Slashdot Mirror
I Like My IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid
Esther Schindler writes "'Who has money to train these guys nowadays? They should be lucky they're still employed, right? Keep thinking that way,' writes Lisa Vaas. The competition applauds your choice to glue your wallet shut. Or, to put this another way: This is why the boss won't pay for developer training. Vaas explains how those still training manage to get their training budgets funded."
Really not trying to troll anyone with that summary.
seriously.
I saw this among the submissions and am amazed it made it through. So much for the moderation process.
When they'll do it themselves on their own time and their own dime?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Most developer training is absolutely useless. For any recent technology, unless you've got one of the engineers directly from the vendor teaching you, you're likely only going to be dealing with a consultant or lecturer that has read a book on the subject, and has maybe played with the technology in question for a week or two.
The time is better spent in the trenches, going to battle with the technology you want to learn about. You'll need to fight with it. You'll need to grab it by the testes and twist it into what you need it to be; into what you need it to do. You will learn so much more than if you sit in a room with a bunch of your co-workers and listen to the lecturer ramble on, using one unrealistic micro-example after another.
...like my women.
(Sorry. I just couldn't resist.)
In general I agree, but requiring that developers learn something they need for work on their own in their free time isn't really fair, developers have lives too, so at the very least the budget should include time for developers to read up on these things in their working hours.
This is why I always conceptualize employment as a prostitute vs. john situation.
Most companies that have leaders that do not understand their principal technology, and working relationships fail. You cannot make an adaptable organization that changes with the environment and handles complex products on the basis of this type of dependancy culture. I have a great deal of experience in this field. It is also a good idea to hit the ground running when starting a job by reading up on the enviroments that you will work with - i.e. by reading manuals as this is better than "training" as computing is informationally dense. Without the investment, intelligent leadership and book learning you will fail.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
But it totally misses the reasoning, at least in my field. Wireless telecom has very large variety of equipment that is vendor specific, or protocol specific and I have never seen a comprehensive field of classes out there besides the vendors that supply the equipment. Due to this, and nobody wanting to lock themselves in small segment tied to only one vendor, they do not spend their own money to learn it all. My experience was starting from college with an IT background, and a smart manager hiring me fresh, because back then he knew the seperate telecom world was going to clash with IT, while the old guys did not think they needed to know anything about IP.
They sent everyone to trainiung, at least a couple times. The ones who did not appear to use the knowledge, or even retain stayed on the bottom tiers while those who did grow got promotions, and eventually left the operations group to engineering.
I stuck with that company for awhile, then management changed, and with it their beliefs. I no longer received training, and I started to stagnate as an employee, since instead of giving us project's for things we knew, but they would rather hire from outside than promote/train from within. This saves the bottom line on the short term, but with that mindset also changes the mindset of the employee's. Now instead of everyone wanting to stay with company it was valid that the only way to move ahead was to change employers. People coming into the same company demanded higher salaries than an internal promotion would get, and the cycle continued. Now that company is suffering, in particular having a problem with retention. I too have since left, to another company that still helps me grow, and with that I help my current employer grow. I like it here!
So no, the company doesn't want its employee's to be stupid but they fail to see the long term effect their plan gives. In my experience it changed Netops/engineering from a group of faithful employee's who could see a future with them, into the departments having a revolving door.
I welcome my idiot colleagues that take this approach. To an IT pro, training is as valuable a method of retaining good staff as offering more money. Being proactive and obtaining training for your staff tells them you actually give a damn about them and their future, whether with the company or not, which promotes loyalty in employees who recognize the effort and, lo and behold, INCREASES the chances of retaining talent.
Those that don't care are likely to move on anyway regardless of what you do. Those that only work for money and don't want training aren't the kind of employees I want on my staff anyway (the only exception being those that go home at the end of the day and do their job as a hobby as well).
Ultimately this approach is self-defeating as the staff is untrained on evolving technology. Not only will the talent leave, those that are left are incapable of handling new projects that Management demands making you, as the manager, look like a FOOL when you can't deliver.
I hear tell of these training budgets, and yet in 19 years of working for various companies I've actually gone on maybe 3 courses ever. So it's nice to know everyone's being brought down to my level...
