He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home.
Edit: clarified schedule to work schedule.
I actively picked up stories I wasn't familiar with, just to learn it. Other engineers pick up stories because they're already familiar with the subject, that's not how you learn new things.
It's always couched in some doublespeak about "ownership". Trust me, if I were owner or part-owner in the enterprise, I wouldn't mind. But I'm not.
People complain about entitlement attitudes among the young. They need to look at employers if they really want to see entitlement.
It sounds like your boss feels entitled to your time without taking an ownership stake in your professional development.
The hiring manager also spent some time whining about the state of the developer market and said they couldn't afford the higher end of the range they had posted on their website.
Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is valuable in certain situations. Companies love the idea of a "full stack engineer" because they believe they are getting two for the price of one. But in practice, and accounting for exceptions, that's not necessarily the case. A full-time FE with equal experience will be better at the front than a FE/BE and a full-time BE with equal experience will be better at the back than a FE/BE. This is the reality of having deep experience in a specific domain. As an attempt at an example, if you went to college and got an English minor and a CompSci minor you'd be capable in both areas but you would likely not be as knowledgeable as an English major nor a CompSci major within the respective domain.
This divide becomes much more visible when you see a FE/BE architect a solution versus a full time FE or BE. When fixing bugs and implementing straight-forward features a FE/BE has a handy skill set. But when you move past that point, deep experience within an area starts to show it's value.
This seems like it should be true abstractly, but concretely I've never met anyone with deep experience in a specific domain who didn't in the process gain enough experience in other domains to have basic competence in multiple domains. Not necessarily as much as specialists in those domains, but it's practically required to achieve the depths of experience in the domain you think they specialized in.
(Which is not usually the domain they thought they were specializing in.)
This is particularly relevant where there isn't a clean separation of concerns and the involved skills are highly transferable.
So in a world where your choices are 1) learn other tech within our toolbox or 2) learn stuff in your domain but outside of the scope of your current work... only one of those is okay to do much of on work time.
All those ES2018 features and CSS variables may be cool things a front-end engineer should be learning, but if we have to support older browsers then I don't get to use any of it.
Learning only the stuff that covers your immediate working needs isn't a winning strategy, neither for you nor for the company.
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. There are tons of strategies I know to solve problems that I never use because it confuses other people (and some of them confuse me too when I look at them six months later). That's experience. That's wisdom. You won't find that in a private github repository, and only those who already know what they're looking for will find it in a book.
Book learning ain't bad; in my experience, most of the developers I know would do well if they picked an actual book every now and then. It's not as good as hands-on experience, but still miles ahead of "learning" by StackOverflow-driven development. Experience is an important piece of the puzzle of wisdom, but it's not the whole thing. You need to also have understanding, and reading (and thinking about what you read) is a good way to acquire insight.
WRT. closing the loop, your users and peers aren't the only way to close a loop (and arguably, they can only provide certain kinds of feedback that are very context-specific). Trying things out for yourself is also a good way to close the loop through feedback from reality itself (e.g. whether something works, or how difficult you find it, are such pieces of feedback). On top of that, peer/customer feedback makes no sense for a lot of useful knowledge - for instance the new ES2018 and CSS features you've mentioned upthread.
I don't think this analogy works, because CompSci and English are pretty unrelated to each other as fields, whereas frontend and backend by definition work together to create a product. That makes a person experienced in both worth more when working on either, because they're more likely to have in mind the entire system when they do design decisions pertaining to their side of the network.
But in general, I think this is just a different mindset, I love being able to be independent, and complete a stories from FE to BE. I used to be in a position where I could only do FE work, and it really scared me. I had no clue where critical data was coming from, if something went wrong, I couldn't debug our APIs, I was in the dark constantly. Now if something goes wrong, I can switch over to our backend, debug, write extra test cases to cover the bug and push code. I also understand what BE engineers are talking about, and when designing a new feature, it's much easier to come up with new APIs.
In my team I’m just the only FE, so naturally most of that work falls on me. There are months where I only did BE stories.
My company not only encourage transitions, we actually "pay" for them. That means we will assign a senior developer that will have responsibility for growth of the new mentee and we purchase any educational materials the person requires.
