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 come in. I sometimes watch a conference talk about implementing something similar to whatever I’m scheduled to do next.
If I were running a company I’d expect this of all high level employees. It’s your responsibility to be on top of whatever’s going on in your field.
That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged.
That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like they are “Working” even though I explain to them that as long as its work/business related I will expect to be able to call upon them in the future with this new knowledge.
So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning?
It's because when annual reviews happen they aren't talking about the books they read they're talking about a project that they contributed to.
In my experience formalizing "learning" in the work place doesn't work because it requires the performance of learning for management types rather than real learning which involves working through real new problems over an extended period of time.
The real way to get employees to learn is to hand them responsibilities they are not fully prepared for along with the pay that goes with them and see how it goes. Right or wrong managers are rarely comfortable doing that.
Employees need to be comfortable failing in front of you and few are because there are few good examples of that turning out well. When it does go well, all too often the raise they were promised doesn't come through.
this isn't to say you're a poor manager, just that it's unusual to have a healthy environment for on the job learning.
Part of it is just people - I had a co-worker once that their supervisor (remote) did the same thing, bought training courses for them, instructed them to make it part of their schedule to do the courses and learn more, assigned another developer to try to mentor, etc. But this person was also overloaded by said supervisor with day-to-day operational work and felt responsibility to accomplish that work at the expense of their own personal development. [and had personal life situations that they could not easily spend extra time outside of the time they were in the office] They sat next to me for a few months, and so once on whatever afternoon that they had blocked off on their calendar for training, I physically went over to their desk while they were gone, unplugged their phone, and when they came back, reminded them this was their training time and they needed to spend the time the company was giving them on it. They did that day, but then got some flak from another non-co-located employee for not getting enough operational tasks done, and I don't think did much training again after that.
If the entire org doesn't encourage learning, grant the time for it to happen, and protect employees from operational reprecussions of spending time learning, it is hard for individual employees to make it happen.
I think scrum, jira, backlogs and always tight deadlines condition people to never sit back and systematically learn something. Instead you feel the urge to always “produce” and feel guilty if you don’t. At least his happened to me. Lately I am making a conscious effort to work from home for a day and take a Udemy class or read a book about something where I feel i don’t have enough background in. The modern frenetic workplace discourages sitting down and systematically learning something.
So as manager take a look and see if your environment makes people into ticket closing machines or into people who have the freedom to allocate their time where they feel it’s most useful.
You are providing the “option” but not literally scheduling the time. Employees need cover otherwise you are “learning” but nervous something will “slip” because “Learning” isn’t business critical.
>I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things
Does this apply to skills that might be more applicable to another team?
My current manager encourages learning, but shoos me away from topics that are handled by other managers. Frustratingly, he's blocked transitions of mine to other teams with work that I've found interesting and educated myself on.
How do you prioritize learning, and balance it against your interests as a manager to keep your resources focused on your objectives?
Several companies that friends of mine work at institute a 10% personal project time policy. Where 10% of their week is devoted to personal projects. They pick any topic of interest related to programing, learn something new, and when they are done they show the project to the team to present what they've learned. I don't think they have a time limit per se. Some people I know have done work with the raspberry pi, or learned a new framework, or implemented something they were doing at work in a different language. Leaving it open ended allowed for people to pick something that was of interest to them.
The problem with this approach I think is you get more buy-in, but might be arguably less directly applicable to work.
Put it in expectations, quantify it, and reward it at performance reviews. In a self-review, I should be able to write that I took Andrew Ng's Coursera ML course and be rewarded for how that makes me a more valuable team member. On the employee end, I should be able to explain what I learned, how it increases my value to the team, and how I've applied or will apply it.
Too often, companies "expect" their employees to take advantage of the fact that they allow them to learn on the job, but only reward short-term performance.
As an employee I’ve felt like it’s hard in the past to take initiative and do things that aren’t immediately and clearly justifiable as strictly necessary work. Reading a book might or might not be useful but doing something boring but mandatory is certainly not slacking. With that said any time I tried to take more initiative and take more risks (while making a sincere effort to work on the thing that’s going to move the group/project forward) and then just accept correction if I make the wrong call, usually work was more enjoyable and I was more productive (by estimation of me, other coworkers, and my manager).
