Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by stakhanov » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:50 AM UTC

downerending wrote: post #192

rectang wrote: post #76

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…

Voice of experience: Companies are incapable of thinking this way. Instead, take the 40 and simply siphon off 8-10 for your personal education. As long as you're not actually working for a different company during this time, it's all good. If company doesn't like it, move on.

...some bigger learning projects require more time or different rhythms from what can be made available through siphoning off time, which seems to be what most people in this thread are saying they're doing.

For example, if you're doing daily standups, then one hour of an 8-hour workday is doable. But if you want to learn something that requires from time to time that you concentrate deeply for a longer period of time, say 4 hours, then that's half a workday, which may well show on daily standups.

If you have a manager who has a tendency to show up at your desk unannounced and they glimpse you watching a video, they probably won't say anything or ask what you were watching, but may walk away having mentally applied a discount factor to what they think your rate of productivity might be.

Also, while siphoning-off may work well in a good culture of consistent non-rushed problem solving, it may not work so well in a culture where it's constantly management by crisis. Like tomorrow may be the deadline for delivering something in the context of a crisis. The crisis may be entirely made up, but you would still end up looking really bad if you didn't deliver. Then you're probably not going to spend an hour learning that day if you know there's a risk you will have to stay at the office for an hour longer as a result.

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

#412

Post by keeptrying » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:52 AM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #50

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 m…

Yes. Very true. Scheduling learning is hard. And incentivizing it is even harder.

I personally love to learn. It’s what I do best. If I don’t do it I get bored.

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

#413

Post by graphenus » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:56 AM UTC

numbsafari wrote: post #387

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 is what I encourage my staff to do. We have a company-wide bagel breakfast in the morning, and then no more meetings. We also skip our daily “async slack stand-up” on Fridays. My expectation for the day is that you prioritize personal development, long-term planning, or just “deck clearing” if you’ve had a long week or desire something less mentally demanding for the day. Obviously, thing happen that can interfe…

Except when the Friday deployment breaks production and one of your employees needs to fix the issue on Saturday instead of relaxing with their family.

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

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Post by username90 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:22 AM UTC

vagab0nd wrote: post #385

ddek wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any idea what to look for when searching for such a job? I have asked about micromanagement in interviews before but I usually just get bullshit answers.

I'm not sure about other places but the teams I've worked on and worked with at Google works like this.

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

#415

Post by spongeb00b » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:30 AM UTC

graphenus wrote: post #413

numbsafari wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I encourage my staff to do. We have a company-wide bagel breakfast in the morning, and then no more meetings. We also skip our daily “async slack stand-up” on Fridays. My expectation for the day is that you prioritize personal development, long-term planning, or just “deck clearing” if you’ve had a long week or desire something less mentally demanding for the day. Obviously, thing happen that can interfe…

Except when the Friday deployment breaks production and one of your employees needs to fix the issue on Saturday instead of relaxing with their family.

You seem to be getting down voted but this is important. Unless the company is paying staff to be available and on call over the weekend people have lives to be getting on with and wouldn’t be able to respond to an issue as quickly than during the week.

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

#416

Post by gatestone » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:39 AM UTC

By "learning" you mean "reading Hacker News"? ;-)

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

#417

Post by xmprt » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

graphenus wrote: post #413

numbsafari wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I encourage my staff to do. We have a company-wide bagel breakfast in the morning, and then no more meetings. We also skip our daily “async slack stand-up” on Fridays. My expectation for the day is that you prioritize personal development, long-term planning, or just “deck clearing” if you’ve had a long week or desire something less mentally demanding for the day. Obviously, thing happen that can interfe…

Except when the Friday deployment breaks production and one of your employees needs to fix the issue on Saturday instead of relaxing with their family.

I understand this isn't a perfect world and problems happen but we also shouldn't live in constant fear that a deployment will break production. There should be processes in place that prevent broken code from even getting to the point where it's merged into master.

The biggest extreme that I've faced was a team where there was a 36 hour window between Wednesday and Thursday where deployments to production were allowed and it was a nightmare getting any code out especially with most deployments involving 10-20 new commits so if something did break we had to rollback a lot and rack our heads to figure out what went wrong.

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

#418

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:07 AM UTC

globuous wrote: post #138

Braggadocious wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ever think about how much we subsidize businesses by paying for college ourselves? The older I get the more I think the university to corporation pipeline is a fucking racket. It also sucks for employees because here comes these kids who were allowed to learn about all the new technologies you wish you knew with zero distractions and other obligations, now comin' in hot on your heels to take yer jobs en masse, an…

In france, companies all pay quite a lot of money to some fund. The fund’s purpose is to finance employee education if they want to switch careers. For instance, my friend was a mechanical engineer at Total, and after 3 years left to go study ML 1 year. Not only was the school all paid for by this fund , but the now student got a decent share of his salary everymonth. Best of best, he can go work for another company…

The name got changed several times. CIFRE is a PhD course paid for by a company and subsidized by the state. So you get to do real work and get a PhD.

The thing you are thinking about is probably Compte Personnel de Formation (CPF) which was called Droit Individual à la Formation (DIF) a few years back.

Note that this is not some incredible sum of money, however a year in a classic STEM university costs a few hundred euros in France, so what you get from CPF is quite enough.

For five years of engineering school I spend about 3500 euros which included insurance. A full pension with private room costs a bit more than 300 euros per month. The difference with US education prices is just staggering.

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

#419

Post by tempestn » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:12 AM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #394

BigJono wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I had a new manager start his first weekly meeting by asking if there was anything on fire. People filled the ensuing silence with recent annoyances. Of course nothing is on fire right now (and I get it’s a metaphor). If something is “on fire”, I’m not waiting till the Monday meeting to bring it up. I’m not even going to attend the mandatory meeting while I put it out, if that’s when it happens. That’s the definition…

To be fair, your new manager doesn't know that's how you operate. It seems a reasonable question to me, with the expected answer being no. But why not ask just in case? You wouldn't want to be the new manager who just launches into new business not realizing that one of your developers is too timid to interrupt you with the major breaking bug that's currently live, or whatever. Once they get to know the team and can trust that you'd be on top of that kind of thing, it's another story.

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

#420

Post by tempestn » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:16 AM UTC

elpakal wrote: post #258

vorpalhex wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company I'm at sets aside every other Friday for all engineers to learn, contribute to open source, hack on an idea they may have (that may or may not be related to work), etc. So far the only problems I've seen is that sometimes it's hard to convince engineers to actually use the time instead of still working on tickets.

very cool. does your company maintain the IP ownership to anything made during these periods?

I would expect so. Doesn't it seem a bit much to expect the company to give you paid time to work on your own personal side projects? They don't own the knowledge and skills you gain doing it though.