We have quite decent amount of transitions within last few years and all were successful. They do require commitment and investment from both sides.
I do believe we are stronger for it as people appreciate the opportunity for growth and support we provide. We, on the other hand, re-gain skilled colleague that is not looking elsewhere.
They benefited and I also did, as it helped me evolve into a full-stack (web, mobile & server) developer. This was essential for me to transition into building my own company [1] at a later point, as I could build the product on my own both for web and mobile.
So half a day a month? That's pretty much nothing. Maybe time to work through a couple chapters of a book on some new topic.
Even if you were to justify your statement, it would be an ad hominem attack.
Imagine yourself trying to learn a real skill in that allocation of time.
If anything, you may even be reducing your tech employees' "professional development" with that metric, because I bet the average tech employee already spends greater than 4 hours per month on active learning with or without management actively allowing them.
Educational materials/courses are out there, it's all about you, wanting to smash it on the wall and work hard for the goal.
I'm extremely happy when my team members want to expand their horizons, it keeps them engaged in their work and makes the team as a whole stronger.
Your lead should have paired you with a backend developer and have had simple backend tickets assigned to you. This works really well in turning Windows developers into Web developers (together with some coaching).
I can understand your boss though: would you swap a competent employee for an incompetent one, paying the same amount? Probably not. Yes, you retain your knowledge about the front-end, but you wouldn't be using that.
My advice would be to work out the basics on your time and then ask somebody in the backend team to be involved, baby steps.
If you actually become useful for the backend team, they will advocate themselves for your switch, and bring you up to speed once there.
But this is the glass-half-empty boss. The glass-half-full boss is happy to have a competent employee who can be called upon when needed for important front-end stuff and is picking up backend work at a faster rate than the intern the team would have otherwise, because they're already an experienced engineer (with knowledge of the front-end no less!) and there is skill beyond just writing code that transfers between domains.
And that's to say nothing of swapping a competent employee who's already onboarded for an empty seat and a talent search, when the employee quits to expand their skills elsewhere.
Languages tend to be super easy.
Frameworks are a little bit of work.
Domain knowledge is hard.
When somebody says that to you, your responsibility is to either a) change jobs or b) learn during work time anyway.
Imho it's about 50/50, company should not expect employees getting new skills only on their own time and the employee should not expect learning only from 9 to 5.
Technically searching through the internet for examples, is already learning.
Companies should encourage people to learn stuff on the job, because no tutorials or classes can really teach you the day to day struggles.
Or, can I ask my employer to reimburse my under-graduate and graduate tuition?
It's a balancing act. If a company wants employees to keep learning, they need to invest in that. If I, as a salaried employee, am expected to be available outside of the explicit working hours for emergencies, then it's also fair that I be allowed to do things that are directed at my own career during work, bonus if it proves useful to the company.
Because both of us were interested in the other part of the work, we offered a solution that we could spend some time teaching each other. At the end, both of us would know both parts of the work, and be able to substitute for each other during the vacation.
"No, that would be a waste of time."
Nevertheless he should give a more encouraging answer as a team lead. And if you still want to make the change (looks like you are not very interested in it too), maybe just ask to spend a little more time on server stuffs and see what's the reply.
It's all negotiation and sometimes it's difficult to ask the right question.
I thought this was a new battery technology and had to google it.
https://hr.toolbox.com/articles/hr-hipos-identifying-hipos-h...
--
"Get your brokers license"
ok provide me with a course
"well, we've got a limited number of people that can do it at a time"
ok so make the material available to me for learning at home and I'll do it on my own time
"We appreciate your feedback. You could purchase a course on your own, with your own money, and study on your own at home"
-- This is an actual event, with the person parroting the 'we value degrees' line being the head of HR for our opco at the time, on the phone with me cutting me off every time I started to say anything, with me at one point saying a vulgarity and "would you give me some respect and allow me to finish a sentence":
applies to position above me that finally opened up and interviews
"We just wanted to let you know we went with another candidate, we suggest you get a bachelors degree and then an MBA if you'd like to move up"
at entry level position for 13 and a half years I don't want a degree, what sort of a degree
"Oh business is good"
How would a business degree benefit me in any role in this office, at all?
