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As a physician, I attend conferences, subscribe to online references, question banks, various journals, take ongoing CME, repeat licensing exams, and spend the equivalent of one workday a week reading those new materials, and try to spend a couple hours refreshing myself on materials outside of my specialty. This amounts to an extra un-reimbursed workday a week, and several thousand dollars a year.

When I worked in a place that offered CME/conference reimbursement, it covered about 1-2K a year, depending on budgeting issues. In my current place, and for all independent or small practice physicians, that comes out of your own pocket.

This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.

I wouldn’t mind if it was at least partially reimbursed though. It’s an enormous chunk of change, and not for my benefit.

> This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.

Keeping abreast of changes in the field and state of the art offer no benefits and is done solely for patients' trust?

In medicine it's largely to college bribes from vendors.

They said no career benefits. They don't usually get a promotion for knowing about X or a salary raise so its effects are indirect if they don't actually use it regularly like say a dentist knowing about dental implant options.

That is a fair point and in that light the statement is far less jarring.

> This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.

That's what I said. It's surprising how many people chose to read into my post something that isn't there.

Goodhart's Law

May be what OP is referring to.

I have seen it in teaching. Teachers need xx hours of training per year. Training often satisfies that requirement but provides no significant benefits in terms of pedagogical improvement or content knowledge.

Teachers that want to improve do so by other means. The training keeps us in compliance.

I've known more than a few high school teachers who ended up with Masters or PhD degrees kind of by default via continuing education courses. That would seem to go against your "teachers that want to improve do so by other means" idea, unless I'm confused about the nature of continuing education requirements for teachers.

My assertion is that continuing education credits, or advanced degrees are far from a guarantee of improving a teacher's practice. Continuing education suffers from "box checking." There are a number of reasons for this.

It is in no way a knock on teachers. They are caught up in a bad system and are responding to systemic incentives.

If we apply an always/sometimes/never framework to my assertion, we can find examples where teachers advanced their practice via continuing education. So the teachers you know certainly could have advanced degrees, some even very helpful in improving their practice.

My experience in K-12 as well as studying the history of education reform in America since Sputnik was launched inform this assertion. It has been a recurring theme for 60 years.

Credentialism - I saw this word used today elsewhere and it sums up what I am trying to say

Does this surprise you? Interacting with my doctors has never given me the impression that they stay abreast of current literature, and their employment doesn't seem threatened by the deficit.

Medical literature has a pretty low SNR when you look at it from the point of view of "does this help my patients?" Also, PubMed is a thing that's roughly the medical equivalent of Stack Overflow, so you can do some of this "on the fly" to an extent.

Correct.

We don't gain or lose patients by it; the most recent changes in the field are often so far from settled clinical practice that they're years from anything that would be considered malpractice; we don't get reimbursed better or for it; patients largely can't tell the difference, so it doesn't change your referral stream.

It does little-to-nothing for our careers. We stay up out of pride, and out of commitment for providing our patients with good care.

Doctors around here don't do anything close and pay out of pocket. Most will take sponsored vacations paided for by drug companies for being the top subscription giver.

Same for dentists usually paided for by some whiting product they will push over the next year.

How would you compare your earning potential to a software developer's?

Doctors on average make more, but they also start their careers burdened with overwhelming debt (a few hundred thousand dollars) and work much longer hours than software developers.

Both my parents are doctors, and I'm a software developer. And you know what? I have it really, really good in comparison.

edit: I noticed that you phrased the question as "earnings potential" -- well, in that case, it's comparable. High-level engineers at FAANG make boatloads of money.

Good points. Doctors do appear to have good career longevity though (in the US). The practice my children go to has several doctors in their late sixties. The doctor who delivered my kids was close to seventy years old. So if you look at career earnings, doctors seem to be in a better spot, as they aren't worried about finding a job from ages 50-65. Is that your parents' experience with their colleagues?

In fairness the CME/conference circuit is basically a way for physicians to legally embezzle a free vacation. Many of those conferences are held at places like Jackson Hole, the Bahamas, etc, with relatively short amount of hours per day spent in talks and the rest skiing/relaxing/drinking etc on the hospital dime.

That's quite a workload you've set for yourself. I honestly don't know how my doctors do even the basic stuff I see them do, like seeing patients and charting. When you have to see 4+ patients in an hour (this is too many!), it would seem to me that charting would be one of the things that ends up going out the window.

I also find it interesting that you go so far as to repeat your licensing exams. Is this common among physicians as a whole? Having known a couple of med students personally, these exams were usually seen as a hurdle to be overcome and a source of stress, but, I suppose it might get easier after a few years of practice. On a related note, I find it hard to imagine that, say, lawyers would routinely re-sit the bar exam for funsies.