This article seems to be about selling you that paper certifications are something you need for your employees. Anyone who has interviewed or worked with many of the people with these certifications knows that they are worthless. My favorite was a MCSE that didn't know how to install a video card driver. What matters is that the people can actually do the work, if they self taught/apprenticed I'll take them anyday over a certification
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
cross training.
the guy seems to have a lot of bad developers though, the kind that if they stop developing for a while can no longer do it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Not only that, but training is different from experience.
Do you want someone who's gone to a week long class about whatever or someone who's been working on whatever for a year?
So there is SOME logic to hiring as opposed to training. You already have people who can explain the weirdness of your existing systems to the new person.
But just because there's some logic to it does not make it the best course. Instead, you should DEMAND that they read books (that you bought) and pass certifications (that you pay for) and then use those skills on side projects.
The more they know, the better they'll function.
No secret, the only way to get a decent raise is to jump ship. No one gets up the ladder at one company. Get experience, go to another job and get the raise you should have gotten, then get more experience, jump ship again.
I worked for two fortune 100 companies, and people would quit, and then they'd be back in 2-3 years. Earning 30% more.
Companies would rather hire an outsider with paper experience than give someone who knows the company a big enough raise to keep them. I even went for salary matching once and got a counter offer $8k less.
Pay me what I'm worth, and the certifications won't lead me away. Otherwise I'm skipping back and forth, chasing a decent raise.
While training is usually useful (but one can also learn by RTFM'ing) local playgrounds where a developer or systems administrator can have some actual hands on experience is even more vital.
Great swathes of middle management tiers were slashed during the early 90s in a vain attempt to show shareholders that organisations were more 'lean'. This senior management mentality left many organisations with no one who knew their business systems from a management perspective, and no one glueing together the corporate culture.
The unappreciated middle manager was the guy (pardon the sexist reference, but before the 90s, they mostly were guys) who established business systems and then went about implementing and policing them. For some strange reason, senior managers believed that they could replace this critical part of the organisation with code-cutters.
For a limited time it worked. You can make burgers with a robotic arm. However, it eventually started to slide sideways when people realised that their career was not going to be furthered by a performance management spreadsheet, and when their workmates were being retrenched by e-mail, the workers went into open revolt. Through no fault of their own, the IT workers were blamed for this loss of corporate identity - and the IT retrenchments that followed Y2K were testament to the corporate beliefs.
Now, ten years has passed, and this article has surfaced about 20 times. Despite its title, its NOT about training IT boffins. Its about trying to rebuild the middle management layer. People like Lisa Vaas have realised that the only viable candidates for the role are the IT people. They are the only ones who understand the business systems, and are the only ones who interact with the business on a horizontal plane instead of a vertical one.
Sadly, senior management are still trying to woo the shareholders with their clever cost cutting measures. And they feel more than a little threatened by the IT folk who know all their dirty little secrets. I doubt that any training gleaned by this approach will be more useful than a PHP refresher. Worse still, that is all that Lisa is asking for - when really, the IT crowd are the only ones holding the corporate life preserver these days.
Not everything is a well known certification. As I said in my earlier post, in some fields the only way to gain advanced knowledge of vendor specific pieces of equipment or protocols is to work with the equipment a long time and figure things out by trial and error(outages) or take a vendor supplied coarse. At the end of the training, the "certificate" is a piece of paper you will likely throw away/forget about, but having time in a lab with an instructor from the vendor, many times the same guys who work with the developers with every software change(since they only have one lab) is invaluable.
My current employer did not see any of those certificates of completing a class, and they were just a random bullet point on my resume that they did not even seem to read when I applied. But when they tested my knowledge by asking questions about a Nortel(Now Ericson) MSC and the eBSC behind it, as well as troubleshooting SS7(along with all normal IP engineering). I had answers, I had those answers at my previous company too, but they decided that I was only as smart as the title I already held, and was treated as such for longer than I should have put up with it.
Let's make a moron matrix.
Miserable environment + no further education = going to leave (unless they're morons. the dumb ones get comfortable and will stay and continue to shit all over the place) You lose in productivity and group morale as everyone hates IT or Joe User tries to fix things on their own making things even worse.