I recommend making it part of regular cadence. Every Friday or every other Friday (or part of the day). You can encourage them to share learnings or summaries with the teams. These days can also be used to attempt to apply learnings in ways that improve the team or org. These don't need to be formal courses or books either: it can be exploring and learning systems at work, or understanding system telemetry or customer use cases better.
1. Make it part of their annual goals (e.g. attend a conference, get a certification, compete in a competition).
2. Throw them in the deep end, a little beyond their edge, and be okay if they fumble around a bit.
3. Make them teach. Give them stuff to understand and present to your team or other teams. That forcing function will give them a mechanism to immediately exercise their newfound knowledge/skill.
4. Make room in your project schedules for it. They'll learn on their own if they have the time, or they'll invent something. The ones that don't are your bottom tier.
My first boss sent me to Siggraph my first year to drink from the fire hose. He also asked me, on my first day, what I was worst at of all the areas of programming I was aware of (Windows UI) and assigned me three months of work writing custom controls... I did it in six months, and I've never been able to thank him enough for teaching me, right off the bat, that your people are your greatest investment, that optimizing for the project is rarely the right choice.
Decrease expectations in other areas? If it takes me 8 hours a day to do all the work you expect, and you say “oh it’s fine if you spend time learning”, am I supposed to stay for 9 hours a day to do the learning?
I've just had a preliminary conversation about people's next set of objectives.
Training is on there (with a 5% of time budget for it), and if they don't achieve their objectives, their next appraisal will go badly. Pay rises and promotions and so on depend on good appraisals, and I anticipate some quarterly review meetings in which I tell people that they're on track to do badly because they're not meeting their training objectives.
If having their training objectives written in black and white, and being reviewed quarterly and appraised annually on whether or not they're meeting their objectives doesn't make it "okay", well, I guess I'll have to come up with something else, but I sure hope that will make it clear.
For me and my people, learning never works when it is a task independent of actual work, meaning I only learn something new when I see a place I can use it.
Learning must be optional, never required. And must have incentive: I learn programming because it makes my work faster. But if I can't use my program, I feel like I wasted my time.
Learning should tell me that I am increasing my value.
I can never learn new stuff just because I am supposed to. Nor will anyone suffer a book if there is no IMMEDIATE benefit.
I empathize and don't have any clear solution. One thing that has helped is actually setting a schedule and following up on it. If Tuesday mornings have two hours booked then you can actually just ask if that was followed any time you follow up with that person. It sort of hacks the categories by turning those moments into clearly work tasks with boxes that need to be ticked.
Can and have seen agile teams just create user stories for this. With estimates and acceptance criteria (yes having your people pass a quiz can be acceptance criteria). They even did an end of sprint demo where they had to present (without a deck) on the concepts of what they learned and answer questions.
I'm at a new place; the managers there did it by picking particular topics and instituting a group learning time (blocked off everyone's calendar for the time, let people select one of two topics, are soliciting new topics for future versions). It's working reasonably well.
You give them a stack in the companies long term success.
Once the goals align, it will become clear to everyone that employees must both have deep understanding of the current company and an eye towards the future.
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 extremely strong open source bona fides, I'm an inveterate organizer of study groups both at work and elsewhere, I speak regularly at meetups in order to force myself to learn new things well. Giving me the space to train myself is a great deal for potential employers.
But they aren't biting. 40 hours is what they are set up for and it is hard for them to figure out how to be flexible, even if they want to.
At my last job with a small growth-stage startup, I successfully negotiated for 32 hours, and it worked out great for all parties. But it seems harder than I think it should be to close such deals.
“40 hours is what they are set up for and it is hard for them to figure out how to be flexible, even if they want to.”
I had the same experience. asked for 32 hours week with corresponding pay cut. The HR people barely could comprehend the idea and certainly didn’t have a process for dealing with such a request.
Someone who asks for reduced hours is probably shooting themselves in the foot wrt comp. It suggests you are negotiating against yourself. If you aren’t asking for more money you are leaving money on the table. Just work effectively for 30 hours and nobody is going to know you aren’t working 40. Measurement of productivity in software is very vague.
