything will work out." But let's still see what the designers and designers of the "Contour" are reading.
The library has Taffy in English, who is considered a cult author on the topic of information design. Masha explains that it is difficult to study these works in English, and the author does not want to be translated.
"We have a lot of books published by Artemy Lebedev Studio: I personally really like the book about the letters from Aa to Yaya by Yuri Gordon. There is a "cowardice", but it's more likely just because it should be."
In addition to books about design, the library has books on general business processes. We saw the "Toyota Dao" and "Website Conversion Enhancement", Rework, Dream Team and even "Word of Mouth Marketing".
Masha continues the story: "Of course, we have a mental hospital in the hands of Alan Cooper's patients. The book is more than 10 years old, it gives a historical digression, and reading it, you understand how much the software development industry has grown. Cooper allows you to understand what problems have remained in the industry or have been reborn into new ones. Now the book is in someone's hands."
It happens that employees return from studies from other countries (for example, from the Netherlands) and bring printouts of interesting materials. They are also stored in the library.
Right now, about 50% of the books are on hand. You can't read many books on drawing, calligraphy or typography at once — you have to work with them. Therefore, publications are delayed by readers.
The process of transferring books is organized simply. They are stored in a closet next to Masha's workplace, and their availability can be viewed on the blog of designers and designers. Here you can also get acquainted with the average rating of the book and read reviews of it.
But you can also find notes about what you read offline:)
The blog also has a section marked with mysterious letters "PCH". Here is a large summary table in which you can see who has read what and what rating this book has put. The titles of the books are not easy to read, but it looks like this:
"Now we want to come up with some mechanisms to motivate people to read more, to make minimal reports and reviews, because it is the advice of a friend that best encourages reading a particular book," says Masha. "We also figure out together how to make sure that the books are not lost."
One of the options is stickers. Here, for example, is one of the versions:
After saying goodbye to Masha, we briefly looked at the developers. What's on their bookshelves?
The order of books and the filling of the library is handled by the office manager of the development department, Anna Aleksandrovna Radosteva.
Anna says that the idea of creating a library belongs to Eduard Romanovich Shifman, head of the development department. Today there are about 70 books in the catalog. Recently, there are more and more publications in foreign languages.
Interestingly, the most widely read books are not about programming languages and not about development directly: this is the "Human Factor. Successful projects and teams" by Demarco and Lister, "Addicted to adrenaline and zombified by templates", "Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb and the same Rework.
And this is what the bookcrossing zone looks like in the "Contour". Any employee can bring his book and put it on the shelf in the kitchen. Similarly, anyone else can take it and read it both over tea in the office kitchen and at home.
Cool design, isn't it?
Thanks to the Kontur team for an exciting tour. Did you like it too? Write down what impressed you the most in this library. And we are already preparing reports from other well-known Russian IT companies.