Regarding CME, isn't that required to maintain licensure? Or, are you talking about courses above and beyond the minimum to keep your license?

And, BTW, I don't know who you are, where you practice, or even what your specialty is, but you sound like the kind of person I'd like to have be my doctor.

Interesting how people interpret things so differently. A doctor who says that keeping abreast of their field has no benefit to them sounds like the kind of person I'd not want as my doctor.

I agree, but I also know how chronically overworked doctors are. That gives me a bit of sympathy toward the ones who don't want to basically work an extra day a week just to avoid falling behind.

They specified no career benefit. I'm almost certain they view increased trust from their patients as a benefit, and the extra confidence you gain from keeping up with the latest clinical science is hard to measure in terms of personal value but almost certainly comes out to $0 in financial terms (or negative if you value your free time).

> This does not have any career benefit whatsoever; it’s done so as to be worthy of our patients’ trust.

"I do it for my patients, not for my paycheck." If you have a problem with that, then by all means, I'm sure you can find another physician that would suit you better.

> Is this common among physicians as a whole?

Some of it is, some of it isn't. The worst doctor you know (okay, maybe not the worst, but close) is doing at least a couple of major journals and his CME. Really, you'd be surprised, but sitting on the other side of the exam table, believe me - it's the exception that doesn't try to stay fresh. That's really not what distinguishes bad from good from great doctors - it's finding a way to integrate and retain all that knowledge so you can apply it in an unexpected clinical scenario, rather than as watercooler talk or on an exam.

I don't re-sit step exams 1/2/3, but I do a lot of ongoing question banks to refresh my boards, and I do go back to refreshing material from step 1/2/3 all the time (which is what I meant about repeating licensing exams- I see now that phrasing was unclear.) You're right that it's largely a hurdle and a stress, but that's because as a med student you're drinking from a firehose and your career depends on it. Studying it at my leisure, I can dive into things as deep or as superficially as is interesting at the time, and the broader my knowledge gets the more insights I ultimately glean from going back to those fundamentals. Memorizing biochem pathways when studying for boards is hell; refreshing biochem at your leisure just to better understand and retain is... well, if not pleasant, it's certainly not hell.

CME is required to keep your license, but that's not a problem that I have - there are multiple sources of materials that grant CME credits that I already do "for fun", so I've got an over-abundance of credits. I hunt-and-seek interesting CME courses to stay abreast of interesting things. I went into medicine for love of medicine, and the idea of getting so narrow into my niche that I lose sight of all of those other exciting things would be a tragedy to me.

As much as I appreciate the praise, honestly, you'd be surprised by how much even your least-impressive physician puts into staying up to date. There's just so much to know that the moment you stop your knowledge base evaporates.

My anecdotal evidence does not match your anecdotal evidence. I'm approaching 50, and I've had about a dozen jobs in tech starting in my teens. I've never worked anywhere that didn't allow on-the-job time for learning, and the majority of my employers have both actively-encouraged it and financed it. I also learn on my own, for fun, as my career started as a hobby and still interests me, but the vast majority of my education has been paid for during normal work hours. I also actively seek out new and interesting technology when switching jobs, and I switch jobs when things stagnate. It's what you have to do in tech, regardless of your age. If you stay too long at a company that isn't advancing your career, you're going to go stale. This isn't specific to tech either. How many mechanics, lab technicians, chefs, marketing people, stock brokers, architects, lawyers, etc. could find a job today if they hadn't learned anything in 20 years?

No field reinvents itself as frequently as software.

That's only true if if you consider SWE as "learning a JS framework".

The core methods and principles of SWE are almost timeless, other things are well documented and can be learned on the go.

It's extremely difficult to communicate this to a team exclusively populated by those who do not have cross-language experience.

As an anecdote, and not to boast: I have occasionally had to write data visualization and function plotting software at least a half a dozen times in as many languages and frameworks, from QuickBasic as a teenage hobby, to C in DOS, Java (Swing and JavaFX), OpenGL, WebGL, JS with charting libraries, Linux raw framebuffer... Also tweaked MRTG charts back in the day, wrote a super basic 3D editor in highschool for games I never ended up making, etc.

A team I was on once had to add a simple chart to a webapp. When the task came up in meetings and was causing the dev assigned the task some grief, I mentioned that I've had to do some charting work before, and offered to help with any details if they got stuck. Instead of saying something like, "Ok, I'll let you know if I have any questions," they said, "Yeah, but was it D3?"

If by "anything" in the phrase "hadn't learned anything in 20 years," you mean things like legal principles, rather than specific new precedents and laws, I suspect a lawyer probably doesn't have to learn much after they clear the bar exam. If any lawyers read this, I'd love to be proven wrong. :)

I think you're underestimating how fast the law changes. In a lot of practice areas (I work in tax), there can be substantial changes every few years, and in between, daily work changes as everyone converges on optimal strategies, and then the law changes again. Then there's new software constantly, which you generally need to be familiar with or get left behind. Then there are the gimmicks of the day that your clients find on the internet that you need to be familiar with or risk looking like you don't keep up with best practices (even if the new stuff isn't anywhere near a best practice, or is only applicable to Fortune 500 cos.).

