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Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

sloanreview.mit.edu

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Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#41

Post by cmcd »

datashow wrote: post #31
Bootwizard wrote: post #9

I'm currently a frontend engineer. I told my team lead a while back that I'd like to transition to the server side, especially since our server team is woefully understaffed and our frontend team is overstaffed. He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home.

What if someone learned something on their own time, do they get to be reimbursed from the employer? Or, can I ask my employer to reimburse my under-graduate and graduate tuition?

They aren't going to reimburse you after the fact, but if you get approval in advance many companies will reimburse for graduate programs or other courses.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#43

Post by ghaff »

ken wrote: post #25
Bootwizard wrote: post #9

I'm currently a frontend engineer. I told my team lead a while back that I'd like to transition to the server side, especially since our server team is woefully understaffed and our frontend team is overstaffed. He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home.

I’m amazed to hear this from programmers. You can learn this for free, anywhere, at any time. I’m no longer in software and when I want to upgrade my skills, I’m doing it on my own time and my own dime. Often doubly so if I have to take time off work (hourly) for training.

You can do stuff on your own time, especially if it's pretty much orthogonal to your day job. But I expect any job to include material time for relevant/adjacent training. Otherwise, it's in the same category as hiring manager expectations that you're working in open source in GitHub repos in your spare time.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#44

Post by michaelcampbell »

Bootwizard wrote: post #9

I'm currently a frontend engineer. I told my team lead a while back that I'd like to transition to the server side, especially since our server team is woefully understaffed and our frontend team is overstaffed. He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home.

Your team "leader" sounds more like a team "director".

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#45

Post by commandlinefan »

mrbgty wrote: post #29

In addition to having space to learn on a daily basis, more tech companies should consider offering a week of study leave in addition to what they offer in their vacation policy. I'm imagining the type of week that Bill Gates and John Carmack take.

> a week of study leave

Nice thought, but if my wife can see me, that week will become "fix stuff around the house leave" or "visit her parents and don't read anything leave". If my coworkers can see me, that week becomes "fix these bugs for me leave". They'd have to fly me somewhere for that to work.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#47

Post by r34 »

I divide my working time sth like 50/50 for actual tasks solving and learning. My company doesn't understand it, but I work remotely and no one notices. But soon I'm back to office.

I've joined my current company two years ago. We are small (but constantly growing) company - about 10 programmers at the moment. 10 separate programmers, lack of notion of any "team". Time (and money) lost on problems arising from that fact is XXX% or even XXXX% per project.

The most important thing about learning is not accumulation of knowledge by individual, but accumulation of knowlege by group, making knowledge common, therfore creating higher level being called "team".

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#48

Post by russnewcomer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged. That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like the…

Part of it is just people - I had a co-worker once that their supervisor (remote) did the same thing, bought training courses for them, instructed them to make it part of their schedule to do the courses and learn more, assigned another developer to try to mentor, etc. But this person was also overloaded by said supervisor with day-to-day operational work and felt responsibility to accomplish that work at the expense of their own personal development. [and had personal life situations that they could not easily spend extra time outside of the time they were in the office] They sat next to me for a few months, and so once on whatever afternoon that they had blocked off on their calendar for training, I physically went over to their desk while they were gone, unplugged their phone, and when they came back, reminded them this was their training time and they needed to spend the time the company was giving them on it. They did that day, but then got some flak from another non-co-located employee for not getting enough operational tasks done, and I don't think did much training again after that.

If the entire org doesn't encourage learning, grant the time for it to happen, and protect employees from operational reprecussions of spending time learning, it is hard for individual employees to make it happen.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#49

Post by School-Cotton »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged. That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like the…

Decrease expectations in other areas? If it takes me 8 hours a day to do all the work you expect, and you say “oh it’s fine if you spend time learning”, am I supposed to stay for 9 hours a day to do the learning?

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#50

Post by commandlinefan »

keeptrying wrote: post #16

I even setup my reports with a skills matrix which shows the skills they need to get to. Still find them not really pushing themselves.

Well, I’ve been in situations where I was expected to learn this or that, but I was also expected to complete 30 or so “story points” per two-week sprint, and be available to troubleshoot production problems, and attend planning meetings - and the only things anybody ever asked for statuses on were the bug fixes and new features, so I always had to end up choosing before meeting my mandatory learning goals, meeting my mandatory feature implementation goals, meeting my mandatory bug fixing goals or meeting my mandatory meeting attendance goals; “learning” always ends up taking a back seat.
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