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

They’re not incompetent. They have domain knowledge in both the general industry of the company and the fine details of the company itself. They’ve probably been nearby the backend developers while they were talking through issues and even offered insight in the lunch area about specific algorithmic problems some backend developers were having.

Languages tend to be super easy.

Frameworks are a little bit of work.

Domain knowledge is hard.

This factor almost exclusively led me to leave a company. They demanded billing time to clients and also required a working day filled with billed hours.

Where was I to learn? On whose dollar? Multiple clients need me to learn the same thing? Who takes the hit?

In the end the system is setup to pressure me into taking the hit out of my own time. I consider this one of the great evils of consulting companies.

Personally—I think because I've seen so little of the code I've written actually live long enough to seem worth the time it took to make it, including a bunch of small-potatoes projects for huge companies that took months of my work-life and then were simply binned because they changed direction or acquired some company with another solution or the project was doomed from the start because they'd very obviously allocated far too small a budget—I'm no longer turned off by the idea of having a job that's more-or-less understood to be entirely bullshit, the way I might once have been.

I think I'm not understanding something.

Is it usually the case to have product teams documenting clear business cases to explain why something is important?

At my employer:

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"Get your brokers license"

ok provide me with a course

"well, we've got a limited number of people that can do it at a time"

ok so make the material available to me for learning at home and I'll do it on my own time

"We appreciate your feedback. You could purchase a course on your own, with your own money, and study on your own at home"

-- This is an actual event, with the person parroting the 'we value degrees' line being the head of HR for our opco at the time, on the phone with me cutting me off every time I started to say anything, with me at one point saying a vulgarity and "would you give me some respect and allow me to finish a sentence":

applies to position above me that finally opened up and interviews

"We just wanted to let you know we went with another candidate, we suggest you get a bachelors degree and then an MBA if you'd like to move up"

at entry level position for 13 and a half years I don't want a degree, what sort of a degree

"Oh business is good"

How would a business degree benefit me in any role in this office, at all?

"We prioritize education"

I don't want to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to make an extra 10% so that would mean I could pay the loans off in a decade from the raise

"With tuition reimbursement you could get a degree in as little as 6 years"

In 6 years I'll be 40 and you'll give the job to a 22 year old that's been here 6 months, why don't you create some sort of system for advancement internally that is equal to degree work

"We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really work on a 4 year degree and then an MBA"

Why

"We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really..."

That's classism

"We prioritize..."

I don't want your defacto dues card, I guess I'll just keep working for people above me that have been at the company a fraction of the time that I have because they have a 4-year degree in Artisan Baking Social Media Marketing with their minor in Mayan Whittling from 2000BC to 1990BC.

--

Sigh. There isn't even a degree in what I do, and the university my employer has partnered with only has one degree you can do, some random super-specific business degree that has literally nothing to do with what I do.

Even if I wanted to get a degree, by the time I do 8 hours of this work my brain is shot. Processing large amounts of data, with all sorts of legal and fiscal ramifications, while being under pressure to not only meet but exceed production... yeah do that all day and the last thing you want to do is go home and study/research/write papers that have to be in some asinine format scheme or you fail outright.

Then even if they did come up with some way to teach us on the job, it wouldn't even work because due to the nature of the job if someone leaves it can take 6-12 months to replace their processing capacity and business volume grows so we're always chugging along with no downtime and we hot bunk desks so when your shift is up, someone else will be along in a couple of hours to sit down and keep going.