There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
281–290 of 467 posts
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#282Maybe I just had a different career path, but so far it seems that my job is learning, and the work is a byproduct of that. I spent a bunch of years in the USAR doing basic computer stuff, both in training, and then learning from others as I went along. I was the US Army version of a general purpose "IT" fellow. Once I got out of the military and I interviewed at a few private sector jobs I realized I was not overly…
This is how I approach it too and I think it's a healthy approach. I get into a job mainly for the learning opportunities it provides. I'll happily take a pay cut if it means I get to grow in a direction I need. Once I feel like the opportunities become fewer and farther between, and management cannot change that, I'll find a new job that can provide me with the right learning opportunities again.
Of course, I'm not even in my thirties, so I can afford to optimise for learning now to have the compound interest pay off for it when I'm older.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#283I am still learning.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off topic but that still sounds like it's framed within the enlightenment period. If you're reading books and valuing literacy, (ie individual interpretations of texts, as opposed to being told what a book means) then you're still framed within the "enlightenment view of reality."
By 'enlightenment' I'm referring to a particular worldview perpetuated to denigrate the Western tradition and broader philosophical outlook in favor of a focus on empirical sciences and radically egalitarian social mores. The basic idea of 'enlightenment' is there is no objective and learnable purpose to the natural world and human society, and instead once we learn how to manipulate the natural world we can subject…
That's sortof what the enlightenment was about... The enlightenment period was a decentralization of information caused by the reinvention and widespread use of the printing press in europe. During the dark ages europe's literacy rate was comparable to pre-mesopotamia. The fall of the roman empire lead to a fracturing of european civilization, the near-total loss of literacy, latin fractured into a dozen languages because priests wrote and read at a first grade level, misspelling words, reading with one finger slowly scrolling the text, mouthing each word phonetically...Ancient Greek texts were completely lost for a time...
Because nobody could read and copies the bible were sparse the catholic church was the single source of word of god. The printing press changed things. The bible became widespread and people read the bible for themselves. With that came an important shift, that one's own interpretation of a text was a valid interpretation. Tons of important literary works became widespread. The middle class valued literacy and saw it as a ticket to wealth and began teaching their kids to read and write competitively at younger and younger ages. They invented the education system we have today; the entire idea of a sequential learning system based around books, and becoming an adult when you could read at a certain level (as opposed to the catholic belief that you were an adult when you were old enough to fight at age ten), that was also the enlightenment and romantic period. Protestantism came about because people valued individual interpretations of the bible, which the catholic church had serious qualms with since that was their entire claim to authority...
So the fact that you grew up in a family which valued literacy, which sent you to a university where you spent four years reading books, and then came out of that with your own valid and rational ideas about what those texts mean, and your rite of passage into adulthood is based on your ability to read and write at a university level, that is still very much framed in the values of the enlightenment.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most STEM courses aren't vocational training and aren't super specialized. I think you might have a biased negative view for what STEM courses are? Edit: Let me state it a different way that might shed more light on my point. A CS major can pass all of his/her classes with a perfect GPA and still be incapable of writing software ready for a production system (even at small scale). The STEM degrees emphasize fundament…
For some value of 'super specialized' you are correct. For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture and what it means to live a good life, an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
>For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture
Sure
> and what it means to live a good life
That's just self-aggrandizing bullshit. There is no class that will tell you what it means to live a good life. Anyone who thinks so is dearly lacking perspective.
>an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
An exclusive focus on STEM will include the philosophy of science and what it means to seek truths about the physical world. IMO that has immensely more value in a philosophical sense than you seem to imply.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#286Frankly, if your workplace doesn't already think so, it's a red flag.
Many managers believe that learning is something that you should do on your own time. Even when "learning" boils down to memorizing idiosyncrasies of some framework/protocol/micro-controller they force you to use.
How is this possible? I'm often asked to do something I don't know how to do. Figuring it out ("learning") is part of the process of accomplishing. I don't know how you can separate learning from doing.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like a good idea that I would really like to try, for my own sanity if for nothing else. For me, the issue—imagined or not—would arise in the Friday morning daily stand-up. I’m not sure it would go over well if I said that I intend to spend part of the day doing PRs (this is fine and expected) and the other part learning/researching (likely not). Oh the joys of the JIRA sweatshop. We have JIRA pulled up o…
The way we handle this is by padding our sprints enough so that there's always "extra time" at the end. E.g: If we as engs think we can do 12 tickets in a one-week sprint, we commit to 8. This leaves room to pick up any production issue related work, address tech debt, and have some breathing room so we're not rushing through jira tickets. It's also workplace specific, but imo product people shouldn't be engaging in…
How does this fly in an organization where your promotion is based on sprints and not sustainable coding/quality?
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like a good idea that I would really like to try, for my own sanity if for nothing else. For me, the issue—imagined or not—would arise in the Friday morning daily stand-up. I’m not sure it would go over well if I said that I intend to spend part of the day doing PRs (this is fine and expected) and the other part learning/researching (likely not). Oh the joys of the JIRA sweatshop. We have JIRA pulled up o…
It's not like that everywhere > product guys cycle through the status of each dev team members’ items during each daily standup Something has gone horrible off the rails. Standup is supposed to be a quick time for every team member to raise any blockers primarily, with a quick "here's what I did, here's what I'm doing" type blurb. The benefit of standup is identifying blockers and if engineers are getting mired in pr…
Agreed. PMs (product or project) should rarely speak during standups; instead, they should be listening for blockers and other action items for them.
I've worked in environments where the PMs micromanage like this. It's both hellish and extremely inefficient.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've started using Friday as a "personal development" day at work. I do not write any code on Friday (unless it's a severe production level issue). Instead, I spend the mornings reviewing PRs that I wasn't included on (to keep up with whats happening, but also to learn more about how other people write and review code) and the afternoons are spent reading/researching/online classes. This has really helped me avoid bu…
This sounds like a good idea that I would really like to try, for my own sanity if for nothing else. For me, the issue—imagined or not—would arise in the Friday morning daily stand-up. I’m not sure it would go over well if I said that I intend to spend part of the day doing PRs (this is fine and expected) and the other part learning/researching (likely not). Oh the joys of the JIRA sweatshop. We have JIRA pulled up o…
Where I work standups are for devs only. The product guys are involved in planning and reveals, but otherwise they stay out of our hair. We're expected to complete what we've committed to on time or promptly notify the product guys if that's not going to happen for whatever reason.
About once a week (usually Friday) I tell my team I'm going to spend the day researching or exploring some new idea that doesn't have any stories yet. It's never a problem. A decent chunk of our big leaps forward for our projects have come from us working on random stuff nobody told us to work on.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
That happens?
Maybe they don't make quotas but if they comment on how many coffee breaks or bathroom trips you make, they obviously care about it.
Number/duration of coffee breaks is hardly "amount of coffee you drink". And I find it hard to believe any software engineer would catch grief for any amount of time spent away from the desk of their output was measurably above average. So this complaint sounds like it's actually, "I don't get anything done and don't even bother trying to appear busy and my manager tried to talk to me about it".