I don’t understand people who are in a career who can’t see long term implications of not keeping up with new developments. Sure, reading about LINQ right now does many people no good because their employer won’t adopt the new frameworks for a year or more, but when they do, wouldn’t they like to hit the ground running? What if they drop 3.5 into their environment and this developer is already at an intermediate level and becomes a leader to the team? Even if that isn’t recognized at their current job it looks and sounds great on a resume or in an interview.

I also understand the freebie mentality. No one is cheaper than me. However, almost all of my employers have been “about books”. My current employer has an O’Reilly Safari subscription for us. My last employer would buy almost any book that we asked for. My employer before that was the same way. I also hit our public library for books, or buy them used on Amazon.

I have to wonder what kind of market you work in. As I said in the article, I directly attribute my success in the industry to the amount of reading I do (all media included). The last three times I went on the market, I instantly had suitors and this past time, I had interviews every day from the time my prior company closed their doors to the day I accepted my new position. Total time out of work from my last day to my first day? Seven business days. I directly attribute my marketability to my knowledge and the things on my resume that that knowledge has brought me. I’m never scared to say that I can do some new thing at work, because I know that I can RTFM (or have already).

I make a habit of not working for companies that consider IT a total liability. In fact, I ask questions during the interview whose sole purpose is to ferret out their policies or culture. If you aren’t in a company that values you and your continuing education, I have to wonder if you shouldn’t look elsewhere. Better situations are out there!

Personally, I have a ton of programming, architecture, and design books. I love to read. I read more than a book a month. Do employers value that? Nada. Zip. No benny. For most programmers if there has to be an external motivating factor for reading full length books. Not so for me. I love to read. But again, it hasn’t provided me an out. It hasn’t manifested itself in new positions, greater glory or upward (or even lateral for that matter) mobility. Most employers if their people are reading books. Everything has gone the way of outsourcing and bean counting. Companies want what they need and want it now. They want it for the least cost. Quality and long term vision have been sacrifice. Is this a cynical or insightful response to a reasonable question? Perhaps other’s have different sentiments.

Now one thing to point out. I read a decent number of books, but I don’t always read them through, even if they were meant for that.

For advanced topics, there are times that I love short 2-3 page articles on something. I have read MSDN magazines and SQL server magazines so much before. They had some good short articles where I could dig deep into something pretty fast.

The shorter articles also made it easier to think about something where I didn’t want to invest the book reading time.