421–430 of 467 posts
If you're working at a factory, the time you spend to sharpen the saw, so you can continue to work, is paid and no one is questioning that. Also, factory workers are not learning how to use new tools at home. They get the training paid by the company and that is normal.
So why would the learning on the job in the computer industry, as a way to sharpen your skills, be treated any different and (I dare to say) almost be stigmatized in some places.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to spend my time outside work hours developing skills needed for my job. That's effectively the job stealing my time and money.
And those who do, have a competitive edge over you. It's an investment in yourself that qualifies you to leave and find a better paying job.
Time is the only thing you have in life, use it wisely and balanced.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't, and you shouldn't. Your "resources" (what a derogatory way to refer to people, by the way) will be more valuable, more competent, if they know more than just that what's needed for your team's direct focus. Being able to place your own work in broader context is very powerful.
>Your "resources" (what a derogatory way to refer to people, by the way) will be more valuable, more competent, if they know more than just that what's needed for your team's direct focus. Would that I could safely direct your ire to my manager.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to track this through JIRA you need to make time for both learning and teaching. I've found that mgmt is reluctant to allow for "a day of learning", but if the output of that is a document or a small seminar where you can share that knowledge with the team it goes down much more easily.
It also takes all the fun out of it. I can’t properly get my mind in a state to learn if I’m going to be held accountable for how much I pick up.
That is school and university in a nutshell though.
I would tend to agree, but from what I've read in Robert Cecil Martin's book "Clean Coder": it's not the job of your employer to keep your CV up to date, when you pay a musician for a performance, you don't pay them to practice scales.
A lot of professional musicians (e.g. permanent orchestra members) are definitely paid to practice scales. A lot of instruments even require training specific muscles to manage playing at all.
For gig-musicians (of any kind), the practice must be factored into the gig payment.
I'd say your analogy is appropriate, but for the opposite point. I don't see any reason for programmers to keep their relevant work skills up to date for free.
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…
Why have WIP limits? Well one of the reasons is to be able to create downtime where you can go watch a video or read a newsletter. So I've been trying to spread this message in my team when someone has asked "The WIP is blocking and I can't really help anywhere at the moment" by answering "Go watch a video or read or take a walk for 10 minutes".
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?
Usually the idea is you move onto another task since you have multiple allocated at one time, then ask briefly for guidance during the standup when everyone has put time aside, rather than interrupting everyone throughout the day. Blockers are not just people and usually it's not done for accountability. They can be undocumented APIs, an unfamiliar requirement ("do we already have a way to extract images from PDFs be…
Sit there and do nothing for awhile just may be the right thing to do!
I'm thinking about the Theory of Constraints and optimizing a system versus individual parts. This is a concept you would want your PM to know. So when they are mentally mapping the workflow heard during standups, they can be thinking about optimizing the entire production system.
Next step is the importance of communicating this to everyone on the team, so that they understand that there may be times when the right thing to do is nothing.