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Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

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Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#21

Post by whiddershins »

My current company does tons of training. The devs are trained in project management, team building, project leading.

Individual team members suggest trainings on a topic, and if enough people are interested they schedule a time and do it. We have book clubs, and regular developer discussion group. All of this is encouraged and on company time.

There are also more extensive multi day trainings and certifications I haven’t been part of.

We also have a monthly training stipend which accumulates.

Etc.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#23

Post by Akronymus »

By giving me enough guidance and help, along with a challenging training project and a pretty tight feedback loop. There's also a pretty generous budget for training, after I am cought up to speed. (Recent switch in what I work with)

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#25

Post by gorbachev »

I agree that training, in general, is not really effective. You have to actually use the things you've been training for immediately afterwards to gain any benefit. If 2 - 3 weeks go by, you've already forgotten a lot of the training.

How my company is trying to deal with that is by creating a library of self-paced training modules maintained by software engineers, and facilities to help anyone do that. I'm not sure it's going to achieve exactly what the OP is asking about, but I think it's better than alternatives.

We also have a private Stack Exchange server, frequent tech meetups, internal support slack channels and a bunch of other ways to interact with internal platform teams that help quite a bit.

Still, you have to walk the walk and figure things out on your own at the end of the day.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#27

Post by impoppy »

>What skills?

When I've been through the interview process, it's been very obvious that I have strong backend skills but lack on cloud and DevOps stuff, so that's what I'm focusing on now.

>Training frequency?

As of now, most of my tasks are related to cloud and CI/CD and, to be honest, I'm enjoying it a lot, it's more fun than backend to me as there's plenty of new things to explore and learn. I even feel like I might switch from backend development to Developer Experience Engineer, exploring new ways to make development, testing, deployment and initial setup faster, easier and more enjoyable, since I like to think that I know how developers feel about our current processes and what can be improved.

>How is your next set of skills decided?

I just tell my manager that there is some stuff I'd like to learn and tell them what is it.

>Is it personalized?

Yes.

>Are you involved in the discussion?

I start it.

>What are the biggest obstacles to your training?

Sometimes, when I meet a new task I have no clue how to even approach it, I feel a bit overwhelmed and unmotivated, so I take my time preparing for it and asking around for initial problem study.

I know it's not very productive, but it's an enjoyable pace for me and my company promised me a raise if I get better at cloud, DevOps, Docker and AWS stuff while I'm on my probation.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#28

Post by zkirill »

I always thought the term "10x engineer" was only used in job ads. Nobody I know refers to themselves (or even thinks of themselves) as a "?x engineer", unless it's for marketing purposes in which case you might as well put 100x for good measure.

The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing". They may also say that the most valuable thing that they have learned over their career is humility. There is always going to be something new and shiny to learn, things will always be breaking around you, a fake prophet will push today's ideology to sunset yesterday's. The only thing that you can do is to always be resourceful, to grow holistically as a person, and help others grow as well. Avoid any company that tries to distill these virtues inside banal presentations and check-the-box training sessions. It is better to ask an unassuming looking person inside the company if they have grown as a person, who helped them, and whom are they helping do the same. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#29

Post by hanselot »

whiddershins wrote: post #21

My current company does tons of training. The devs are trained in project management, team building, project leading. Individual team members suggest trainings on a topic, and if enough people are interested they schedule a time and do it. We have book clubs, and regular developer discussion group. All of this is encouraged and on company time. There are also more extensive multi day trainings and certifications I ha…

If my company wants me to be a project manager, team builder of project leader, they should have hired me to be those things.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#30

Post by flavianh »

whiddershins wrote: post #21

My current company does tons of training. The devs are trained in project management, team building, project leading. Individual team members suggest trainings on a topic, and if enough people are interested they schedule a time and do it. We have book clubs, and regular developer discussion group. All of this is encouraged and on company time. There are also more extensive multi day trainings and certifications I ha…

I assume some of the skills you're trained on are technical too. Your organization sounds like it does a lot to develop engineers, do you think it's paying off regarding competition or other tech companies?
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