'Learning at Work is Work, and We Must Make Space For It' (mit.edu) 123
An anonymous reader shares a paper: The event was running over, the car was waiting, but the keynote speaker did not seem to mind. He was enjoying fielding questions from a large auditorium packed to the rafters with executives, aspiring entrepreneurs, and management students. "Get ready for an age in which we are all in tech," he had told them, "whether you work in the tech industry or not." The moderator called for one last question. "What's the best way to get ready?" a woman asked. "Be great at learning," he said without hesitation. "The moment you stop learning is the moment you begin to die." Calls for learning have long been common at corporate retreats, professional conferences, and similar gatherings. But with the furious pace of change that technology has brought to business and society, they have become more urgent.
Leaders in every sector seem to agree: Learning is an imperative, not a cliche. Without it, careers derail and companies fail. Talented people flock to employers that promise to invest in their development whether they will stay at the company or not. And companies spend heavily on it. By one estimate, in 2018, corporate outlays on learning and development initiatives topped $200 billion. Despite the lofty statements and steep investments, however, learning at work remains complicated. People are ambivalent about it, if not outright resistant. We want to learn, but we worry that we might not like what we learn. Or that learning will cost us too much. Or that we will have to give up cherished ideas. There is often some shame involved in learning something new as an adult, a mentor told me at the start of my career. What if, in the process, we're found lacking? What if we simply cannot pick up the knowledge and skills we need? I have spent two decades studying adult learning, helping companies design and deploy learning initiatives, and teaching and coaching thousands of high potentials and executives all over the world. And I have found that mentor's words to be wise: Nothing truly novel, nothing that matters, is ever learned with ease.
Leaders in every sector seem to agree: Learning is an imperative, not a cliche. Without it, careers derail and companies fail. Talented people flock to employers that promise to invest in their development whether they will stay at the company or not. And companies spend heavily on it. By one estimate, in 2018, corporate outlays on learning and development initiatives topped $200 billion. Despite the lofty statements and steep investments, however, learning at work remains complicated. People are ambivalent about it, if not outright resistant. We want to learn, but we worry that we might not like what we learn. Or that learning will cost us too much. Or that we will have to give up cherished ideas. There is often some shame involved in learning something new as an adult, a mentor told me at the start of my career. What if, in the process, we're found lacking? What if we simply cannot pick up the knowledge and skills we need? I have spent two decades studying adult learning, helping companies design and deploy learning initiatives, and teaching and coaching thousands of high potentials and executives all over the world. And I have found that mentor's words to be wise: Nothing truly novel, nothing that matters, is ever learned with ease.
Lack of workplace learning is a casualty of... (Score:5, Insightful)
..."business process re-engineering," i.e. imposing "more efficient" workflows on employees that reduce "unproductive time." It was that unproductive time, i.e. employees talking casually to each other, that provided the necessary familiarity, rapport, & trust for them to discuss difficult issues, solve problems, & learn how to do things better.
Corporate elearning is a poor substitute for a collegial, supportive working atmosphere where employees mentor each other. That's where the really useful workplace learning happens. If your employees aren't "wasting time" on idle chit-chat, you aren't gonna get the higher levels on-the-job learning that come with it.
And no. Social media & workplace communications platforms are no substitute for it either.
Re:Lack of workplace learning is a casualty of... (Score:5, Insightful)
Training is different and directed. It is what most places call learning. It is meant to create a uniform workforce that is not educated, just robots.
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Im voting you ceo, you get it.. Robots produce, humans don't. Look at no child left behind, we made robots for the big orgs.
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It really is because most learning, real learning, is exploratory.
That's still a common belief but not supported by the evidence. See: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s153... [doi.org]
tl;dr - There's 2 main principles to learning; (1) The randomness as genesis principle (i.e. learning by trial & error) & (2) The borrowing & reorganising principle (i.e. using prior knowledge as analogies to understand & solve novel problems). Randomness as genesis is incredibly inefficient, i.e. slow & unproductive. Borrowing & reorganising is more efficient but many people don't
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Leaders in every sector seem to agree: Learning is an imperative, not a cliche
is not true. If it were, when the choice came down to spending time to ship something or spending time learning, their organizations wouldn't choose ship 100 times out of 100.
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Most workplaces? You are cynical.
