A few months ago, a work friend and I were commiserating about how we never make time to read any research. There’s all this fascinating, challenging stuff being written, we agreed, and we’re missing it all.

When a few more coworkers chimed in, saying they’d also like to push themselves to read more academic literature, we realized we were onto something. The next day, the Exosite Paper Club was born.

It’s been really fun to organize and participate in Paper Club these last few months. I’ve learned a lot, not just about the fields on which our reading material focused, but also about my coworkers and my company. Now I want to share some my excitement about this project and encourage you to start a Paper Club at your own company.

What Paper Club is and does

Paper Club is a group that meets every other week over lunch. We all prepare by reading a particular academic paper, and we discuss it in a free-form group session. Sometimes we teach each other about concepts from the paper, sometimes we brainstorm ways to apply ideas to our work at Exosite, and sometimes we just chat.

The paper for each session is selected by a participant from the previous session, and can be about any topic from project management to statistics to psychology to medicine. Readers of any skill level in the paper’s subject matter are warmly welcomed at meetings, but you can always skip a session if the topic doesn’t interest you. All we ask is that, when the material is hard for you, you push yourself and try to grasp it anyway.

We want a wide variety of participants, from DevOps to UI to sales & marketing, but we also want to read papers that are detailed enough to be challenging. To these ends, we have three guidelines for submitting a paper:

1. Papers should be accessible. Try to pick papers at a technical level such that at least some of your peers will be able to understand most of the content. You want the session to be a discussion, not a lecture.
2. Papers should be challenging. While accessibility is important, you don’t want your peers to have too easy a time. The best conversations happen when people are forced to push themselves a bit. It’s okay to suggest papers that are only accessible to those with a particular academic background, as long as you think the paper will create a good discussion with some subset of your coworkers.
3. Papers should be deep. The best discussions tend to come from papers that dive pretty deep into a topic. Reviews and textbook chapters can be interesting, but we tend to prefer papers that go into detail on a specific topic.

What we’ve read so far

We’ve been doing Paper Club at Exosite since mid-November, and we’ve discussed 8 papers to date. I thought we’d be reading mostly computer science papers, but I couldn’t be happier with the variety we’ve gotten!

Here are a few of the papers that produced the most interesting discussions:

• Confidence in Judgment: Persistence of the Illusion of Validity. This classic behavioral study from 1978 takes the well-established observation that people (even especially experts) are usually more confident in their judgments than they should be. The authors build a simple but powerful model for the mental processes responsible for this overconfidence, and present some suggestions for systematically curtailing it.
• On Bullshit. If you’re like most engineers, you’re utterly allergic to bullshit. But have you ever thought about what makes bullshit bullshit? How it’s different from outright lying, and how it’s different from normal speech? This famous philosophical essay tries to answer these questions, and it provides some valuable insights for someone trying to excise bullshit from their life.
• Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt. This 1999 analysis of PGP 5.0 usability raises some points that are crucial for anyone trying to design intuitive user experiences. The paper led us into a super productive critique of the metaphorical structure used in our own company’s documentation.

How it’s going

I have been really happy with the intellectual diversity of our Paper Club participants. Even when the paper under discussion is an especially wonky one, we get project managers, devs from all different software teams, salespeople, marketers, managers, and occasionally even company executives. Seeing all these people engage in thoughtful dialogue on such a wide variety of topics is inspiring. It takes me out of my DevOps bubble and reminds me that I work with some very interesting and smart folks.

I’d like to see how far we can stretch ourselves. Selfishly, I’d like us to read a math or linguistics paper some time, and help each other through it. I think that would be very rewarding.

Overall, I’m very glad we have a Paper Club here. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes people and/or learning. If you start one at your company, let me know how it goes!