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Comment by siffland | Hacker News Reader

I work IT and have the same issues, coworkers dont want to learn new tools. This is a huge issue, if your employer wants you to learn a new peice of software, that is your job.

It annoys me here at work, i go home and watch videos, download demos and put the effort in (and it is noticed at work) and some of my coworkers dont and then get annoyed when they dont understand how the new software works. it is just frustrating, glad it is not just where i work.

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I don't want to watch videos and read books when I'm going home. I have a thing called life and actually love it. If a PM wants me to learn a new tool (I'm thinking especially of useless migrations to Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli, Rollup, Webpack ...) or the f*ing js framework of the day, I had to do it during my working hours. I'm with your coworkers.

The comment you responded to was not about "learning in billable hours" Vs "learning in your spare time" but about the willingness to learn at all.

Except they also explicitly talk about learning new tools on their own time. I'm not paid to learn new tools. I'm paid to write software. If someone on my team tries to convince everyone that some tool they learned on their own time is great and everyone needs to start using it yesterday, either the company needs to let everyone bill hours to learn the new tool or we're not using it.

The comment very much does come across as being mad at coworkers for not putting in time after-hours.

> I'm not paid to learn new tools. I'm paid to write software.

All fine, if your contract has the "I am a robot" clause or if you happen to write COBOL for a living. The rest of us will have to learn to stay up-to-date, just like carpenters, doctors or gardeners. Because nobody wants to hire someone who missed all progress since graduation...

Well, I write Java and C++ for a living. Maybe that's the same as COBOL if you're a front-end JavaScript developer? What, exactly is there for me to "stay up to date" on?

I'm not saying that you should never learn anything new. For example, I really hope that I have a chance to ditch C++ and Java both for Rust one day, but I can't just go and do it today and that's fine. Change does not need to happen at the pace that some people seems to think it does.

I cannot provide any examples for your languages of choice but mine (CL) is older and I do check out new libraries.

And yes, I would be pretty irritated to find anyone in my team who thinks there is nothing else for him/her to learn, even in their field of expertise.

Who said anything about "nothing else to learn". There's always lots to learn, or I wouldn't have a job anymore. That doesn't mean I spend any real time reading or using other peoples code. Most of the actually interesting work I do involves things for which there are no libraries. The less interesting thing (e.g. a REST service using Spring) do their job just fine and are so utterly boring I can't imagine why anyone would care enough to rewrite the whole service in some other framework.

I do go looking for libraries when I have a need for some functionality, but I don't seek out new libraries to replace other libraries or my own code when the existing solution works. It's the frequent rewriting of working code to use some new tool/framework/library just because it's new and sexy that I find problematic.

Have to agree with this. I'd rather spend only work hours on tech du-jour.

I spend plenty of my own time on math/CS/<techs that I'm personally interested in>, and I think companies benefit from those as they make me a better programmer - but most/all? companies don't really appreciate and never reward those efforts 'cause those aren't the latest fads <sigh>.

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