Back in mah day... (Score:3)
...I had to learn Unix administration at night by reading the DGUX System V admin manual until my eyes bled and my heart turned black as coal
Of course, I got myself into it by stepping up from a job doing AutoCAD on DOS to a GIS system (ArcINFO) that only ran on Unix.
The first day of my job, the manager showed me a pile of ArcINFO manuals and I told him I should have full understanding in a month (I was picking up new CAD systems in about a week).
It was probably 2-3 years later that I really had a grasp and was able to write complex INFO programs to process Dynamic Segmentation cursors
3 freaking years of no sleep and headaches, would have loved to be able to train on the job, in the office 9-5
Good luck kiddos
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Exploitation of the worker is a FEATURE of Capitalism, NOT a bug
FYI, it exists under other economic systems as well, just named differently
Too bad (Score:3)
A summary is supposed to SUMMARIZE! (Score:2)
Hey msmash.....
The entire first paragraph of this summary added zero value and shouldn't have been there at all.
The second paragraph could easily have been paraphrased down to 50% of its current bulk.
When our first reaction to the summary is TLDR you know there is a problem.
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Maybe you just have a comprehension problem
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Give her credit - she was able to post it without blaming global warming the patriarchy. I'm sure she was sweating profusely by the time she hit the post button.
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Give her credit - she was able to post it without blaming global warming the patriarchy. I'm sure she was sweating profusely by the time she hit the post button.
Doubtful. The entire summary was a verbatim copy of TFA.
Can't learn in just one shot (Score:3)
What I find facinating about learning something new is how when you're first learning, it literally feels like you're walking uphill into a strong wind, mentally. You have to push and push. Then you give up for the day, do something else and sleep on it. The next day when you try that new thing, however, whoosh! You zoom right past where you stopped last time until you get to some fresh information.
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Don't quote me on this, but I remember reading (hearing?) that the activity levels in the brain actually INCREASE when we sleep.
We make MORE connections when we "sleep on it" than when we keep hammering away mindlessly at something.
This is why when we come back "fresh", we're actually coming back with more concrete connections made in our brains, and so the solutions come more naturally to us in that sense.
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Also, the brain responds like a muscle, and become more capable due to use
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Easier said than done. (Score:3)
I worked in the training department of a major retailer in my region, and having time set aside for training, let alone learning, was quite difficult at both the store and main office levels. At the store level, employee hours are strictly controlled and paid time spent on training subtracted from hours available to work. It was always frustrating that employees were given an insufficient amount of training time to become familiar with a new task or procedures. At the main office, because almost everybody was salaried, making time for training was much easier. Over two years ago, my employer's parent company decided to eliminate all its divisions' training department and centralize training, so I was laid off. From what I've heard, the quality of employee training has gone down the toilet since then.
As for me and learning to improve my professional development, it was always difficult to make time to learn when I got home from an exhausting 1+ hour commute home. My employer did offer to cover education expenses as long as it was related to my work, so I can't blame my employer for not making learning affordable. No, the lack of learning on my part was more due to low energy and low ambition (I made enough to be quite comfortable). What I did learn during my time with my employer had nothing to with my specific career. I learned stock market investing and financial literacy, skills which can serve one well regardless of one's chosen line of work.
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If we are all in tech... (Score:5, Interesting)
...can we finally get rid of managers of tech who neither understand nor value what they're managing?
Re:If we are all in tech... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, but the c-levels will still bring in idiot management consultants who will spew buzzwords and promise the world, while extracting the money that SHOULD be spent training staff, whilst disparaging them and preparing list of people to be let go... all in hopes of bringing on contract workers from companies who give the management consultants kick-backs.
Having a manager who is business savvy enough to keep management consultants at bay pays off in the end
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Only if we can get rid of programmers who neither understand nor value what they're doing.
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As a result, I have been working for medical research non-profits for the past 16 years
As a moderately competent worker, I am able to choose which companies I am willing to work for
Many of my friends who work in the private sector make more money than I do, so that has to go into your decision as well.
Ah goody, the cult of work (Score:5, Informative)
In a society where if you don't work you don't eat, and where the amount of useful work that can be done by people without a bachelor's degree (and maybe soon a Masters) is diminishing every year this isn't necessarily metaphorical.
