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Comment by clifanatic | Hacker News Reader

> no one’s going to stop you from spending time reading at work or spending time learning

What? You've lived a truly blessed life, Dan Luu. I've observed the opposite, pretty consistently. I've been working as a programmer for 25 years and I've found, across nine separate employers (and lost-track-of-how-many different supervisors) that spending any appreciable time reading (even a book about Angular when you're supposed to be learning Angular) will become a management issue. Everywhere I've ever worked has expected learning to be on your own time. Don't believe me? Put "read three chapters of a book" on a status report and see how many levels of management show up at your desk to micromanage your time.

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> Put "read three chapters of a book" on a status report and see how many levels of management show up at your desk to micromanage your time.

Try something like "reviewed industry publications for new paradigms and optimization techniques."

Yep, that's pretty much how I spin it. But make no mistake, I have to "spin" the fact that I'm reading about programming while working as a programmer.

Weird. I have found this to basically never be the case. Even some of the worst managers I've had have supported learning on the clock, through reading materials, tutorials, or otherwise. I've even had some jobs where learning time was a regularly slated part of my work week, and in some cases was allowed to take classes which cut into work a bit. My current employer has a library of technical books and educational material that any of us are free to rent and learn as we go.

Sounds nice. I brought up the concern that learning on the job was frowned upon and was told "that is just keeping yourself marketable, you do that on your own time".

Not sure why you're being down voted since places like this exist ... I know because I've worked at them.

OT: How are you able to tell I'm being downvoted?

It appears faded to other people

Bummer. I know that reality exists, it's just unfortunate. I wouldn't want to work for anyone who had that attitude if I had the option.

I have a love hate relationship with the place, it's rarely black and white. I get to work on really cool projects and stay in an incredibly low cost of living area.... but the internet access is awful and I don't get much time to improve myself.

A standing directive that I've got is "get your work done; other than that, I don't care how you spend your time". I regularly put something like "researched current code-signing best practice" into my status reports (and have for the past 8 years, when appropriate).

My time at home is mine. If I'm reading a technology book, it's usually something I'm curious about and don't have a direct use for in my professional life.

I'll consider myself very lucky then. At my firm we're strongly encouraged to take 4 hours per week to dedicate to learning something new or bettering our existing skill set. You simply let your team lead know your current objectives for the month and we're given access to pluralsight/codeschool etc. I honestly didn't know how much fun work could be while still being work until I started here.

Does the same hold true if you put replace "read three..." with "research"? Perhaps it's specific to my industry (data), but I spend a considerable amount of time reading about new techniques and approaches to make our codestack more efficient.

That's not my experience at least in a "DevOps" role. In fact a large portion of our time is spent reading/learning documentation, and random websites. Getting punished for learning on the job, would immediately lead to me looking for a new job.

>Put "read three chapters of a book" on a status report and see how many levels of management show up at your desk to micromanage your time.

Can't say I've ever had a problem with that in my two decades in the industry. Learning is expected and mandatory.

Awesome handle!

I'm quite surprised by this since most programming jobs will involve solving problems you don't know how to solve on a regular basis. Reading, whether it's books, blogs, Stack Overflow are ways to help you solve problems.

If you are a JavaScript programmer and spend the work day reading about Elixir; that is a problem. It likely doesn't apply to work so that should be on your own time.

> since most programming jobs will involve solving problems you don't know how to solve on a regular basis

Yes, you'd think that would be blindingly, painfully obvious to anybody with the cognitive ability to tie their own shoe laces. And it probably is, to everybody except the MBA "efficiency experts" that are taking over my profession.

You must have bad luck with employers I don't recall this being an issue at my employers.

At my first job (from high school) my first instruction was "go to company library get the book on fortran and learn it".

I guess. Nine in a row.

Places I've worked have had their own mini-libraries. I have some kind of documentation loaded up on at least one of my monitors at pretty much all times.

I don't spend significant amounts of time doing nothing but research however. The problem might not be "read three chapters of a book" on a status report, it might be having only that on a status report.

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