Miserable environment + education = probably going to leave after "free training" (read - opportunity cost). If you're going to run a shit hole, run a shit hole. Don't randomly throw them a bone. They'll make it into a ladder. Simply bad / clueless management does this.
Great environment + no education = probably going to learn on your own to be happy. The law of diminishing returns applies here. It's going to suck soon unless you pay them / give a title / whatever makes the little buggers happy. You're soaking management / planning costs here. Managers are more expensive than grunts.
Great environment + education = you're going to keep them longer. LoDR also applies here, but the effect is slower.
Basically....
As an employee, make your mistakes on someone else's dime. When you used up all internal opportunity, bail to greener pastures.
As a director you have a choice. You can get by making a technology barren revolving door shit hole (and don't forget how it messes with the entire org system morale). You lose productivity in having to get new people to adapt but you don't spend "visible" dollars.
As a director you can make a genuine nice place to work. Give education opportunities, make a nice organic learning culture, and treat people with respect. Hire those who will support this structure. You spend "visible" dollars on training and gain "invisible" dollars on productivity rates, retention, and expertise. The worker will become more efficient over time. You will slowly spend more visible dollars on cost of living / regular raises and promotions but efficiency will increase until it plateaus. If they earn, they earn. Else, into the woodchopper you go.
Huh, -1 Interesting. Now I just need to see a +5 troll!
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
First, let me address something important and then set it aside. Training is for monkeys. Education is for humans.
Okay. This is a field in which rapid turnover of skill requirements is a given. Therefore, staff will not be able to deliver their best unless they are provided with the means to keep their skills fresh and relevant. I realize that even such a basic proposition as this will have its detractors, but frankly, they're idiots. There isn't much more to discuss on that front.
On the other hand, there's lots to discuss when it comes to finding effective means for staff to maintain relevant skills. I remember how shocked I was when I first got out of university and went on some of the technical courses required and paid by my industry employer. Hour for hour, the cost was at least 50 times higher than what I had paid for course time at university. And the content was laughably thin. And the instructors usually cut a few corners, because the students, for the most part, were disinterested. This was in 1980 when hardware vendors provided courses in their own operating systems. Yes, in principle it was a good idea to provide this important aspect of product support. In practice, the approach was exceedingly inefficient.
Good documentation was to become an even better idea. Take the original Unix documentation for example. It wasn't a course in system design, but if you had a reasonably general systems background you could rely on the documentation to fill in the specifics. And you could learn what you needed to know at your own pace. And it was free. All you needed was time. Most vendors became very committed to documentation. I'm not sure what was happening in the training industry at the time, because for decades I never ran into a situation which needed it.
As time passed, however, a different trend began to assert itself. Consumer products gradually began to ship with less and less documentation. Most of what remained seemed to consist of legal disclaimers. On the industrial side of the fence, a similar trend followed about a decade later. Vendor literature is fancier than ever, but also considerably more vacuous. There are lots of pretty screenshots explaining what form fields to fill out, but not what the fields mean or what processing is taking place behind the facade, much less to provide an analysis of the general case.
In other words, the state of vendor documentation today is what vendor training was like thirty years ago. And this is good business, because if you want anything more, you're going to have to pay for it. Alas, the training is no better than the documentation. It's worse, perhaps, for anyone whose reading speed is faster than human speech.
Given this dismal state of affairs, I can see why employers don't find a lot of value in sending their staff off for training, especially if they have to travel to some distant city for several days. But don't let them throw the baby out with the bathwater! There are many other channels of education apart from the training industry. Some are enormously better value. You simply have to be willing to explore them. Conferences are a traditional example, as are university extension courses. I'm personally in favor of exchange programs, where organizations in the same sector allow their staff to trade places or engage in projects of common interest.
We should regard such undertakings as characteristic of our profession, and show some initiative around them. Otherwise we are reduced to following, to being monkeys. In that case, training may be the right word after all.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I don't believe it, if only because actions speak louder than words. If they're not out billing, they're redundant.
If he really believed in the value of training in staying competitive. he'd be hiring more developers to give everyone a chance to stay current and his business competitive.
And for those who would rather learn on their own, at least some time to pursue pet projects or do some research that might pay off at a later date, or at least enhance people's skills ...
But no - it's "bid too low just to get the job, then work the coders insane hours and blame them if it goes pear-shaped."