Moreover, people learn slower as they age. This is pretty damn well documented with a few well known outliers who are more like freaks of nature than the template for a workforce.
At any rate most companies stopped training when the H1-B gravy train started. Why spend money training your employees when you can just demand whatever credentials you want and Congress will dutifully go get them from overseas.
Right now there's two camps that have a chance of getting anything done: the "Stop all Immigration" one and the "America's a melting pot" one.
Both are missing the point. Birth rates continue to go down, so if you want a retirement we need immigrants. But the average American worker sees zero benefit from immigration instead seeing their wages suppressed (supply and demand is a bitch).
What we need is broad social programs that take the money those immigrants generate and make it work for everyone. Things like Single Payer Healthcare, tuition free colleges and federal jobs programs (e.g. the "New Deal" part of the "Green New Deal").
That would solve both problems. We'd have the immigrants and the money they bring so that your investments (and your retirement) stay afloat but the workers here today wouldn't get shafted by lowering wages (since we'd be using universal programs that make up the difference).
Right now the benefits of immigration just go to the top. As such you're going to see increasing hostility towards it, culminating in outright Xenophobia.
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In other words, higher taxes for *everybody*.
Re:Ah goody, the cult of work (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm good with higher taxes since I'd be receiving a huge amount of benefit from them. to live a life where healthcare malady's might not break me and my family? sign me up please.
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I'm good with higher taxes since I'd be receiving a huge amount of benefit from them. to live a life where healthcare malady's might not break me and my family? sign me up please.
So you're on board with it as long as somebody else is paying the bills.
Nice. It's always easy to spend somebody else's money.
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I don't mind paying taxes for an uplifting society for everyone. I don't mind requiring you to pay for it too if you're going to live in it.
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Almost as nice as dying in a cardboard box because you had to piss away the family fortune on a bunch of greedy docs to try and get cured from a cancer caused by unregulated toxic dumping into the watershed along which you built your 2-acre MacMansion in a gated community because you couldn't stand the sight of all those foreigners.
How about we come to an agreement on what truly is the common good and then fund that with our common resources rather than this every man for himself approach which won't work b
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Bootlicker stink, Sucker think. (Score:2)
The top 1% of wealth holders have 10million in assets.
The top 1% of income is only like 400k
What does this tell us? If I started making 400k a year and INVESTED MY ENTIRE PAYCHECK BEFORE TAXES in something pulling me a safe 6% a year: It would take me 15 years of saving my 1% income in order to just barely make it into the upper 1% of wealth.
Honestly I'd have a better chance of moving into the ruling class by convincing everyone I killed a dragon.
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Great, when you gonna stop driving on my fucking roads and using my goddamn safe electricity and clean water and pay for you own?
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I'm good with higher taxes since I'd be receiving a huge amount of benefit from them. to live a life where healthcare malady's might not break me and my family? sign me up please.
So you're on board with it as long as somebody else is paying the bills.
Nice. It's always easy to spend somebody else's money.
Taxpayer money for government spending comes directly out of OUR pockets , and NO WHERE else.
Since it's my(our) money, why not make sure no one ever has to worry about healthcare again? Oh your rich? You'd rather see a specialist in Australia? That's ok, you can still do that.
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I'm not rich yet I've always managed to have health insurance. And before Obamacare, it was affordable.
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Because Obamacare was a terrible compromise. It put all the burdens on the insurance company but with none of the responsibilities (where everyone truly has to have coverage). It is almost a proof of concept planning to fail and show why single-payer is needed to really improve things.
It doesn't matter that you've always managed to have health insurance. You're likely at least middle to upper-middle class. There's a huge majority of Americans where that money simply does not exist. Not because of reckl
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Since healthcare costs and insurance rates were going up year over year before Obamacare and continue to go up year over year after Obamacare, I'm not sure Obamacare is the line in the sand that you seem to think that it is.
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Yes, before Obamacare, fake health insurance designed to give them an out for any significant expense was affordable. Just like a gold nugget of 100% pure pyrite is very affordable right up to the point where you actually try to plate something with it.
It wasn't affordable (Score:2)
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I find it almost impossible that this hasn't been explained to him. It's gotten to the point I could script both sides of the conversation over and over. The only ones who don't get it are people who would rather die than embarrass themselves in front of their cult.