I would go so far as to say that a lawyer who just recently passed the bar exam is substantially worse at the practice of law than a paralegal with 20 years of experience. The legal principles learned in order to pass the bar exam are akin to... basic algorithms (maybe?) for a software engineer. They're important, but they're also not really what the job is on a daily basis.

> I've never worked anywhere that didn't allow on-the-job time for learning

I think the issue is more just that there aren't any clear ethical standards that have been set industrywide, and since developers tend to have limited oversight, at this point it's really just a matter of what standards you set for yourself.

IMHO for things you're learning that will materially benefit your career, a reasonable standard would be that for every hour you spend on your own time teaching yourself that thing, you can spend an hour of paid time. Whereas for things that only benefit your employer, e.g. niche libraries or outdated frameworks, that should happen entirely on the employers dime.

Nobody can argue what the next accounting rules are. Accounting practices are handed down from above and all accountants have to follow it.

Programming is not like that. If you ask 100 programmers what the new big thing is, you will get 100 different answers. I would much rather take responsibility for my own professional education than outsource it to a company that may not have my career best interests at heart.

>Nobody can argue what the next accounting rules are

This is just not accurate.

Accounting rules not only can be argued, they are all the time.

FASB and GAAP are rife with subjectivity.

I have an accounting degree.

True but the framework is standard, which is why there is no software engineering equivalent to GAAP. GASP?

I think a lot of this is because employee turnover in the software industry is much higher than for most professions.

An accountant, lawyer or architect can reasonably be expected to stay with the same firm for a decade or longer, often their entire career. It makes sense under that context for employers to invest more in long-term skills.

Whereas, once you get to the heart of Silicon Valley, it's not unusual for people to jump employers every 6 months. That's maybe not the rule. But even Google and Microsoft has turnover rates that imply a half-life of no more than a few years for the average employee. The economics of long-term re-training just doesn't make sense.

Is this the worse thing in the world though? It allows savvy workers to continuously jump around companies and continuously re-negotiating higher compensation packages. That helps to make sure that workers are paid at or near their market value. In a way that doesn't work in the accounting industry, because future employers would look down at your resume history.

That logic doesn't hold up. The overhead in learning your way around a Google or Microsoft-sized codebase is much larger than learning a new language or framework.

That's no surprise. Both of those companies have many individual codebases that are larger than any web framework. For instance, last I checked, Django clocked in at around 60-70k [0] Python LOC. The Windows kernel source, IIRC, is over 1M LOC, and, obviously, much lower level than Django.

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[0]: Also, IIRC, 20-30k of that is taken up by the ORM.

This is a good comment with a lot to unpack, but I want to raise a couple points here.

First, I wonder if firms investing in training could possibly improve turnover, thereby creating a bit of a positive feedback cycle. It doesn't even have to be formal training, either. It could be something as simple as having a weekly journal club, or the equivalent, and encouraging engineers to read at least one research paper a month. [0]

The second aspect, engineers moving jobs just to get raises, seems weird to me from a market efficiency point of view. Interviewing costs companies money -- so much so that it's something they should want to do as little as possible.

Many companies don't keep pace with the open market in terms of raises, which is a primary force driving people to job hop. Are there any studies comparing companies that do at least attempt to keep comp for current employees in line with the open market against those who don't?

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[0]: In my experience, reading research papers thoroughly can be a pretty thought intensive process. In grad school, where I studied math, what I would do is read the abstract, decide if it was interesting, then skim the section headings and statements of theorems to see if I wanted to go further. If I did, and I was searching for a particular widget I needed for a proof, then I would read as much as I needed to read to digest the proofs of the useful theorems. If it was for general interest, then I would read the whole thing. I found that once I got an interesting paper in my hands, fully comprehending what it said could take up to 1 day per page for particularly dense papers.

> Whereas, once you get to the heart of Silicon Valley, it's not unusual for people to jump employers every 6 months.

Unless you're serially hopping from one shitty startup to another, it's pretty unusual.

I managed a software development team, staffed with a number of folks that each had about 30 years experience. We were a fairly advanced team that wrote image processing pipelines in C++.

When they finally rolled up our team, after 27 years, the person with the least seniority had ten years.

It's entirely possible to keep folks for long periods of time, but it requires some pretty serious management chops, and those skills are not exactly encouraged, in today's world; in any field -not just software development.

I worked for a Japanese company. The Japanese wouldn't even acknowledge my employees until they'd been around for a year. Having the same people on hand, year after year, was pretty much required, as our projects always took the long view.