I would just take the job and spend 90 minutes a day doing the things you mentioned. If anyone objects, well that’s conflict about how the flow of work will proceed, and dealing with those conflicts is everyone’s job.
You’re presuming that you’re not allowed to do the things you think are crucial as part of your daily work, but that’s already conceding too much to your superiors.
You do have to wait for the right time to do things, so it is justifiable as part of some near-term team goal. And be willing to wait when it’s not the time.
> 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.
It's a society wide thing. I don't work in tech, I don't do anything CS related, for certification/licensing that will assist us in our jobs (and that is used to prioritize applicants for positions) we are expected to do it on our own time, outside of work, on our own dime which if you actually get the license/certification they will then refund a portion of a course you took IF it was graded and the only ones that carry grades require you to attend in person for 40 hours where you'd have to take a week off then go put yourself up in another state... and then annually the exam for the one with a license has a 3-20% annual pass rate, with the average around 15%.
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.
Maybe I just had a different career path, but so far it seems that my job is learning, and the work is a byproduct of that.
I spent a bunch of years in the USAR doing basic computer stuff, both in training, and then learning from others as I went along. I was the US Army version of a general purpose "IT" fellow. Once I got out of the military and I interviewed at a few private sector jobs I realized I was not overly well equipped for IT, but if I could show I wanted to learn they would usually bring me on-board. I did desktop support for ~2 years before I landed a veryyyy basic SysAdmin job. I did that for a year, and rolled it into a real SysAdmin job. Did that for a year and turned it into a Server Engineer job (Super sysadmin?) I did that for ~2 years....you can kind of see where this is going.
I've been out of the military for ~10 years now, and every job I've had has been about learning, (and then learning that my current job wasn't going to pay me what I was actually worth) while trying something new. I got paid to "learn" every step of the way. It just wasn't a direct "learn X and you get Y" process, but even then, most companies offered some level of college reimbursement (I never really did that college thing) or will pay for certifications/training, and really, IT is one of the few fields I can think of where all of the knowledge needed to do it is open, accessible, and available to everyone.
This is how I approach it too and I think it's a healthy approach. I get into a job mainly for the learning opportunities it provides. I'll happily take a pay cut if it means I get to grow in a direction I need. Once I feel like the opportunities become fewer and farther between, and management cannot change that, I'll find a new job that can provide me with the right learning opportunities again.
Of course, I'm not even in my thirties, so I can afford to optimise for learning now to have the compound interest pay off for it when I'm older.
It's all a holdover from assembly-line factory jobs. You need to start at a specific time and work hard the whole shift. If you're 3 minutes late, the line is delayed by 3 minutes. Software development is a very different profession.
My employer encourages using around 20% of our time learning. Lower level developers can manage this pretty easily. But most of the level 3’s are kind of expected to just know stuff, plus the heavy work load. We still manage about 10% of our time to learn. But if we want to take Udemy classes, paid tutorials, or something else they’ll gladly reimburse us for the costs. They prefer their developers to “be on point”.
I agree making time to learn at work for a job you've had for a while is important, but we should probably make a distinction for newhires. Software has a low barrier to entry and I'm sure many of us have been victim to people who earnestly, but mistakenly, believe they are capable programmers. As a result, they're constantly "learning", in effect turning the job into a classroom, and leaving embittered peers who have to pick up the slack indefinitely. This type of "learning" can be toxic. (Of course, good hiring practices should be able to filter those sorts of people, but hiring practices can be its own can of worms.)
This is why i love my current employer and i won't leave unless i'm forced to.
We have a policy of "Chargeable work always comes first but if you've got nothing to do go learn something, we'll call you when something comes in"
This has lead to times before where we go dead around the same time every year and you spend 2 months being paid to independently upskill. Come the busy November-February period its really obvious who spent their time wisely and who goofed off.
I’ve been noticing my employees recently will walk away from there desk and find a nice cranny to read some type of business book to help them improve in there personal and professional career. I LOVE it. The craziest thing is we have never had any discussions about continued education, but we do keep a library of great books and resources readily available. My take, when your employees continue to learn on the job, it’s just them investing in themselves which in turn will be an investment in your company, and will ultimately make them better asset to the org. It’s a win win. I love it.