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Yeah obamacare was 10 years ago and it made it a lot harder for insurers to ditch costly members and pass the savings on to everyone who wasn't dying.
By aging 10 years alone your insurance should be much higher by now. Of course it went up instantly when all their favorite tricks for ditching you when you get cancer no longer work.
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Taxpayer money for government spending comes directly out of OUR pockets , and NO WHERE else.
Why do you bother using weasel words when nobody gives a fuck? Yes taxpayer money comes from taxpayers.
Taxpayers are both businesses and people. Taxes are not the only source of revenue for the government.
So depending on who "OUR" includes... yes taxes always come from tax payers.
On a side note I'd like to ask why you sound like a boomer on facebook and not like a 2000s era slashdot poster? Where were all you guys back when this was one of the busiest sites on the internet?
Guys like you didn't used to
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Most people would do well even with higher taxes since they would save $700-$1000/month in health insurance premiums and all of the nonsense about in-network vs. out of network vs well, the hospital is in-network and so were Drs. A, B, and C but Drs. D, E, and F are not so they'll bill you separately.
I guess you missed the part in GP's post where he said he would be OK with HIS taxes being higher in exchange. No doubt due to your haste to condemn government services and certainty that you're nigh invulnera
The only poors on slashdot are paid shills. (Score:2)
I realize that you're poor and the behaviors and attitudes of actual middle class people may be as confusing as the irrational fury of the gods to prehistoric men as their crops were washed away despite all their prayer and sacrifice.
So let me help you, pay close attention.
After paying my bills I have plenty of money left over and will happily pay more in taxes if it means dignified existence remerges as the standard of living for all Americans
With some exception slashdot posters are all wealthy. The onl
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I was poor until I stopped believing that a little more blood and sweat was all that separated me from a comfortable living now I'm rich and typing this to you in the middle of my work day before I head home early.
This is rich, but not in the way you mean.
If you're rich, what are you doing at work? If you're rich, why were you crying above about the difficulty in saving enough money to be in the 1%?
By the way, I've been coming to Slashdot since the late 20th century, and as far as I can tell the only thing that's really different here is the quality of the editing.
Also, nobody uses the term "boomers" as an implied insult except disaffected assholes. Grow up.
Wait, if the only poors are paid shills (Score:2)
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Some of us have suggested morals are harmful to society and we should all be focused on ethics.
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It's an ethical problem as well as a moral one.
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I've been toying with coed locker rooms as the morality-ethics-justice thought experiment.
Imagine a college that has coed locker rooms. You've got 20-year-old men and 18-year-old cheerleaders oggling each others's naked bodies. This is a moral crisis: it's uh...wrong...for...read your bible. Jesus said so. Sex is bad.
Is this unethical? ...who is harmed? Why would it be unethical? If people want to enter that kind of environment and get all grabassy and whatever else goes on, that's their prerogati
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Right now the benefits of immigration just go to the top.
Pretty much all benefits of anything go mostly or completely to the top these days. No surprise people are flocking to those with (apparently) simple recipes (that cannot actually accomplish anything for them). No, I am not only talking about the orange man here, but the whole political landscape.
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But the average American worker sees zero benefit from immigration instead seeing their wages suppressed (supply and demand is a bitch).
FALSE.
Long-run aggregate supply is independent of the price level. Birth rates swap off for immigrant labor. Immigrant labor, therefor, should not and does not impact price level and thus wages.
Minimum wage has been in-line with cost of living (or CPI-U inflation) since 1960. That's the problem: inflation is a zero adjustment.
You get new technology, you can make 20% more per person, what does that mean?
It means two things.
First, you've moved from producing what $20,000 buys to producing what $24
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But the average American worker sees zero benefit from immigration instead seeing their wages suppressed (supply and demand is a bitch).
FALSE.
Long-run aggregate supply is independent of the price level. Birth rates swap off for immigrant labor. Immigrant labor, therefor, should not and does not impact price level and thus wages.
Minimum wage has been in-line with cost of living (or CPI-U inflation) since 1960. That's the problem: inflation is a zero adjustment.
You get new technology, you can make 20% more per person, what does that mean?
It means two things.
First, you've moved from producing what $20,000 buys to producing what $24,000 buys on a per-person basis.