"We prioritize education"
I don't want to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to make an extra 10% so that would mean I could pay the loans off in a decade from the raise
"With tuition reimbursement you could get a degree in as little as 6 years"
In 6 years I'll be 40 and you'll give the job to a 22 year old that's been here 6 months, why don't you create some sort of system for advancement internally that is equal to degree work
"We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really work on a 4 year degree and then an MBA"
Why
"We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really..."
That's classism
"We prioritize..."
I don't want your defacto dues card, I guess I'll just keep working for people above me that have been at the company a fraction of the time that I have because they have a 4-year degree in Artisan Baking Social Media Marketing with their minor in Mayan Whittling from 2000BC to 1990BC.
--
Sigh. There isn't even a degree in what I do, and the university my employer has partnered with only has one degree you can do, some random super-specific business degree that has literally nothing to do with what I do.
Even if I wanted to get a degree, by the time I do 8 hours of this work my brain is shot. Processing large amounts of data, with all sorts of legal and fiscal ramifications, while being under pressure to not only meet but exceed production... yeah do that all day and the last thing you want to do is go home and study/research/write papers that have to be in some asinine format scheme or you fail outright.
Then even if they did come up with some way to teach us on the job, it wouldn't even work because due to the nature of the job if someone leaves it can take 6-12 months to replace their processing capacity and business volume grows so we're always chugging along with no downtime and we hot bunk desks so when your shift is up, someone else will be along in a couple of hours to sit down and keep going.
Lots of companies blow smoke about a lot of shit, especially after a merger. What they actually value is what they're willing to invest in. If an initiative has no funding, it's not an initiative.
E.g. look at any PG essay that tried to talk about broader philosophical or political issues and you'll see this limitation. His frame of reference is stuck in a recent enlightenment framing of the world. Granted, PG is indeed a great communicator in technical fields.
The question is if that cost an individual occurs if they choose not to spend their free time on career-related skills is ethical or good for society.
While by contrast, there are some people who want to kick back and simply collect a pay check, there is a whole segment of people in the middle ground who are hungry to learn, but are stretched so thin that they can’t outside of work — a whole segment that isn’t being catered for, and therefore an opportunity exists to tap into this.
At my university engineers were offered two elective courses in the faculty of arts or sciences. That's not a particularly broad education.
The good news is, you can do it without going back to school. IMO an SE will get little benefit out of going back for another degree. You'll get much more ROI spending your time contributing to OSS projects and making a name for yourself.
Sure, CS or STEM courses are probably really solid to pair with a non-CS major because it teaches you stuff that helps extend your abilities in your own field. So I can see why my friend that was going to school to be a nurse might have wanted to take a CS course or two instead of minoring in sociology.
Edit: Let me state it a different way that might shed more light on my point. A CS major can pass all of his/her classes with a perfect GPA and still be incapable of writing software ready for a production system (even at small scale).
The STEM degrees emphasize fundamentals that are rarely (if ever) used in day-to-day "real jobs".
Sure
> and what it means to live a good life
That's just self-aggrandizing bullshit. There is no class that will tell you what it means to live a good life. Anyone who thinks so is dearly lacking perspective.
>an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
An exclusive focus on STEM will include the philosophy of science and what it means to seek truths about the physical world. IMO that has immensely more value in a philosophical sense than you seem to imply.
STEM at best tells you how to do something, but can never tell you what to do, or why to do it. For that you need philosophy, much more than philosophy of science.
However, I guess non-technical/engineering degrees have different results.
By the time you are in a financially stable situation, old habits are ingrained.
Because nobody could read and copies the bible were sparse the catholic church was the single source of word of god. The printing press changed things. The bible became widespread and people read the bible for themselves. With that came an important shift, that one's own interpretation of a text was a valid interpretation. Tons of important literary works became widespread. The middle class valued literacy and saw it as a ticket to wealth and began teaching their kids to read and write competitively at younger and younger ages. They invented the education system we have today; the entire idea of a sequential learning system based around books, and becoming an adult when you could read at a certain level (as opposed to the catholic belief that you were an adult when you were old enough to fight at age ten), that was also the enlightenment and romantic period. Protestantism came about because people valued individual interpretations of the bible, which the catholic church had serious qualms with since that was their entire claim to authority...