The thing that annoys me the most is that tech companies, mine included, will reimburse gladly books, but no one is ever allowed to be seen reading books at their desk on company time. Whereas being on hacker news, reddit, NYT visibly is okay. I've just started reading PDF's on my computer screen but I'd prefer a real book of the same thing most of the time.
Really? I’ve seen coworkers reading, but it’s rare. I occasionally encourage people to read at work. People tend to not follow through, since it’s often hard to find good books on niche subjects.
At one point I was in a reading group on Quantum Computing (we were working through some classic text book). I eventually stopped since I was bad at making time to do the exercises.
I 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!)
Folks, there's so much cynicism here. If you want to learn and invest in yourself, do it! If you want to sit back and wait for your employer to invest in you, don't be surprised when it doesn't happen. Orgs need to make smart investment decisions. If you're not feeling supported it may be that the org doesn't view you as HiPo and that's clear feedback on your current value to the organization.
I divide my working time sth like 50/50 for actual tasks solving and learning. My company doesn't understand it, but I work remotely and no one notices. But soon I'm back to office.
I've joined my current company two years ago. We are small (but constantly growing) company - about 10 programmers at the moment. 10 separate programmers, lack of notion of any "team". Time (and money) lost on problems arising from that fact is XXX% or even XXXX% per project.
The most important thing about learning is not accumulation of knowledge by individual, but accumulation of knowlege by group, making knowledge common, therfore creating higher level being called "team".
A better way of thinking of this is in terms of freelancers learning on the job and charging customers for this openly. Often there is a mutual benefit where even having access to a person with the ability and willingness to learn is worth something to customers.
I recently did a python project for a customer where I was very open about my limited python skills and the fact I hadn't really used it in over a decade. But I got them to pay for me because I had other skills that they needed (building search backends using Elasticsearch). In the end, I brushed up my python skills on the job and had a happy customer. It wasn't a big deal but I definitely spent some billable time googling the basics of using Python (I literally had to google the syntax for e.g. for loops, lambdas functions, and a few other things).
I would argue my ability to learn and adapt is actually what makes me valuable. I can wrap my head around complex tech stacks, new languages, etc. while applying skills I already have.
When I was a dev lead I came up with the concept called a "learning spike," where a developer would pick a focused topic to dive into for a set period of time[1] and then do a short[2] presentation of learnings to the entire team. This would be backed by an official story in Jira or whatnot. The goal would be for the developer to choose something that sparked their interest (within the loose boundaries that it be at least marginally related to the team's work.)
I figured this would be great in a number of ways -- developer deepens their knowledge of some topic, possibly even has fun, practices their communication skills by sharing with others, and the entire team learns something. Although the idea was technically backed by management, it didn't really catch on. I think the problem was that the short term opportunity costs were too high when everything was on fire (which was often).
[+] [-] aczerepinski|6 years ago|reply
I subscribe to those weekly emails for the programming languages we use at work and I read them when they come in. I sometimes watch a conference talk about implementing something similar to whatever I’m scheduled to do next.
If I were running a company I’d expect this of all high level employees. It’s your responsibility to be on top of whatever’s going on in your field.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|6 years ago|reply
That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like they are “Working” even though I explain to them that as long as its work/business related I will expect to be able to call upon them in the future with this new knowledge.
So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning?
[+] [-] habnds|6 years ago|reply
In my experience formalizing "learning" in the work place doesn't work because it requires the performance of learning for management types rather than real learning which involves working through real new problems over an extended period of time.
The real way to get employees to learn is to hand them responsibilities they are not fully prepared for along with the pay that goes with them and see how it goes. Right or wrong managers are rarely comfortable doing that.
Employees need to be comfortable failing in front of you and few are because there are few good examples of that turning out well. When it does go well, all too often the raise they were promised doesn't come through.
this isn't to say you're a poor manager, just that it's unusual to have a healthy environment for on the job learning.
[+] [-] russnewcomer|6 years ago|reply
If the entire org doesn't encourage learning, grant the time for it to happen, and protect employees from operational reprecussions of spending time learning, it is hard for individual employees to make it happen.
[+] [-] sleepychu|6 years ago|reply
Reward learning with career advancement.
Send your people on relevant training courses out of the office as often as is useful/practical.
Oh and if you have timesheets make sure you can "bill" to training!
