It's weird to see the emphasis on workers rather than emphasizing employers. My employer lets me learn and study during the 9-5. My previous employers didn't. It makes an incredible difference.
Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
311–320 of 467 posts
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
By 'enlightenment' I'm referring to a particular worldview perpetuated to denigrate the Western tradition and broader philosophical outlook in favor of a focus on empirical sciences and radically egalitarian social mores. The basic idea of 'enlightenment' is there is no objective and learnable purpose to the natural world and human society, and instead once we learn how to manipulate the natural world we can subject…
That's sortof what the enlightenment was about... The enlightenment period was a decentralization of information caused by the reinvention and widespread use of the printing press in europe. During the dark ages europe's literacy rate was comparable to pre-mesopotamia. The fall of the roman empire lead to a fracturing of european civilization, the near-total loss of literacy, latin fractured into a dozen languages be…
The precise narrative you just articulated is that of the enlightenment in the 18th century, which is a period much latter than the invention of the printing press and Protestantism.
A good book for you to check out is Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God", written by a secular historian debunking much of the above narrative.
The fact that many educated today take your narrative for unarguable fact also illustrates the problem. The 'enlightenment' narrative is ironically very self limiting.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an old adage about this: Q: What happens if we provide education and training to our employees and they leave? A: Well, what happens if we don't, and they stay ? Growing a company's knowledge and skill base is an investment, not charity. Companies that don't do it reap exactly what they sow -- they're the same companies whose CEOs will otherwise loudly complain about how difficult it is to find skilled emplo…
HR loves to trot out this saying, attributing it to the enlightened CEO or such. In my experience it's about 50-50 if someone stays because we offer advanced training or leverages their new skills to get a new job.
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Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many managers believe that learning is something that you should do on your own time. Even when "learning" boils down to memorizing idiosyncrasies of some framework/protocol/micro-controller they force you to use.
How is this possible? I'm often asked to do something I don't know how to do. Figuring it out ("learning") is part of the process of accomplishing. I don't know how you can separate learning from doing.
Yeah, I don't understand that either. As a developer, learning is my job. Writing code that I already possess all the prerequisite knowledge to write requires almost no time at all, so 99% of my time is necessarily going to be spent learning how to do things I don't already know how to do. If I had to wait until I got home to learn those new skills, I'd never get any non-trivial amount of work done.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe make tickets for your learning activities?
Heh, would not go over well. Now that we have JIRA, tickets are not just watched by my boss, but my bosses boss, my bosses bosses boss, and a few dedicated project managers of some kind.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way we handle this is by padding our sprints enough so that there's always "extra time" at the end. E.g: If we as engs think we can do 12 tickets in a one-week sprint, we commit to 8. This leaves room to pick up any production issue related work, address tech debt, and have some breathing room so we're not rushing through jira tickets. It's also workplace specific, but imo product people shouldn't be engaging in…
How does this fly in an organization where your promotion is based on sprints and not sustainable coding/quality?
Such organization is begging for a quickly written code full of bugs. Then you do some overtime fixing it, and you are a hero for a moment. But before you get promoted, you get sick because your body cannot handle all that stress anymore.
Sometimes you learn to play around the rules. For example, if you are required to report your progress every day (and "sharpening the axe" is frowned upon), a possible solution is to report on Friday morning only half of what you did yesterday, and keep the rest for the Monday report.
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#317I love the distinction between incremental and transformative learning. Personally, I've experienced the most transformative learning through working with a coach - a 3rd party who offers the space for reflective engagement, new perspectives, and experimentation. Much of this is tough to do on our own because we get stuck in the same mindsets and patterns of behavior. A coach helps articulate what's going on in a new light, uncovers blindspots, and holds us accountable for taking action, ultimately fueling transformative learning.
(Side note: I'm on a mission to spread the power of coaching by making it easier to find the right coach: https://uplevel.coach/ Happy to chat with anyone interested in learning more!)
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#318Earlier 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…
Where I work standups are for devs only. The product guys are involved in planning and reveals, but otherwise they stay out of our hair. We're expected to complete what we've committed to on time or promptly notify the product guys if that's not going to happen for whatever reason. About once a week (usually Friday) I tell my team I'm going to spend the day researching or exploring some new idea that doesn't have any…
By the way, this is the official SCRUM way. Product people should be there for planning and for demo. If at the end of the sprint they got what they wanted to get, they should be happy and do their own work... or relax if they have nothing else to do.
Micromanaging means you have nothing useful to do, and you are needlessly making other people angry. Such people should be fired first. (Yeah, I know, they are often the last ones to stay, because people who have better options leave first.)
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this fly in an organization where your promotion is based on sprints and not sustainable coding/quality?
If you want to contribute to the value of the organization because you're a substantial equity holder, then talk to the founders. A sweatshop with high turnover should be less valuable to an acquirer than a strong team. Your initiative may be well received as leadership and you can get your promotion that way. If you want to stay in the organization and get promoted by performance metrics, then figure out what number…
You seem to have re-iterated the Gervais principle:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
(although leader, model worker, autopilot are more polite terms than sociopath, clueless, and losers)
Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it
#320I'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.
I've shot down two companies in the past three days because they made it known during the recruitment that they expected more than 40 hours a week, sometimes well in excess of it. It's always couched in some doublespeak about "ownership". Trust me, if I were owner or part-owner in the enterprise, I wouldn't mind. But I'm not. People complain about entitlement attitudes among the young. They need to look at employers…
The other thing about those places is that they only attract the desperate devs. So you know when they pull out that bullshit in the interview that if you were to take a job there you'd be on a team chock full of juniors with a few "seniors" that just fill a chair for 50 hours a week and haven't learnt anything new in the last decade.