Second, it means inflation will raise a $20,000 paycheck to whatever buys what $20,000 used to buy.
The other $4,000 is distributed as buying power: as you go up from minimum wage, the impact grows. The middle-income wages rise faster than minimum wage, and the upper-income wages...well, those people are receiving a fraction of a large portion of all productivity, right? That's right: $20,000 becomes $24,000 for them; $20,000 becomes $21,000 for you; and $20,000 becomes $20,000 for the minimum wage worker.
It turns out the ratio between mean and minimum wage and the ratio between median income and minimum wage form continuous curves. These curves are disrupted by minimum wage raises, and so there is a trend along the peaks as the minimum wage is not adjusted for long terms (e.g. when we wait 10 years before raising it to catch up to inflation).
That means as minimum wage is raised to keep with cost-of-living, it falls as a portion of per-capita income or %GNI/C. As minimum wage falls as %GNI/C, the mean wage and median household income falls as %GNI/C.
We have all reaped the benefits of trade and immigration. The defect is in the government wagesetting policy [nordicmodelusa.org].
Source: I'm actually the guy who created structural wealth theory, and have discovered these relationships myself. It's hard to source new theory, but rather easy to point out that all the data is public and you can go check for yourself if you have Google Sheets. #Macroeconomistsrule #Microeconomistssuck
So what happens to the minimum wage worker when the wage isn't increased?
Is that when they have to climb through my window at night or while i'm at work and steal my shit so they can feed their kids? Or should they just get better jobs? or should they just die?
Since you have done extensive research on the matter I was curious whether you had an alternative solution to increasing the middle wage , or the three solutions i consider above.
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Is that when they have to climb through my window at night or while i'm at work and steal my shit so they can feed their kids? Or should they just get better jobs? or should they just die?
Greed hits at every income level. It's just that rich people get better prisons.
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Is that when they have to climb through my window at night or while i'm at work and steal my shit so they can feed their kids? Or should they just get better jobs? or should they just die?
Greed hits at every income level. It's just that rich people get better prisons.
When your kids are starving it's hard to call it greed.
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So what happens to the minimum wage worker when the wage isn't increased?
Is that when they have to climb through my window at night or while i'm at work and steal my shit so they can feed their kids? Or should they just get better jobs? or should they just die?
Basically, yes, all of the above happen. We've spent 50 years on a zero-increase minimum wage, and now we wonder why so many people are so poor when the distribution of labor purchase is ever-more-slanted toward low-wage inputs. If we'd indexed it to %GNI/C (at 2/3 GNI/C), it'd be $20.32/hr today--that means two working adults would be pulling in $85k and they wouldn't have to steal shit.
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Basically, yes, all of the above happen. We've spent 50 years on a zero-increase minimum wage, and now we wonder why so many people are so poor when the distribution of labor purchase is ever-more-slanted toward low-wage inputs. If we'd indexed it to %GNI/C (at 2/3 GNI/C), it'd be $20.32/hr today--that means two working adults would be pulling in $85k and they wouldn't have to steal shit.
It also means that middle income wages should also be adjusted, and they haven't been. The top 10% have taken all the increases for themselves.
Meanwhile you have the poor and middle class chanting for republican leaders. Because it's totally acceptable to feed them misinformation, and they don't know any better. And they would never listen to the people that actually want to fix the problem because they have been convinced that they are the enemy and there is absolutely no chance that they will even cons
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It also means that middle income wages should also be adjusted, and they haven't been.
Middle-income wages are naturally built by marginal utility. Basically, if you get $20/hr from a minimum-wage job, then you can put in effort to acquire skill, search for jobs, apply for jobs, and interview for these higher-paid, more-demanding positions; all of that is extra effort (it's easy to get hired by McDonalds; the hiring process for a concrete pourer is more-discerning because you can fuck concrete up to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if you do it wrong, and thus just going
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Trump and Sanders are doing this. Trump is blaming democrats and labeling them socialists, while also attacking foreign trade partners and immigrants. Sanders is blaming the rich and foreign trade partners (he also claims if we had open borders we'd have an influx of poor people and it would collapse our economy).
trump and Sanders are at extreme ends of the spectrum. And not necessarily even extreme ends of the parties to which they belong. The behavior and actions of trump today would have made republicans of even just 10 years gouge their eyeballs out. And open borders is absurd for a number of reasons. Would I be happy to pay a couple extra percent on top of the current 1.45% for medicare if it meant no American would ever have to worry about healthcare again? I sure as hell would. But that doesn't mean I w
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Would I be happy to pay a couple extra percent on top of the current 1.45% for medicare if it meant no American would ever have to worry about healthcare again?