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
So as manager take a look and see if your environment makes people into ticket closing machines or into people who have the freedom to allocate their time where they feel it’s most useful.
[+] [-] supercanuck|6 years ago|reply
You are providing the “option” but not literally scheduling the time. Employees need cover otherwise you are “learning” but nervous something will “slip” because “Learning” isn’t business critical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
[+] [-] cushychicken|6 years ago|reply
Does this apply to skills that might be more applicable to another team?
My current manager encourages learning, but shoos me away from topics that are handled by other managers. Frustratingly, he's blocked transitions of mine to other teams with work that I've found interesting and educated myself on.
How do you prioritize learning, and balance it against your interests as a manager to keep your resources focused on your objectives?
[+] [-] pipingdog|6 years ago|reply
Be seen doing it yourself.
[+] [-] WhiskeyJack55|6 years ago|reply
The problem with this approach I think is you get more buy-in, but might be arguably less directly applicable to work.
[+] [-] the_watcher|6 years ago|reply
Too often, companies "expect" their employees to take advantage of the fact that they allow them to learn on the job, but only reward short-term performance.
[+] [-] bigred100|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sethammons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rifung|6 years ago|reply
Maybe instead of having them read something, make them give a presentation on it to the rest of the team?
Then they have deadlines and produce content. Sounds just like work to me.
[+] [-] chaboud|6 years ago|reply
1. Make it part of their annual goals (e.g. attend a conference, get a certification, compete in a competition).
2. Throw them in the deep end, a little beyond their edge, and be okay if they fumble around a bit.
3. Make them teach. Give them stuff to understand and present to your team or other teams. That forcing function will give them a mechanism to immediately exercise their newfound knowledge/skill.
4. Make room in your project schedules for it. They'll learn on their own if they have the time, or they'll invent something. The ones that don't are your bottom tier.
My first boss sent me to Siggraph my first year to drink from the fire hose. He also asked me, on my first day, what I was worst at of all the areas of programming I was aware of (Windows UI) and assigned me three months of work writing custom controls... I did it in six months, and I've never been able to thank him enough for teaching me, right off the bat, that your people are your greatest investment, that optimizing for the project is rarely the right choice.
[+] [-] umanwizard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WilliamEdward|6 years ago|reply
So the solution is to make it clear you pay them to learn.
[+] [-] gbrown|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|6 years ago|reply
Training is on there (with a 5% of time budget for it), and if they don't achieve their objectives, their next appraisal will go badly. Pay rises and promotions and so on depend on good appraisals, and I anticipate some quarterly review meetings in which I tell people that they're on track to do badly because they're not meeting their training objectives.
If having their training objectives written in black and white, and being reviewed quarterly and appraised annually on whether or not they're meeting their objectives doesn't make it "okay", well, I guess I'll have to come up with something else, but I sure hope that will make it clear.
[+] [-] nashashmi|6 years ago|reply
Learning must be optional, never required. And must have incentive: I learn programming because it makes my work faster. But if I can't use my program, I feel like I wasted my time.
Learning should tell me that I am increasing my value.
I can never learn new stuff just because I am supposed to. Nor will anyone suffer a book if there is no IMMEDIATE benefit.
[+] [-] pedrocr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaitai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msluyter|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763789
Having an actual story to back the learning process might help making employees feel more comfortable with it.
[+] [-] blain_the_train|6 years ago|reply
Once the goals align, it will become clear to everyone that employees must both have deep understanding of the current company and an eye towards the future.
[+] [-] rectang|6 years ago|reply
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 extremely strong open source bona fides, I'm an inveterate organizer of study groups both at work and elsewhere, I speak regularly at meetups in order to force myself to learn new things well. Giving me the space to train myself is a great deal for potential employers.
But they aren't biting. 40 hours is what they are set up for and it is hard for them to figure out how to be flexible, even if they want to.
At my last job with a small growth-stage startup, I successfully negotiated for 32 hours, and it worked out great for all parties. But it seems harder than I think it should be to close such deals.
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
I had the same experience. asked for 32 hours week with corresponding pay cut. The HR people barely could comprehend the idea and certainly didn’t have a process for dealing with such a request.