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Has anyone had any good experiences with programming-centric training courses that they would recommend? Please, no introductory stuff.
Thanks.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
CFO says to CEO, "What if we spend all this money on training everyone, and they leave?"
CEO replies, "What if we don't spend the money and they stay?"
This is one reason why I love working for big consulting companies. The more experience and skills you can put on your resume, the better - makes it easy to get approval for training. Plus, the big guys have relationships with major software vendors that yields free training.
Your comment is telling.
You're not sending your good employees (you know, the ones that you already know are intelligent) out to get certs. You're attempting to hire talent that already comes pre-trained so you don't have to do it. Anyone can fake their way through a class and memorize questions for a test, your goal should be to know your workers and send the ones that show promise off.
Find that smart kid from ops who seems to spend his days fixing printers and ghosting machines and send him out to get a MSCE. You'll probably wind up with half decent net admin when you're done. Hiring some mouth breather just because he paid for a cert and you've got a 95% chance of failure.
Actually that could be a way to weed out cert idiots, just ask them who paid for the cert. If it's their last employer it could be an indicator that they saw some talent there. Food for thought that.
I think you're making a logical error. You are comparing the value of the certificate as a predictor of success (that is, how much - if any - weight to give their degrees and certifications when deciding whether to hire them) and the value of the training process - yes, completely ignoring the certificate at the end - for someone that you've already hired and whose ability is not in question.
The question isn't whether someone with less intelligence or no experience in the subject matter can become an expert on a subject from a training program; the question is whether the smart and knowledgeable person you hired (let's at least assume that you hired someone who meets your standards, and have ruled out potential hires that would not cut the mustard without the certification or degree) can come out with much more and deeper knowledge of the subject.
--Matthew
Guys, go to conferences. Seriously.
I'm 23, I make over 100k, no college or diploma.
But I can destroy even the most senior developer at any of the large companies I've worked for. I went to a few conferences and someone picked me up, just like that. $10/hr to $30/hr+ in one job change.
You know what? The company that picked me up is running my code in production years and years later. Happily reaping the rewards of my first few months of employment when I rewrote their entire network monitoring system over Christmas break (had just started, no vacation).
Go to conferences and hire these young kids. Get over their short term (easy) problems. You have to defend them at work from the IT sharks but find a passionate one and remove the yellow tape. 1 year and the company will be begging to hire him..... That's my story. Did your company find such free flowing talent? You probably wanted someone who sat through something right? The passionate will gather for fun at these conferences.... they will be scared of your traditional interviews since you throw their resumes in the trash. Still worried about paper, most are....
(hint: poor people from sub 30K/yr income households have passion too, and without any financial backing for college they are *ripe* for the picking at these conferences. Even better is you get to hang out with these kids before they know it's an interview and you'll get a good judge of character.)
Tight and stupid.
Employees are a commodity, therefore expendable. This isn't going to change until there is a labor shortage, which will probably happen in the next decade. Demographics define the future. That's why things aren't really as bleak as they seem at this time.
When I first started work and was in a job, I didn't just feel safe in my job. I would also get regular training - new skills, new techniques, all sorts of things.
In the past decade, I've worked in a load of companies as a freelancer, and only in 1 company have I seen people getting trained. The rest, they expect people to pick up books or manuals, maybe a CD-ROM course if you're lucky.
I really don't see any attraction to a job now. I don't see much difference apart from getting paid less.
Sounds like the women i gravitate too.
Experienced and senior individuals should spend at least some time each week reviewing the work of junior developers and helping to bring them up to speed. I do it, and the results are incredibly worth it.
Sadly, some senior individuals prefer to treat the juniors like crap simply *because* they don't know as much.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
You are comparing the value of the certificate as a predictor of success (that is, how much - if any - weight to give their degrees and certifications when deciding whether to hire them) and the value of the training process
Probably because we had a story here a couple days ago about "the value of the certificate as a predictor of success" compared to the value of a portfolio of hobby projects.
The mentality to keep them stupid so they will stay is indicative of a toxic work environment and one that I have seen in MANY places so far in my career. The vast majority of my career experiences were in truly toxic environments so I can make an assertion on the population that more than 3/4ths of IT work environments are toxic.
