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Career growth in engineering: Is reading white papers a must?

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Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community2 months ago

I’m aiming to grow in my career to become a senior engineer and eventually a staff engineer. I often see people on LinkedIn talking about how they read tons of white papers or articles on designing large-scale systems every week.

The thing is, I don’t really enjoy reading white papers—I find them boring. I prefer reading things directly related to the problem I’m working on. I’m hesitant to invest time in stuff I’m not actually building, especially since I tend to forget a lot of it later anyway.

So, how important is reading white papers and similar articles for career growth in engineering? Can you still grow without it, or is it something I need to make peace with? Would love to hear your thoughts!

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(2 comments)
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    ML Engineer
    2 months ago

    With how good AI is these days you rarely need to read a paper cover to cover. I would just plug it into claude/chatGPT and ask it questions and "chat" with the paper. that 20-30 mins of chatting should give you enough of a high level idea where if you want to you can then dive deeper

    I would also look into talks/lectures if you find that interesting

  • 1
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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    2 months ago

    Definitely not required to read most white papers. I can confidently say that the majority of engineers almost never read a white paper/academic paper.

    Of course, this depends on your domain. For deep infra/ML, you should expect to read recent papers since the cutting edge is changing so rapidly, and then being applied in the industry.

    More important than reading white papers is to thoroughly read design/architecture documents. For senior levels and below, this is far more valuable to get promoted internally.