381–390 of 467 posts
I was publicly told by my immediate supervisor to stop once reading a technical book on the job for a degree my company has paid for. Apparently that was unacceptable behavior. I quit the company after I earned that degree. My experience is that most people quit because of poor management.
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…
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.
If there's one thing I've learned between being a new engineer and a senior eng is that you can just take a small slice of time in your work schedule to learn. You don't have to clear this with anyone. You're salaried, take an hour or two a week to learn something new. You're getting paid for your technical judgement, use it to invest in something relevant and deepen your ability to judge. It pays off for both you an…
I actively picked up stories I wasn't familiar with, just to learn it. Other engineers pick up stories because they're already familiar with the subject, that's not how you learn new things.
I'm currently negotiating with two potential employers, one of them one of the bigs. It would be great if they would pay me to learn at work, but I don't feel like I'm in a position to ask for that — that's an industry=wide problem. So I'm trying to hack the system to get fewer hours: 30-32 per week. That gives me enough time to self-study, handle some of my own training and overdeliver, yet still have a life. I have…
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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…
Yep, that's a way away from ideal. You're unlucky, there are a lot of software teams out there where the developers are pretty much autonomous. That's not to say they do absolutely whatever they want, but micromanagement is usually out of the question. A couple of months ago I spent about half my working hours in a week watching everything that happened at .Net Conf. I didn't ask anyone, I just said I was taking trai…
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Your lead made a mistake there. Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is worth as much as one of each, especially when they have intimate knowledge of your actual code.
>Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is worth as much as one of each... Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is valuable in certain situations. Companies love the idea of a "full stack engineer" because they believe they are getting two for the price of one. But in practice, and accounting for exceptions, that's not necessarily the case. A full-time FE with equal experience will be better at the fron…
But in general, I think this is just a different mindset, I love being able to be independent, and complete a stories from FE to BE. I used to be in a position where I could only do FE work, and it really scared me. I had no clue where critical data was coming from, if something went wrong, I couldn't debug our APIs, I was in the dark constantly. Now if something goes wrong, I can switch over to our backend, debug, write extra test cases to cover the bug and push code. I also understand what BE engineers are talking about, and when designing a new feature, it's much easier to come up with new APIs.
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…
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…
What we don’t do, is “no deploy Fridays”. We deploy all the time, and maybe somebody wants to do some minor bug or light UI cleanup. I’m certainly not going to stop them. Requiring an “off-day” for deployments is a major red flag for me.
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…
I used to do this, and then we "switched to be more agile." (This just meant using JIRA and tracking sprint efficiency wrong). Companies do think "It’s your responsibility to be on top of whatever’s going on in your field" and they might even claim that learning and development on the job is important, but when it comes time to log JIRA hours, they tend to show how much they really believe in this.
This makes me sad. I had a great experience with what I now think of as “authentic agile” at my second job, now I doubt I’ll ever get to do things that way ever again.
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.
My job gives us about 5K a year for individual training in addition to hosting meetups after work etc etc. The 5K can be used for training, conference and travel tickets etc etc. This is in Norway so everything is mostly nice all the time, but to be honest it is the first time I've had anything like this. Feels awesome.