I Like My IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid 235
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."
Article was written like crap (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The death of Middle Management (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
It's a game theory problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
As usual, it depends (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:yeah okay (Score:4, Interesting)
When was the last time you didn't know more about new trends than your prof?
Why the hell would an undergrad prof be teaching new trends? And yes, the prof usually knows a lot more than me in the area he teaches, that's why he's the prof and I go to his class. Meanwhile, training is focused on something small, like SVN or a dev methodology. No profs anywhere.
Re:Most developer training is useless. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's also worth pointing out that while the summary, and to a certain extent the article, focuses on traditional "become a certified Share Point guru" sorts of training; there's a strong undercurrent of people "training" in the sense of just being given on the clock time to learn stuff and play with tech. At least one company is specifically mentioned as having a policy similar to Google's "20%" where they expect their tech employees to spend 20% of their time (on the clock) learning, working on personal projects, and generally unwinding. This company has seem efficiency gains rather than loses since implementing the policy. The majority of the article does focus on the kind of training that a lot of slashdotters consider useless (I don't entirely agree, but I can see the point), but there's definitely kernels of wisdom floating around in there too.
Re:Article was written like crap (Score:4, Interesting)
hahaha sounds so familiar.
It's the new way of running business. Owner hired an operations manager with those beliefs, hired tons of useless, extremely high paid people, fired everyone who was competent as he saw them as useless as their pay was lower. fired my boss because he believed they could do better by hiring an ITT tech graduate. They added a new role and hired a consultant from Las Vegas who had no experience with server 2003 let alone 2008, ignored everything I said, treated me as if I had no idea what I was doing. Then when I quit, they hired an ITT tech graduate.
a year and a half later, their network is in shambles, the turnover rate is about 1 month, the people in the lowest parts of the company get paid MINIMUM wage, and they've got five lawsuits on their hands now (why he hired the operations manager in the first place, to avoid this) because they hired unqualified employees because qualified employees they'd have to pay more than minimum wage. So after these employees let a few people die on their watch (this was an adult care company) shit got worse.
All of this to cut costs! but they ended up spending so much more money going with cloud computing and overpaid lofty bullshit positions where those people just look at porn all day and take vacations every 2 weeks.
Bonus! They cancelled all water services because "buying water jugs for the office coolers was just too expensive" instead they bought $1000 pallets of water bottles to distribute amongst all the locations, and were shocked that after a day that all the water bottles were used up. So they started buying $5,000 worth of pallets. week, tops.
Water service: $50 location at the most. less if they were leasing a filtration machine that just used tap water and filtered it (lol, doesnt filter anything.)
It's the new business mentality, driven by egotistical morons who do generous rounding in their heads and make up imaginary numbers to cut costs rather than sit down and analyze the costs, and spending where necessary and saving where necessary.
on an IT related note: The new IT guys quadrupled the IT spending budget after we left. We ran it, willingly, on a shoestring budget, and only got expensive stuff where necessary, and made sure it came with warranties. These idiots built custom built PCs, invested heavily in tens of thousands of dollars of cisco equipment that sat around, and a lot of it was unaccounted for after they were fired. What they did replace with cisco equipment broke the network badly, and rid of any cost effective solutions we implemented. Funny how fast your former employer begs for help when sending a file across a windows domain in the same office takes 45 minutes due to networking clusterfucks and improperly configured devices. Not that I helped them, I do not want to even go near that nightmare.
Yes, the only way to get up in the company after that was to leave, and that's what I did. I get paid a little less now, but I bring home more due to commission, and I am a lot better now than I was at that old company.
Re:Most developer training is useless. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been pretty impressed by the training my company has been able to put together lately.
Most of these guys are well respected in their fields, and while not exactly famous, are names I had seen more than once in connection with those topics. All of them spent some time looking at our company's needs specifically before doing the training in order to customize it for us. Our company isn't small, but not huge either. We have around 1600 employees, a few hundred of which took the training. It has really helped us revitalize a lot of our old school techniques. If a company our size can put a line up of training like that together, it ought to be within reach of most mid-size organizations.
Re:Mod parent up. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.