It's like 12% for medicare-for-all (single-payer), and 1.25% for an Australian-style multi-payer system [nordicmodelusa.org].
open borders is absurd for a number of reasons
In a sense, open borders is the only possible policy.
All forms of immigration slow down when the availability of jobs and income slows down. Population is self-limiting: it responds to access to resources, and this response occurs with both immigration and fertility decisions.
When unemployment increases, population growth slows. Birth rates tend to fall where there is a low infant mortality rate;
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It's like 12% for medicare-for-all (single-payer), and 1.25% for an Australian-style multi-payer system [nordicmodelusa.org]
.
What percentage of the average U.S. worker's wage is currently going to healthcare each year?
In a sense, open borders is the only possible policy.
Open borders introduce greater security concerns. I personally would never travel to the U.K. or Russia and expect to illegally take up residence.
Utopian society? Yes! Evolutionary change in global politics/law? Absolutely not.
It's absurd to think immigrants would destroy our nation.
I completely agree, I think a very large majority of immigrants desperately want to contribute to a functioning society. Ultimately we should figure out a method of allowing those with good
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What percentage of the average U.S. worker's wage is currently going to healthcare each year?
18% of GDP. It's not a matter of wage: if we call it wage, we can say about nothing goes to healthcare. The cost gets to you somehow, though.
Open borders introduce greater security concerns.
If your argument is that we can somehow stop the drug smugglers, human traffickers, and foreign attackers from infiltrating by closing the borders...you live in a fantasy world. These people come from underground tunnels nobody can seem to detect (despite every non-expert claiming it's just so easy and dozens of contractors selling tunnel detection devices to bor
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This question ---> "What percentage of the average U.S. worker's wage is currently going to healthcare each year?"
Was posed because when people consider what percent they would be willing to accept as a payroll deduction for universal healthcare I do not think they are considering the percentage they are already paying between 1.45% in medicare and the amount withdrawn as healthcare premiums. For instance if I made $2000 a week and I paid 1.45% in medicare, and I paid $200 in insurance premiums or 10% t
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"If productivity and total per-capita income went up 150% and the top 1% saw income growth of 150%, then...where's the rest of the income growth?
There must be more income around if the upper 1% are in proportion. There's enough income for everyone to be in proportion...unless the bottom earners all stretched out. That's exactly what happened: the %GNI/C of low-wage workers fell, and the low-wage workforce got bigger. Middle wages also fell.
Imagine it as a ball of putty, pressed into a rectangular wedge. It'
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That still does not constitute a large portion of growth of the "pie" - unless I'm looking at it wrong.
Yeah. I'm saying we have a known value that the whole pie grew by 150%, and we have a subset of people who got 150% growth. That means there's some question of where in the hell the rest went.
It makes sense if you have more than proportional population growth, but some people have a reservation on proportional income growth: they take their chunk, and the rest have to divide up what's left. They'll have to divide it thinner.
In 1950-1970, the minimum wage was 67%-78% of the per-capita income. That mean
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useful work that can be done by people without a bachelor's degree (and maybe soon a Masters) is diminishing every year this isn't necessarily metaphorical
I'm not even sure what to say to this one, there are plenty of people that have little or no college education making the subjects being taught today.
Learning on the Job (Score:3)
Over qualified (Score:3)
Managers in tech do not want to employ anyone who knows what they are doing, because it will show up how ignorant they are. Your only hope is to start your own Ponzi scheme^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H startup.
Learning Development with a purpose (Score:2)
No, you learn on your own time (Score:5, Funny)
Work time is for meetings, random interruptions from your boss and the occasional donut if you're lucky. If you have real skills you spend another 4 hours of your own time - this is when you /really/ get shit done.
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Funny but true. I will say that when I want to /really/ learn some new coding technique, I always do it on a personal project first, then apply it to the work project. There's just something about having 100% design ownership of a project, it's very liberating and I'm much more willing to take risks. Also, the projects are smaller.