Retention of employees at all costs is a business anti-pattern that formulates in an environment with chronic high turnover. From what I have seen personally, chronic turnover in an IT company isn't caused by low wages, high expectations or managerial incompetency, it always seems to be all three at once. I never personally worked anywhere a company only suffered from one of these problems.
My theory about why this is considered acceptable to not train your people properly and keep them stupid is typically because the product they offer has little to no competition or the money is easy and management has grown complacent. There is no real incentive to do a spectacular job when mediocre makes you nearly the same amount of money.
The best work environments I have had were with companies that struggled to make every dollar they earned and I find it ironic that easy money can make for terrible management.
I like it tight and I like it stupid!
Than Developer Training.
I know there are a lot of devs here and I don't want to offend anyone....but it's the truth. Every training I've ever attended was some 2-3 day conference or 'class'. All they ever had the time to do was show-and-tell cool stuff you could do. It was more a day-off/paid vacation than training. Except the costs were extremely high.
The 'good' developers seem to learn this stuff on their own anyway. In fact, they are normally the ones who push for the company to be using it. So, you either send the good devs who don't get anything out of it as a 'reward' for being good....or you send the bad devs. The bad ones certainly aren't going to learn anything.
Instead of sending one dev to a conference you could get 1,000 good development books. 85% of which will never be used as more than a desktop reference because the majority of devs aren't going to read it.
What if the co promises to reimburse you for training 18 months afterward? If you leave early, they don't pay.
Table-ized A.I.
Two more factors that make it a vicious circle:
Employees not given the chance to train themselves (after unpaid overtime as late as midnight?) to get the formal qualifications and certifications will almost necessarily be underpaid, while most training comes at a price tag that requires a corporate sponsor.
they want some some to have a $1,249- $4,699 app?
that would push most workers under mini wage and brake the law. For there 1st paycheck.
As an employee, even if you get training/education and apply it, most of your efforts are still helping people 'above' you who could never do what you are currently doing. It's like doing 10 pushups, but your boss(es) get the benefit of 9 of them, and you only get the benefit of 1. So, if you improve and make them more money, usually the employee never gets a percentage of how much the company grows. You may get a little raise, but that's about it. Your boss(es) continue to make way more money, and you don't. I'm thinking that everyone should be self-employed. Anybody in charge of a large 'company' is really also only self-employed, and contracting with hundreds of others. No training necessary for those you contract with. If *they* want to train themselves, they will do - with the proper motivation - to get other contracts/business. I think we as a nation should start to think in other terms other than the 'employee' mindset. It's limiting in a great many ways.
Problem with this is so many companies require the cert to get hired in the first place. So people pay for them to get the damn job in the first place.
I'm not sure about code monkeys. You know the guys who receive a project design and implement each individual function. I'm a software engineer and as such, as opposed to being a developer or a code monkey, my job is to identify problems, research the problems, research solutions and then either implement my findings or document it for a larger team of individuals to implement.
:)
A software engineer is a person that should be able to program, but it's just a small part of the job. The majority of a software engineer's job is solving problems, generally through research and sadly often trial and error.
Software engineers require books, possibly video training courses etc... if you are a software engineer and you need to be spoon fed new topics, then you're doing it wrong... or you're trying to get a paid vacation
Talking about that... time for the boss to spring for a new Safari Online subscription
I'm a guy that doesn't like traditional training. That is, I can't stand power point presentations with guys from the local training center. I'd rather poke my eyeballs out than sit through those classes. But that doesn't mean I don't need training.
If I'm working on an important project, I'm going to be conservative. I'm going to use what I know works. I'm going to keep it simple and keep the risk low. But that means that I might overlook some fancy new technique or technology that would make the project even more successful. I might be reinventing the wheel because I just don't know the details of a class library. Or I might be missing opportunities for writing better code because I just don't know any better.
So, I need time to research. I need time to read. And most importantly, I need time to experiment -- WITH my colleagues. We need projects that we can try new techniques on. We need to evaluate new technologies and languages and class libraries so that we know if we want to use them in the future. I really shouldn't be doing that "on the job" because I'll likely make a dog's breakfast of the job.
