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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged.

That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like they are “Working” even though I explain to them that as long as its work/business related I will expect to be able to call upon them in the future with this new knowledge.

So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning?

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It's because when annual reviews happen they aren't talking about the books they read they're talking about a project that they contributed to.

In my experience formalizing "learning" in the work place doesn't work because it requires the performance of learning for management types rather than real learning which involves working through real new problems over an extended period of time.

The real way to get employees to learn is to hand them responsibilities they are not fully prepared for along with the pay that goes with them and see how it goes. Right or wrong managers are rarely comfortable doing that.

Employees need to be comfortable failing in front of you and few are because there are few good examples of that turning out well. When it does go well, all too often the raise they were promised doesn't come through.

this isn't to say you're a poor manager, just that it's unusual to have a healthy environment for on the job learning.

I agree, I personally have similar problems with formalised learning. Nothing sticks until I use the knowledge practically, and toy projects don't seem to count. Solving a real issue is the perfect time to learn (especially if someone else is around who can mentor or verify the result).

At least one big company I know of, learning is part of performance reviews - agreed upon in advance by the manager and engineer. It didn't usually help (at least AFAIK). Part the fault of the engineers and rest the culture of the team to always be fighting fires.

I don't know the exact situation you're talking about, but my guess is that this is exactly the type of formal "learning" I would argue does not work.

This is spot on. Thank you.

Part of it is just people - I had a co-worker once that their supervisor (remote) did the same thing, bought training courses for them, instructed them to make it part of their schedule to do the courses and learn more, assigned another developer to try to mentor, etc. But this person was also overloaded by said supervisor with day-to-day operational work and felt responsibility to accomplish that work at the expense of their own personal development. [and had personal life situations that they could not easily spend extra time outside of the time they were in the office] They sat next to me for a few months, and so once on whatever afternoon that they had blocked off on their calendar for training, I physically went over to their desk while they were gone, unplugged their phone, and when they came back, reminded them this was their training time and they needed to spend the time the company was giving them on it. They did that day, but then got some flak from another non-co-located employee for not getting enough operational tasks done, and I don't think did much training again after that.

If the entire org doesn't encourage learning, grant the time for it to happen, and protect employees from operational reprecussions of spending time learning, it is hard for individual employees to make it happen.

Reduce pressure. When I don't have 7 customer deadlines I'm much more inclined to spend the hour daily I'm meant to on training.

Reward learning with career advancement.

Send your people on relevant training courses out of the office as often as is useful/practical.

Oh and if you have timesheets make sure you can "bill" to training!

I think scrum, jira, backlogs and always tight deadlines condition people to never sit back and systematically learn something. Instead you feel the urge to always “produce” and feel guilty if you don’t. At least his happened to me. Lately I am making a conscious effort to work from home for a day and take a Udemy class or read a book about something where I feel i don’t have enough background in. The modern frenetic workplace discourages sitting down and systematically learning something.

So as manager take a look and see if your environment makes people into ticket closing machines or into people who have the freedom to allocate their time where they feel it’s most useful.

In theory, scrum is supposed to provide intentional non-ticket time after retro and before the next ipm/scrum meeting. That time can and should be used for learning, hacking, contributing, etc.

Reality of course differs.

The first rule of software methodology: no matter what the methodology proposes, professional “managers” will turn it into a micromanaged waterfall process.

I was so stoked when I read about that part of scrum back in 2006. Not once has it materialized since.

Are there still places left that don't do scrum? Hopeless to put "I am working for a workplace that does not practice scrum/sprints" in my cover letter?

Actually almost nobody does Scrum. They use some artifacts from Scrum but leave out the important parts.

It’s actually way, way worse than that. Nobody does Scrum and everybody seems to be getting into SAFe.

https://www.scaledagile.com/safe-5-preview/

Probably Parkinson’s Law in action.

You are providing the “option” but not literally scheduling the time. Employees need cover otherwise you are “learning” but nervous something will “slip” because “Learning” isn’t business critical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

>I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things

Does this apply to skills that might be more applicable to another team?

My current manager encourages learning, but shoos me away from topics that are handled by other managers. Frustratingly, he's blocked transitions of mine to other teams with work that I've found interesting and educated myself on.

How do you prioritize learning, and balance it against your interests as a manager to keep your resources focused on your objectives?

You can't, and you shouldn't. Your "resources" (what a derogatory way to refer to people, by the way) will be more valuable, more competent, if they know more than just that what's needed for your team's direct focus.

Being able to place your own work in broader context is very powerful.

>Your "resources" (what a derogatory way to refer to people, by the way) will be more valuable, more competent, if they know more than just that what's needed for your team's direct focus.

Would that I could safely direct your ire to my manager.

You mean to your management resource? :)

The second a manager blocks a transition it’s time to leave the company.

> So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning?

Be seen doing it yourself.

Several companies that friends of mine work at institute a 10% personal project time policy. Where 10% of their week is devoted to personal projects. They pick any topic of interest related to programing, learn something new, and when they are done they show the project to the team to present what they've learned. I don't think they have a time limit per se. Some people I know have done work with the raspberry pi, or learned a new framework, or implemented something they were doing at work in a different language. Leaving it open ended allowed for people to pick something that was of interest to them.

The problem with this approach I think is you get more buy-in, but might be arguably less directly applicable to work.

> ...might be arguably less directly applicable to work.

Why is this a problem?

IC continuing education isn't (primarily) about having them finish reading the RFC even though they've already gleaned what they needed for their immediate problem. Rather, it's about drawing in whole new areas of knowledge. It's about keeping your deck stacked with wildcards so when you get blocked by something hard, not covered by your standard 'best-practices' you have enough diversity of experience to actually have a hope in hell of having something to draw upon for inspiration on how to solve it.