So the fact that you grew up in a family which valued literacy, which sent you to a university where you spent four years reading books, and then came out of that with your own valid and rational ideas about what those texts mean, and your rite of passage into adulthood is based on your ability to read and write at a university level, that is still very much framed in the values of the enlightenment.
A good book for you to check out is Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God", written by a secular historian debunking much of the above narrative.
The fact that many educated today take your narrative for unarguable fact also illustrates the problem. The 'enlightenment' narrative is ironically very self limiting.
As far as protestantism and the printing press being invented prior to the enlightenment, yeah. Without widespread use of both you don't get the enlightenment for reasons I mentioned previously. And neither were really new ideas, either. Ancient greece had the printing press, high rates of literacy and a belief in interpreting texts for yourself, but these ideas were lost during the dark ages.
At any rate, we are obviously referring to different things by the term 'enlightenment', definitely different historical epochs.
Based on what you're saying here, are you arguing for a kind of Scholasticism?
Finally, your criticism of a "radically egalitarian" view is somewhat perplexing to me. Would you mind expanding on that point?
And yes, a teleological philosophy like scholasticism makes the most sense if we are trying to figure out the best way to live. Otherwise we just end up with the specious word game philosophy that everyone hates
My experience of interacting with older, more stable 'intellectuals' who do not have a broad background of reading is an acquired indolence towards foreign ideas and older ideas, subsisting on a shallow 'tolerance' as a sign of their broad mindedness.
1. not going to find a good economic deal
2. not going to get any true value
3. not going to have fun
You're better to take a 2-year programming diploma or go into the trades if you want the highest short/midterm pay-off.
If you're playing a longer term strategic game and actually enjoy learning for the sake of growing (i.e. you do it on your own regardless) look at the career-long pay-off.
Now, if all companies made it part of their "offer" to train people "enough" (say, 1d/w), then you'd expect all the workforce to become more qualified, better in time and in age.
You could actually pay/recover the "investment" of training the equivalent of university/grad/postgrad/etc for all employees simply by the fact that everyone else would do it too (and it would certainly lower wages a bit for the early years of these newcomers, since they'd skip the idling 20's decade of many youths currently).
I don't know, it's clearly not something you could do overnight or even over a generation, it's likely to be deeper and more 'revolutionary' than that in people's minds; but mathematically, economically, it tends to make sense (we've done that for years with "guilds" and "companions" in the medieval ages and actually since forever in some trades).
I think the current mainstream / massive education (take hundreds, thousands, and grad them each year) is just the result / need of industrialization (requiring an educated workforce), a novelty of the late 19th and 20th century.
I think the cursor is moving and the explosion of alternative means and times/ages of learning is a strong indicator of that.
Some places require spending a certain percentage of payroll on training by law, failing which the employer must pay the difference to a government training fund. I live in the Canadian province of Quebec which is such a place. I think at least one major tech city in the US has a similar law, though I'm not sure.
Q: What happens if we provide education and training to our employees and they leave?
A: Well, what happens if we don't, and they stay?
Growing a company's knowledge and skill base is an investment, not charity. Companies that don't do it reap exactly what they sow -- they're the same companies whose CEOs will otherwise loudly complain about how difficult it is to find skilled employees, especially at a senior level, and decry the terrible state of universities. As if everyone else just stumbles upon people with twenty years of experience in a particular niche on the street.
Yes, some people will leave. The smart thing to do is to convince as many of them to stay and to stay on good terms with those who leave. Keeping a loyal employee base whose knowledge and skills remain largely unchanged after joining the company doesn't provide any kind of meaningful growth.
On a few educational systems, you have dedicated curriculums for technicians and artisans/craftmen, with theory in classes, practice in labs and internship on the job.
Even if learning on the job is a big part (roughly half of the training), it's not purely that.