Personally, I don't really favour the "one day a week" of personal training. It's too hard to stay focused. Instead, give me 6 weeks a year (in a row), with a couple of colleagues to simply try new things. Then I will come back to the team and share my experience.
I've refused every offer of training ever given to me. After leaving uni, I was an independent technician for 10 years - roaming from place to place with year-long contracts with various schools (up to 8 simultaneously, on a sort of shift rota). The longest-term ones had me there for 8-9 of those years consecutively because they liked my work, and even poached me from an employer (at great expense) and hired me full-time for 2 years at the end (I left because of internal politics which I hadn't been subjected to previously). I did everything from managing their finance servers to writing new programs.
They never had a problem with my work, but they were nice enough to offer me training to advance myself. I refused. Why? Because they couldn't find a course suitable.
The problem with IT training is that it's generally aimed at people new to the industry. Even when you get into the £2000/day training courses, it's Powerpoint slideshows and "let's all try that now, shall we?" from someone who's never been in a professional position except "trainer", and on material that you could teach *them* more about than they could teach you. Don't even get me started on the mainstream junk (e.g. MCSE, etc.). Learning menu positions, control panel icons, how to use the MMC etc. by rote isn't learning.
Every training on a "new technology" would have me sleeping within 30 minutes. When your training could be surpassed by a 1-page crib sheet written by someone at the same level as the participants, you know the training is a waste of time. And if you attend training and find yourself in a room with more than 20% of people with pen-and-paper on their lap, religiously scribbling down every click they see, do yourself a favour and leave.
And precisely how many of my employers have ever been bothered by the amount of professional training I have? Zero. They don't even ask, because I was making a career of it (at my own personal financial risk) before they'd even heard of the various certifications (or, in some cases, used a computer). How many were dissatisfied with my work? Zero.
Amusingly, one employer wanted me to take the ECDL just so they could say all their staff had it. The look they got was enough to have them backing out of the room in silence.
IT Training, from my point of view, is currently a complete waste of time. It's an excuse for a jolly-up, disguised in a £2000/day invoice. And if someone needs to be *professionally* trained to do their job - you hired the wrong person. You can do little one-day seminars on certain topics (e.g. legal implications of new data protection laws, etc.) but to actually think that you need to keep training your IT staff to keep them working at the right level? That's ludicrous. Also, I wouldn't expect them to PAY to train themselves either, that's just silly.
Just give them 5-10% of their day on side-projects. Mention that the company will be wanting you to be able to do X within a year, and they'll use that time to train themselves up. You're "paying" for it, because it comes out of their work-time. You're not paying over-the-odds or floating a crappy here-today-gone-tomorrow "training" company. And within a year, they'll have grasped whatever concepts they need to (and if they haven't - that's the sign of a lazy worker, because they were pre-informed). If it's a massive job, they'll ask for materials and/or support and before you know it you have a trainer, and complete training materials, in-house for the rest of your staff.
It works fabulously from the lowest ranks ("We're *going* to be moving to this new telephone system - I'll put your new phone here, here's a brief intro, you'll have your old system and phone up until the end of the year but we *will* be switching then to the new system - get used to it" - replace phone with software, PC, input device, whatever) to the most skilled ("Next year, we're going to move *everything* to SAP - do you know SAP? No - well, no problem, we have a year and
Idiotic. Another example of what's good on paper meaning the reality gets ignored.
Next week - why your employees will leave once they're experienced anyway, and how the prospect of a position with training will hasten that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As I said in my earlier post,
This is the funniest thing I've read in a while! (If you don't get the joke, look at the quoted poster's user name.)
I can definitely see the value in continued training (on the company's time and dime) for developers. That's an area where everything changes/evolves and if you don't keep up, you're eventually ineffective compared to the people who know the newer/improved technologies.
But coming from more of the network administration side, I've not really seen any evidence that paid training was worthwhile. In the 20-some years I've been doing this, every time I went to a training class or seminar, it was honestly of really limited value. It generally worked ok as an overview of what was new in a given product, or as a "crash course" in what a certain application was capable of. But ultimately, far too much detailed information was crammed into peoples' heads in a 1-2 day session. Even if you tried your best to take notes, much of the stuff was never used again back at the workplace until possibly a full YEAR later, when they reached the point of actually purchasing said technology and getting it online. By then, you could barely remember why you wrote down what you did when you looked at it again! In cases where you were getting training on existing products? Some of the same issues applied. The classes have to try to cover all the different needs and requirements of everyone in attendance, so much of what you learn doesn't apply to the place you work. Some of the items that COULD apply don't always do so immediately, because your employer doesn't yet use whatever portion/module of the software you learned about and thought they SHOULD start using.