>Why is this a problem?

I don't see it as a problem; my boss sees it as a problem. I've tried reasoning, but without that direct connection of "what am I paying you for" it just falls of deaf ears.

Put it in expectations, quantify it, and reward it at performance reviews. In a self-review, I should be able to write that I took Andrew Ng's Coursera ML course and be rewarded for how that makes me a more valuable team member. On the employee end, I should be able to explain what I learned, how it increases my value to the team, and how I've applied or will apply it.

Too often, companies "expect" their employees to take advantage of the fact that they allow them to learn on the job, but only reward short-term performance.

As an employee I’ve felt like it’s hard in the past to take initiative and do things that aren’t immediately and clearly justifiable as strictly necessary work. Reading a book might or might not be useful but doing something boring but mandatory is certainly not slacking. With that said any time I tried to take more initiative and take more risks (while making a sincere effort to work on the thing that’s going to move the group/project forward) and then just accept correction if I make the wrong call, usually work was more enjoyable and I was more productive (by estimation of me, other coworkers, and my manager).

I recommend making it part of regular cadence. Every Friday or every other Friday (or part of the day). You can encourage them to share learnings or summaries with the teams. These days can also be used to attempt to apply learnings in ways that improve the team or org. These don't need to be formal courses or books either: it can be exploring and learning systems at work, or understanding system telemetry or customer use cases better.

> So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning?

Maybe instead of having them read something, make them give a presentation on it to the rest of the team?

Then they have deadlines and produce content. Sounds just like work to me.

If you want your reports to learn on the job:

1. Make it part of their annual goals (e.g. attend a conference, get a certification, compete in a competition).

2. Throw them in the deep end, a little beyond their edge, and be okay if they fumble around a bit.

3. Make them teach. Give them stuff to understand and present to your team or other teams. That forcing function will give them a mechanism to immediately exercise their newfound knowledge/skill.

4. Make room in your project schedules for it. They'll learn on their own if they have the time, or they'll invent something. The ones that don't are your bottom tier.

My first boss sent me to Siggraph my first year to drink from the fire hose. He also asked me, on my first day, what I was worst at of all the areas of programming I was aware of (Windows UI) and assigned me three months of work writing custom controls... I did it in six months, and I've never been able to thank him enough for teaching me, right off the bat, that your people are your greatest investment, that optimizing for the project is rarely the right choice.

Decrease expectations in other areas? If it takes me 8 hours a day to do all the work you expect, and you say “oh it’s fine if you spend time learning”, am I supposed to stay for 9 hours a day to do the learning?

If you are actually paying them to learn, which is the key issue here, then they shouldn't complain and i'd have a hard time believing they would.

So the solution is to make it clear you pay them to learn.

Tie it to deliverables, like reporting back to the team about the content or giving seminar style talks.

> Tie it to deliverables

That's a great idea in theory because tackling a real world problem tends to motivate towards a real world solution.

However, learning invariably encompasses failure which rarely measures up well with typical (if arguably useful/useless) performance metrics that developers contend with.

If the deliverable is a team report, then failures are super useful and still count. "I tried implementing X as a test after reading about method Y, but found that for our domain there are serious drawbacks."

I wholeheartedly agree with that outcome.

I was referring to the potential for a metric that could backfire in the context of a performance review. (And that'd be a relatively tame surprise in one of those god-forsaken events...)

I've just had a preliminary conversation about people's next set of objectives.

Training is on there (with a 5% of time budget for it), and if they don't achieve their objectives, their next appraisal will go badly. Pay rises and promotions and so on depend on good appraisals, and I anticipate some quarterly review meetings in which I tell people that they're on track to do badly because they're not meeting their training objectives.

If having their training objectives written in black and white, and being reviewed quarterly and appraised annually on whether or not they're meeting their objectives doesn't make it "okay", well, I guess I'll have to come up with something else, but I sure hope that will make it clear.

For me and my people, learning never works when it is a task independent of actual work, meaning I only learn something new when I see a place I can use it.

Learning must be optional, never required. And must have incentive: I learn programming because it makes my work faster. But if I can't use my program, I feel like I wasted my time.

Learning should tell me that I am increasing my value.

I can never learn new stuff just because I am supposed to. Nor will anyone suffer a book if there is no IMMEDIATE benefit.

I empathize and don't have any clear solution. One thing that has helped is actually setting a schedule and following up on it. If Tuesday mornings have two hours booked then you can actually just ask if that was followed any time you follow up with that person. It sort of hacks the categories by turning those moments into clearly work tasks with boxes that need to be ticked.

Can and have seen agile teams just create user stories for this. With estimates and acceptance criteria (yes having your people pass a quiz can be acceptance criteria). They even did an end of sprint demo where they had to present (without a deck) on the concepts of what they learned and answer questions.

I'm at a new place; the managers there did it by picking particular topics and instituting a group learning time (blocked off everyone's calendar for the time, let people select one of two topics, are soliciting new topics for future versions). It's working reasonably well.

Check out my comment re: learning spikes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763789

Having an actual story to back the learning process might help making employees feel more comfortable with it.

You give them a stack in the companies long term success.

Once the goals align, it will become clear to everyone that employees must both have deep understanding of the current company and an eye towards the future.

Make sure they have time to do it. If they feel like they have a lot on their plate or a higher-up breathing down their neck, then new learning will not be a priority.

Hire me. I love to get paid to watch MIT lectures that will benefit my work.

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