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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

#301

Post by BigJono »

vorpalhex wrote: post #247
paracyst wrote: post #240

Earlier 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…

If this were the case then standups would be totally useless unless the org was so cooked that nothing gets done unless someone is made accountable in front of the entire team.

If I run into a blocker why would I wait until the next morning to try and get it resolved?

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

#302

Post by tobych »

sasper wrote: post #101
aczerepinski wrote: post #83

I’ve always learned on the job and have never asked permission. I guess I’m lucky that I haven’t worked in the type of places where somebody’s looking over my shoulder every minute of the day. Somewhere around an hour a day every day and I’ve been doing it for years and nobody has ever said anything about it. I subscribe to those weekly emails for the programming languages we use at work and I read them when they com…

As an engineering manager, this is what I expect my top performers to do and encourage my junior folks to do the same. It benefits the IC, the delivery team, and the company at large. You can't heads-down slam out code for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Be responsible with your time and use it to push forward the vision & mission of the company by taking your professional development into your own hands.

What's IC?

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

#303

Post by fastbeef »

vorpalhex wrote: post #252
Ididntdothis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think scrum, jira, backlogs and always tight deadlines condition people to never sit back and systematically learn something. Instead you feel the urge to always “produce” and feel guilty if you don’t. At least his happened to me. Lately I am making a conscious effort to work from home for a day and take a Udemy class or read a book about something where I feel i don’t have enough background in. The modern frenetic…

In theory, scrum is supposed to provide intentional non-ticket time after retro and before the next ipm/scrum meeting. That time can and should be used for learning, hacking, contributing, etc. Reality of course differs.

I was so stoked when I read about that part of scrum back in 2006. Not once has it materialized since.

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

#304

Post by megaframe »

aczerepinski wrote: post #83

I’ve always learned on the job and have never asked permission. I guess I’m lucky that I haven’t worked in the type of places where somebody’s looking over my shoulder every minute of the day. Somewhere around an hour a day every day and I’ve been doing it for years and nobody has ever said anything about it. I subscribe to those weekly emails for the programming languages we use at work and I read them when they com…

Same but I've also been in places where they do look over your shoulder and I ended up fighting the tide. Everyone around me was in a constant panic mode, so I slowed my work output for 2 weeks (most I could get away with without ending up in a room talking about my work performance) where I studied and optimized the tasks consuming most of my time. Then automated them (this involved working what felt like two jobs at once pushing well over 80h a week)....

When I finished I had so much free time I could finally start doing the interesting projects and my work output was consistently 2x my co-workers. I considered explaining this to management but they had just admonished a co-worker for not doing the thing they asked and trying to improve process. So I kept it to myself.

Obviously this was a bit of a toxic work environment (early in my career) and I was luckily switched out of this group.

My point is that you can fight bad management to make a better working environment for yourself but it takes a lot of effort and you need to be strategic in what you tell them as it can backfire.

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

#305

Post by lonelappde »

paracyst wrote: post #240
protonimitate wrote: post #227

Earlier 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…

Stand up for what you believe in. Tell them you are spending the day on research.

Better yet, cancel that standup because it's garbage. Only one representative needs to go to the product meeting.

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

#306

Post by lonelappde »

spike021 wrote: post #268
protonimitate wrote: post #227

Earlier 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…

My team when I first joined had something like this; we called it a 'spike' day. Basically a full day of time where we could learn about something new, maybe hack on a non-necessary feature or even personal project for a few hours a week. But sadly over the past few years we've kind of just done away with it. We don't allot time for it specifically anymore. We think about it from time to time and wish we still had th…

Go in tomorrow and tell everyone it's time to start doing spike again.

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

#307

Post by james_s_tayler »

ryanmercer wrote: post #189
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.

At my employer: -- "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…

It sounds like their system is meeting it's design goals.

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

#308

Post by strstr »

lycidas wrote: post #299

The thing that annoys me the most is that tech companies, mine included, will reimburse gladly books, but no one is ever allowed to be seen reading books at their desk on company time. Whereas being on hacker news, reddit, NYT visibly is okay. I've just started reading PDF's on my computer screen but I'd prefer a real book of the same thing most of the time.

Really? I’ve seen coworkers reading, but it’s rare. I occasionally encourage people to read at work. People tend to not follow through, since it’s often hard to find good books on niche subjects.

At one point I was in a reading group on Quantum Computing (we were working through some classic text book). I eventually stopped since I was bad at making time to do the exercises.

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

#309

Post by sasper »

tobych wrote: post #302
sasper wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineering manager, this is what I expect my top performers to do and encourage my junior folks to do the same. It benefits the IC, the delivery team, and the company at large. You can't heads-down slam out code for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Be responsible with your time and use it to push forward the vision & mission of the company by taking your professional development into your own hands.

What's IC?

Individual contributor. It's a fancy management word for SWE or anyone else in a non-management role.

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

#310

Post by yters »

hueving wrote: post #285
yters wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe you are proving my point. For example, the goal of much ancient philosophy was exactly what it meant to live a good life, and the theory of such was very well developed. Most of the culture you take for granted as 'common sense' is directly based on this philosophical development.

STEM at best tells you how to do something, but can never tell you what to do, or why to do it. For that you need philosophy, much more than philosophy of science.

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