There used to be a lot of pressure from I.T. for employers to pay for certifications ... but in most cases I saw? That, again, was really just self-serving. People didn't think (or care) that it might help them be a better employee where they worked currently. They just saw them as badges they could bring to the next job interview to negotiate for higher pay elsewhere.
This is nothing new, folks. Back in the early 90s I worked for a Fortune 500 company in one of its design departments. The artists kept begging year after year for training. Of course they didn't exactly specify that they wanted Photoshop and Illustrator training. What did they get? Bullshit "team" training and bullshit "communication" training among other bullshit fluff, none of which was a marketable skill. After all, why should a company pay to train someone so they are able to get a better job somewhere else? The other side of this type of coin are places like Pixar that let you take all kinds of useful classes and people really want to work there.
So the real business question is: how much useful training do you offer your employees? If you treat them like slaves, they won't want to hang around but then again will they have the ability to leave? On the other hand, if you spend a ton of money on training, are you going to see the return on the investment or are you going to go broke in the process?
Not necessarily. Some shops send their least productive person to get a cert so that productivity isn't hurt _and_ they get to advertise that they have people with certs.
The problem is, to overgeneralize all certifications as bad or good, is to remove context from the evaluation of a particular certification area. Some certs are good and useful, and some, may seem like nothing but a rubber stamp, based on memorization of ideas, not actual ability to put thought into action. The problem in my experience is some in management see the word 'certification' and immediately ascribe value, without any real thought process into how or why this particular certification is both a benefit to the person taking the certification track, or to the company's current direction.
As a result you may see people, getting a cert and then jumping out of a company, or leaving a company because they feel they need the training. Here's the bottom line: training is important. People who want to learn will absorb, and work to learn material, those who don't want to learn, very likely won't. Hire people with an interest in learning, and you have a better chance of getting a good ROI on your training dollars. Hire people who just want to 'skate by' and you may not get the same ROI. Just remember that each of us is unique our abilities, and capacities, and motivations to learn. To treat all Developers, all testers, all technical writers, or managers, or fill in your job title here, as all being the same is to ignore the human element that each of us is individuals with vastly different backgrounds.
I've worked over 20 years in IT, have been a trainer (for CIsco courses and others as well) and in my opinion a test lab should be the first stop for most training. Much of the value of the Cisco coursework comes from giving access to a test lab. Whether a test lab makes sense depends on the specifics of your company, the cost of the equipment and the quality of your staff. For example: a 2 person IT dept. that uses a lot of expensive, vendor specific equipment and both people have similar IT experience will get much lower ROI from a test lab than a company that uses mostly FLOSS on commodity hardware, has a 15 person IT dept with a varied range of experience (mentoring/cross-training available). Group one may see formal training as a more cost-effective option (although if they need to keep cold spares on hand a test lab may be viable from that). Group 2 will almost certainly gain more from a test lab than formal training.
In addition to a test lab the employees need time to use it. I would say having 15 - 25% of your time for training and decompressing is about on par with my experience. The exact amount depending on the stress level of the environment and the breadth of the technologies supported. Self-training is an inherently lower stress environment than dealing with a production network and the employee can control the pace of training. Mentoring and working in teams can speed up learning and also build teamwork at the same time. Finally, the wider the scope of technologies you have to support the more time you will need to train for them. Smaller, specialized groups can get by with less training time than a group that must support all the functions.
A dash of formal training here and there can definitely add to the benefits of a test lab, however, they may take the form of classes or discussions at a conference rather than a single longer training session on one subject. Exposure to other technologies and experiences is another advantage of conferences or formal training. That said given the choice between test lab and formal training I'd choose the test lab every time.
You don't want to work for those companies because the management is retarded.
This "balls of clay" metaphor is troubling. "Feet of clay" is more consistent (although not applicable here).