Of course, none of this would be possible without git. Freedom to change is only possible in the absence of fear of destroying prior work. IMHO, git is Torvald's true gift to the
Re: No, you learn on your own time (Score:2)
I have exorcized all memory of version control prior to git as a self-preservation measure.
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Work time is for meetings, random interruptions from your boss and the occasional donut if you're lucky. If you have real skills you spend another 4 hours of your own time - this is when you /really/ get shit done.
I personally like to spend my time at work coding. It does wonders for my coding skills, much more than a doughnut or sitting in on a meeting where my input isn't required. The random interruptions from the boss I don't mind so much since he's usually just assigning more stuff for me to code.
No truer words were ever spoke (Score:3)
In my 35 years, I put the knowledge horizon at 4 years. i.e. If you stop learning completely new technologies, you are useless within 4 years. Everything you know is obsolete and you are good for maintenance and a fixed association with the career kiss of death: legacy. That means that fully one quarter of all my time working had to be spent learning. And I was able to get this time as a contractor by going unpaid for 3 months a year.
Its obvious that profit motive (especially the 4 year investment cycle ideal for startups, and near term profits for the rest of the corporate world) would tend to want to hire only people who can drop in and perform from demonstrable recent success.. but what happens to companies banking on this approach when the event horizon ends up being much longer? Moreover, in my experience, the few who do aggressively learn on their own and advance their skills in their job have trouble finding promotion and have to move to other organizations at a higher salary to capitalize on their personal investment. After a full skill replacement 5 times, I am also losing the maniacal motivation needed to do it on my own as I have.
(Has anybody experienced a skill horizon other than 4 years?)
Re:No truer words were ever spoke (Score:4, Interesting)
Some skills seem more durable -- I mean, IPv4 -- has it changed a ton? When I first learned it in the early 90s, stuff like NAT didn't exist for the most part, and I've had to sort out that but the concept was simple, it was the implementation that was complicated (every firewall wants to do NAT/PAT/etc differently).
And some things feel like it's not the *concept* that's difficult, it's the vendor implementation.
I often marvel at competing storage technologies which accomplish the same goal (ie, iSCSI LUNs delivered to host(s)) -- one vendor does it with absolutely transparent simplicity, the other makes it a voyage to bizarro world with a bunch of complex steps which don't even exist in the other vendor's scheme, yet appear to serve no useful purpose.
I feel like after 27 years in the IT field, I'm not really learning a lot new *conceptually* -- it's mostly vendor specific stuff, and often churn from specific vendors who feel like a totally overhauled (and ultimately worse) UI is necessary to make managers feel like they're getting something for their support contracts.
The part that really bugs me is how software products seem to be stripping out their user interfaces in favor of command line only approaches. This is fine, I guess, since it means you can script some functionality more easily, the downside is less transparency in what the task is supposed to be. Worse yet, some products seem to be even losing complete functional commands, you almost have to write a script from primitives because they're not even providing a comprehensive command for common tasks.
I'm so glad I'll be out eventually, I don't like this handbasket much anymore or where it seems to be headed.
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After 39 years in the mechanical engineering field, I feel like I'm learning new "conceptually" all the time. Vendor specific stuff can stuff it, that's not really important to my job for me to know that, other than getting the vendors to share their input on equipment specs I write.
Sometimes, looking back, I'm amazed at how much I didn't really know 10 years ago, and I'v
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There are fundamentals that don't change with a four year frequency. After working in tech at various levels for 25 years myself I have a better grasp of the big picture than younger techs.
At this point I don't need to know the technical details of every system that I run in my company. I need to know their features and weaknesses. I need specialists who can dig in to the details and keep them running. As for myself, I work on the strategic plan for multiple systems instead of being an expert at any one thi
Java has a long skill horizion for better or worse (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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I am being paid to learn. I hate it. I want to be given a task to do that I am not yet capable of achieving and be given the freedom to learn what I need to achieve the task as I am working on it. If something doesn't work the way I expect, and I spend two days doing research and pounding my head against the wall until I finally figure it out, I am focused and passionate about what I am doing and I retain the things that I learn during my research. If you as me to learn for the sake of learning, I will
Why real professions require PDHs (Score:2)
As a *REAL* engineer, my license requires me to report 16 hours of annual professional development. I'm mandated to make time for it.