[+] [-] susijdjdjxa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|6 years ago|reply
You’re presuming that you’re not allowed to do the things you think are crucial as part of your daily work, but that’s already conceding too much to your superiors.
You do have to wait for the right time to do things, so it is justifiable as part of some near-term team goal. And be willing to wait when it’s not the time.
[+] [-] ryanmercer|6 years ago|reply
It's a society wide thing. I don't work in tech, I don't do anything CS related, for certification/licensing that will assist us in our jobs (and that is used to prioritize applicants for positions) we are expected to do it on our own time, outside of work, on our own dime which if you actually get the license/certification they will then refund a portion of a course you took IF it was graded and the only ones that carry grades require you to attend in person for 40 hours where you'd have to take a week off then go put yourself up in another state... and then annually the exam for the one with a license has a 3-20% annual pass rate, with the average around 15%.
[+] [-] Bootwizard|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|6 years ago|reply
I spent a bunch of years in the USAR doing basic computer stuff, both in training, and then learning from others as I went along. I was the US Army version of a general purpose "IT" fellow. Once I got out of the military and I interviewed at a few private sector jobs I realized I was not overly well equipped for IT, but if I could show I wanted to learn they would usually bring me on-board. I did desktop support for ~2 years before I landed a veryyyy basic SysAdmin job. I did that for a year, and rolled it into a real SysAdmin job. Did that for a year and turned it into a Server Engineer job (Super sysadmin?) I did that for ~2 years....you can kind of see where this is going.
I've been out of the military for ~10 years now, and every job I've had has been about learning, (and then learning that my current job wasn't going to pay me what I was actually worth) while trying something new. I got paid to "learn" every step of the way. It just wasn't a direct "learn X and you get Y" process, but even then, most companies offered some level of college reimbursement (I never really did that college thing) or will pay for certifications/training, and really, IT is one of the few fields I can think of where all of the knowledge needed to do it is open, accessible, and available to everyone.
[+] [-] kqr|6 years ago|reply
Of course, I'm not even in my thirties, so I can afford to optimise for learning now to have the compound interest pay off for it when I'm older.
[+] [-] jdlyga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarellel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattyRad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ENOTTY|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swarnie_|6 years ago|reply
We have a policy of "Chargeable work always comes first but if you've got nothing to do go learn something, we'll call you when something comes in"
This has lead to times before where we go dead around the same time every year and you spend 2 months being paid to independently upskill. Come the busy November-February period its really obvious who spent their time wisely and who goofed off.
[+] [-] sealthedeal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lycidas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strstr|6 years ago|reply
At one point I was in a reading group on Quantum Computing (we were working through some classic text book). I eventually stopped since I was bad at making time to do the exercises.
[+] [-] izietto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freezedance|6 years ago|reply
(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!)
[+] [-] chewyshine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r34|6 years ago|reply
I've joined my current company two years ago. We are small (but constantly growing) company - about 10 programmers at the moment. 10 separate programmers, lack of notion of any "team". Time (and money) lost on problems arising from that fact is XXX% or even XXXX% per project.
The most important thing about learning is not accumulation of knowledge by individual, but accumulation of knowlege by group, making knowledge common, therfore creating higher level being called "team".
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|6 years ago|reply
I recently did a python project for a customer where I was very open about my limited python skills and the fact I hadn't really used it in over a decade. But I got them to pay for me because I had other skills that they needed (building search backends using Elasticsearch). In the end, I brushed up my python skills on the job and had a happy customer. It wasn't a big deal but I definitely spent some billable time googling the basics of using Python (I literally had to google the syntax for e.g. for loops, lambdas functions, and a few other things).
I would argue my ability to learn and adapt is actually what makes me valuable. I can wrap my head around complex tech stacks, new languages, etc. while applying skills I already have.
[+] [-] msluyter|6 years ago|reply
I figured this would be great in a number of ways -- developer deepens their knowledge of some topic, possibly even has fun, practices their communication skills by sharing with others, and the entire team learns something. Although the idea was technically backed by management, it didn't really catch on. I think the problem was that the short term opportunity costs were too high when everything was on fire (which was often).
[1] 2-3 days max, probably.
[2] "Short" is the key word here.
[+] [-] eitland|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] orware|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ellIRUe2mpU