Grabbing testes is something we avoid. The metaphor is hardly as appealing as "grab the gold ring", which has a cultural reference (the golden ring on a carousel) and an appealing outcome (gold in your hand). Who wants a handful of testes?
Another inconsistency is that, once you'ved "grab[bed} it by the testes" you are only holding the testes, not the entire object, so even in the case of clay balls there must be something attached that you wish to control.
Furthermore twisting clay only changes the shape of the clay manipulated, not the object to which the clay/testes is presumably attached.
Consider also that anything with testes will fight back and likely hurt you seriously - something a technology, a textbook, a keyboard won't do. Why must learning be a struggle?
tl;dr summary - this metaphor has all the appeal of a coffee table hitting a bare shin in a dark room.
I don't think you quite understand how the rest of society operates.
My wife works in insurance. Most of my family works in the public sector.
The rest of society works by getting an education for a specific job and any small change... you get training. The idea of hiring someone with 'potential' just doesn't exist in 95% of the world.
Let me give you a little contrast here.
Doctors spend years studying medicine and then a few more years specializing in some narrow field. They continue to work in that narrow field for years, often just doing the same procedures over and over again.
Contrast that with core router equipment supporting the internet. A system with as many complexities as some medical specialization. Oh... just hire some new grad with some general knowledge and have them design and debug issues. Hey, that new grad was me not too long ago :P
Every time one of my family members at work gets a new computer program to use... no matter how small... they get training on it. This is ingrained in 95% of the rest of the workplace. My mother was hiring for some position in the public sector and I read the job description. They put in some obscure computer data entry program that you would of course only use if you worked for the city.
It's really only in tech and R&D where technology is rapid and people are generally apt at self-learning that we think people should just be hired for potential. Of course I think this is the better way :)... but I don't really blame the HR, business people... they do what 95% of society does.
We're the oddballs and quite frankly it is up to us to organize to make sure our field does well.
There are lots of way. Both doctors and lawyers have professional programs with training built in. You can't do surgery without being a professional licensed doctor with know how and proper training. Yet any nitwit can be hired to operate a router.
There will always be a trade off in these areas. Yet I guarantee the same people ranting how ignorant businesses are... are the same people who rant against professional systems.
That's fine and nice as long as you're 20something. When you reach 30something and continue this path of life, burnout is waiting at the end for you.
No matter what angle you look at it, training time multiplies when you do not have a teacher. Plus, from time to time, even programmers might want to do something other than code.
I know what you're talking about. I've been there. My evening hours and weekends were filled with learning about new exploits and my vacations took me to developer conferences. Since 2002 I didn't have a "vacation" that wasn't in a hotel with a few conference rooms and internet connection. In 2009, my world imploded.
It works for a while. But sooner or later your body will tell you that this ain't the way it wants to work. Odd as it may seem at 20something, vacation means time without a computer. Yes, I can hear you gasp and if you told me during the last decade I'd have told you that you're talking out of your ass if you think I could relax without my beloved machines. Somehow, this changes when you hit the 30s, it seems.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Depending on what you're looking for, you might work EXACTLY for that kind of company. If you look for a nice way to slack off, that's the place to go.
Here is why: A company that relies heavily on flashy paper telling about your expertises instead of relying on your previous work will do so in all areas. Not only in yours. So you will have a boss who got his job based on his certs, who in turn has a superior who came due to his certs and so on. And somewhere in that chain, you'll have the mouth breather mentioned earlier in this thread who can't get his act together. Which in turn will mean that he will not be able to use you properly, resulting in a lot of idle time.
And since their network security guys will be hired by the same measure, it should be trivial to dig a tunnel through their filter and read /. all day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I simply explain that if I don't get support for professional development (training, professional / academic conferences - not trade shows, resources such as books, etc.) that I'm going to spend my personal time and money by joining a gun club and practice that instead.
I would like to know how you imploded and how did you cope? Did any health problems creep up on you like RSI or carpal syndrome?
I feel as if I am on a treadmill (the prisoner of hype is so true!) that won't ever stop or get easier. My knowledge may be obsolete in so many years time but not my skills or experience. Humans generally like stability, curiosity and exploration. Unfortunately we all jump from one technology to another without really thinking about it.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
rhymes with telekinesis?
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/