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As a *REAL* engineer, my license requires me to report 16 hours of annual professional development. I'm mandated to make time for it.
Jesus, 16 hours seems woefully inadequate.
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Re: Why real professions require PDHs (Score:2)
... said the not-real engineer.
Scared of knowledge? (Score:2)
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It's part of a social cohesion response designed to protect identity. It also reduces energy expenditure, which increases survival. It's damaged and stupid but it's normal.
Fortunately, we can train it out of what amounts to a species of glorified monkeys. Maybe not the baboon in the oval office, but most of us.
Search engines/web (Score:2)
Increase slack time, reduce anxiety (Score:3)
Even in my comparatively tame workplace, the last few years have brought a crazy focus on "productivity." Especially in this new DevOps world, where managers can see every single employee's output on a real-time basis, there's less and less slack time. At the same time, job security has never been more in question. CxOs wonder aloud why they're not paying someone 40% less to do your job. There's constant pressure to "flatten the organization" and reduce headcount. Both of these factors contribute to a lot of the knowledge-hoarding I see in the IT space.
If you want employees to feel comfortable dedicating time to learning, you need to actively encourage it by reducing the cognitive load caused by their "real" job. Yes, this involves putting slack back in the system and not running departments on skeleton crews. Working your employees above capacity will work for you for a while but eventually it'll catch up with you. The newbies will figure out that it's not normal to live like this and find somewhere with a slower work pace, and a fair amount of your staff in general will just get sick of it and either shut down and stay on coasting, or leave.
If you want employees to learn and mentor, stop treating your workplace like The Hunger Games, invest in your people and eventually you'll see they won't just be disconnected mercenaries.
It shows most in Ageism (Score:2)
This is the cause of IT ageism. The only people allowed to have time to learn new things are unemployed college students. Companies constantly want to push out older employees and bring in new since that's the only way that the organization's knowledge grows.
They can argue that by hiring fresh graduates they can save money on salaries, but the time they spend reinventing the wheel and repeating the mistakes of the recent retirees, they would have been better just letting the staff continue learning during
Boss cheking on me to see if I'm reading (Score:2)
I worked for a while in a place where the boss made sure to be seated behind me. He was seated there to be able to look at my computer screen and make sure that I'm not reading anything.
I remember asking him how exactly he wanted me to implement something if I cannot read the spec first.
"You just do it" was his answer. I resigned shortly after that.
Sure, except companies don't support this at all. (Score:2)
I work in a software company where test cases consist of two sentences that in no way, shape or form tell you how to start, where to test, what to click, what the appropriate menu paths are, what the right parameters are or what to look for when you're done.
What I get is hand-waving, "fill out the fields appropriately" or "create a project in any appropriate projection." It's pure garbage. I spend hours and hours in research projects on tests I'll never see again because the company won't enforce the rule o
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Don't forget 'open work areas' that make it impossible to concentrate.
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Indeed. My productivity drops to half or less in these. Fortunately, I have been able to avoid them mostly so far.
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Because learning is hard for most young people and it becomes mostly impossible when people grow older.
I'm not really sure where you got that from... as we grow older it get's harder to sort through all the things we have learned but learning something new doesn't appear to be a problem.
Pride tends to keep people from learning and trying new things but if you work in tech being at the front of the next new thing is exactly what you do.
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as we grow older it get's harder to sort through all the things we have learned but learning something new doesn't appear to be a problem.
Learning is all about making connections. And having to do a full table scan to do a join takes exponentially longer when the database is larger.
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Pride tends to keep people from learning and trying new things but if you work in tech being at the front of the next new thing is exactly what you do.
Most decidedly not. The thing is I can now see better which new thing is actually worth investing time into and which is not. Hence there are some new things I am on board with and quite a few I deliberately ignore. (Of course, I know that I can acquire those skills pretty fast if I need to, it is probably the same for you.)
Most people, however, do not acquire skills with new things at all when they get older and it is not pride that is the problem. It is actual learning skills. The problem is that most peo
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For me, it's a mixed bag. I don't pick up new things as quickly as I used to. However, a lot of stuff is similar to stuff I already know, so I'm not starting from zero.
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Then you have time to learn.
Yes, and I am learning a great deal.