The key (which I think you're making) is that once you're an apprentice you learn by doing and get paid.
For instance, my friend was a mechanical engineer at Total, and after 3 years left to go study ML 1 year. Not only was the school all paid for by this fund, but the now student got a decent share of his salary everymonth. Best of best, he can go work for another company after his degree without any problem.
I thought that was a great idea. Although in practice, not every one is eligible to this particular program. I forgot how its called, CIFRE maybe
this particular degree isnt paid for by the government like the rest french education. Although it is taught at a very famous engineering school in france
The thing you are thinking about is probably Compte Personnel de Formation (CPF) which was called Droit Individual à la Formation (DIF) a few years back.
Note that this is not some incredible sum of money, however a year in a classic STEM university costs a few hundred euros in France, so what you get from CPF is quite enough.
For five years of engineering school I spend about 3500 euros which included insurance. A full pension with private room costs a bit more than 300 euros per month. The difference with US education prices is just staggering.
When corporations start sponsoring degrees you will see a lot less "fluff" in those forms of higher education.
It's also a clever way for tech companies to externalize a lot of their R&D costs—because academic labs often rely on private grant funding more than the state, corporations can determine research priorities by extending grants, and then have the costs of that research partially subsidized by tuition-paying students!
This is an interesting talk on the subject. Haven't listened to it in a while but it really shaped my thinking about the university while I was a student: https://wearemany.org/a/2014/06/fall-of-faculty
1. Generally, education leads to productivity. 2. College education is typically tranferrable -- learning CS topics improves worker productivity regardless of who they work for. 3. Education is sticky to the individual; it can't be repo'd (or confiscated by fascists / nazis). 4. Employers generally try to match wages to productivity. Even if they pay as little as possible, in a fair market they will have to be prepared to bid close to worker productivity or lose out to a competitor who will.
Given these factors, I think the status quo is going to do a better job optimizing things than requiring employers to pay for training. When deciding who should bear the costs of training, it's appropriate to remember who the benefits accrue to. It's not only fair, but also ensures the incentives are aligned. When the topic is general and tranferable, the benefits of training largely accrue to the trainee.
Which is why I'm sitting in a training class about how our software works and code review culture, and not one about Python or Go.
I’m no longer in software and when I want to upgrade my skills, I’m doing it on my own time and my own dime. Often doubly so if I have to take time off work (hourly) for training.
Some people are more passionate about their jobs than others no matter the discipline.
I love my job but it's still just something I do to fund my actual dreams/passion. Why would I spend more time on it than I need to when I already feel like I don't have enough time for my own interests?
TBH I wouldn't expect any manager (especially it's just a lead, not even a mgr) to sacrifice for my own benefit. I thank them and provide material reward if they do, but I'm 100% with them (and study on my own, then leave the company) if they don't. It has to be mutually beneficial, or at least looks like. So my feeling is that both OP and his team leader are not good at communication.
1. learning outside of work for your own personal enjoyment;
2. learning for professional growth and;
3. for professional needs.
Category 2 is murky, I've definitely done a lot of studying on my own dime to improve myself or learn technologies I could apply on my day-to-day work but... When I could I did it on company's time, on this category I'm using my time for something that will have a direct return to the company, if I can get paid for it I'd always choose so.
Category 3 SHOULD NEVER be done on your own time.
This mentality of needing to use your own time to do any kind of professional development only fosters the race to the bottom, where you are required to use your own time to improve yourself because the company you work for is only interested in extracting maximum value out of your billable hours...
I agree that in the parent's comment case they could have used some of their free time to improve their backend skills and then try a lateral move in their job but it shouldn't make you "amazed" that someone isn't willing to sacrifice their free time to earn a little bit more of salary while their company extracts a higher multiple out of that same work.
If companies want efficient and capable workers, they have to be willing to train themselves. We are < 500 people and are currently building a training center just for that purpose (not software focused). Granted, a culture where job hopping is common, that can come at a steep price.
I've got better ways to spend my time for my career and life than learning things for the benefit of my current employer.
Time is the only thing you have in life, use it wisely and balanced.