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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.
When they'll do it themselves on their own time and their own dime?
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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.
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.
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.
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 only that, but training is different from experience.
Not only that, but people often muddy the issue by confusing the terms education (attending a class, studying to pass a cert test) with training (hands on, real-world experience).
To help clarify the difference, a colleague of mine once put it this way... if you are having trouble drawing a distinction between education and training: Just think of your teenage daughter and how you would feel if her school offered sex education vs. sex training...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
Aaaah, to be 23 again. Full of equal amounts of shit and confidence without the wisdom to know it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.
Wow, way to lose your best talent - Y'know, the ones that actually have options other than putting up with you, Mr. Bonaparte?
If you "DEMAND" that I learn CrappyLegacySystemX that I will never, ever see outside the present job, I'd do what it takes to learn it and make myself the best damned CLS-X coder you've ever had; but you can bet your ass I'd do it on company time, and we can take it up with the labor board if you expect me to learn externally-useless skills, unpaid (no, buying the goddamned books and tests doesn't count, you weasel). Or more realistically, you'd give me an ultimatum, and I'd laugh as you squirm when I call your bluff and leave for greener pastures.
If, however, you want to help me learn ThingI'veExpressedAnInterestIn, which oh by the way happens to translate directly into skills applicable to CLS-X, then we can talk. But don't think my off-the-clock time belongs to your whims except insofar as they first satisfy my own.
Good managers don't threaten and manipulate, they remove obstacles to their team getting the job done. And when the manager himself counts as the obstacle... The same rule still applies. Remove yourself, or explain steadily declining output to your own boss, when no one but C-student interns will put up with you.
Inventing distinctions that aren't part of the existing definitions of words, and then blaming other people by "confusing the issue" because they don't use your non-standard distinction between the words is, well, rather bizarre.
While certainly study of abstract theory can be distinguished to an extent from hands-on practice, "education" isn't limited to the former, and "training" isn't limited to the latter. And, really, even ignoring the semantics, the division is somewhat artificial for things like programming (or most active intellectual pursuits.) If you can't apply the theory in practice, you don't actually understand the theory, and if you don't understand the theory, you've got very limited practical scope, as well. Professional education -- or professional training -- involves theory and practical application together.