I can't even imagine having an environment where engineers are expected to quit every year and a half.

No matter how good the manager is, if he is beholden to an HR department that only gives slightly above COL raises while the market explodes, people will jump ship.

Says you.

Our HR was run by the Corporate General Counsel. It was pretty much as bad as you can get.

Also, we were paid "competitive" wages (read: below-market).

I was the manager for 25 years (I should mention that the engineer with the most seniority had 27 years -we started together), and I feel I did a pretty good job. Considering they did not "jump ship," I guess something went right, eh?

Nowadays, it seems that people "manage by fad," as opposed to managing humans. It's kind of heartbreaking, really.

Until they find out that while they were getting 3% raises and their salaries were well behind the developers who cane in after them that were paid at the market rate.

Wow. You really want to discount what happened. Why?

Just assume that we were all idiots, and go back to your happy place.

Yes. Anyone who is willing to work for less than market value while new people are coming in at market values aren’t “idiots” but they are unwise.

Did you tell them that “we are all family here”?

Well, I'm done engaging. It's fairly clear that we have incompatible worldviews, which is sad, because I'll bet we could find many things in common.

I sincerely wish you the best.

Did it ever cross your mind that there are more things than money which make a person stay at a company for a longer period?

For me personally, if the money is enough for me to make a comfortable life with my family, other things at work become important. I could never spend most of my days with assholes or do idiotic work even if the pay was way above market value, for instance. I'd also trade money for more free-time, if possible.

And yes, the company I work at does feel like a family. But nobody had to tell me this. It just does so, naturally.

> because employee turnover in the software industry is much higher than for most professions

I wonder if that's actually true, and if so, to which degree. On what basis are you saying this?

> Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm.

I think it very much depends on the company and culture. I always had jobs where learning and self improvement was encouraged and expected (also in Germany). With a budget for conferences and books and a fixed time frame (~20%) for that. These were all companies that primarily did software development -- either direct product development or project work for customers. On the other hand you have firms where software treated as an appendage. They might have other great products but an entirely different managerial background. A mindset like: "We need a software department, everyone else has one too" can easily lead to mismanagement -- and I think a lack of time and budget for self improvement is an aspect of mismanagement in the business of creating software.

Ah, training - I remember that. Sadly I was only ever "treated" to a couple of "real" (paid-for) courses at the start of my career and the rest was on-the-job.

I've also heard of a lot of employers that are pushing the 20% policy for their software engineers or providing some other time allocated towards upskilling.

My employer requires us to do one hour of training per day. We are allowed to study whatever we want or work on personal projects. I personally don't think it's weird for an engineer to keep up with emerging tech and trends. I'm sure a lot of engineers outside of software do this.

I have a slightly different problem. My employer will pay to help us keep our skills up. We can take training classes and go to 1 related conference per year. We have some time during regular development to work on innovative projects that we'd like to implement or experiment with.

That's all great, but much of it ends up not being applicable. For example, we were trained in a new language about 3 years ago, but we haven't been allowed to use it in our product yet! I've been doing my home projects in it, so I'm ready to go when we do start using it. But most of my coworkers took the class and haven't touched it since. They've likely forgotten everything about it. Likewise, the conferences are nice, but I've never implemented anything useful after having read a paper about it, or seen a presentation on it. (The few times I've tried, it turned out the paper didn't give enough information to do your own implementation!) It does keep me aware of what's going on in the field, but I'm not sure how useful it actually is to my job.

You definitely have to push for it, only in the best of companies will everyone from top to bottom management take case of this proactively. Speak to your manager regularly that you need to expand your skills, tell him why, and show him what you want to do and how he can help. Some managers are not very good at this and you need to do the majority of the work. Accept it and do your part, but don't think training isn't needed just because your manager doesn't bring it up.

> Whereas, as a software engineer, very few companies(at least in Germany from my experience) will invest into their existing workforce to train them on the job

Maybe I've been fortunate, but in the UK and for a couple of years in Australia, I have had employers (and later clients for my contracting business) who have been happy to throw me at projects far enough outside my comfort zone that I keep learning and stretching my muscles. I feel at the top of my game (much of the time).

> ... (in Germany) ... instead seek to let them go once their expertise is no longer valuable and hire someone already experienced in the needed stack then repeat

Interesting. I thought Germany's labor law highly discourages this. Isn't "It is easier to divorce than to fire someone." a German saying for your tough labor law?

Note that these other professions have tests and certifications you need to pass. I can see developers howling in anger if they were required to do this.

I don't think it makes sense to have this in the form of required licensure to practice, but I certainly wouldn't mind if there were tests and certifications I could take that would allow me to show prospective employers what I could do. Extra bonus points if having those things on my resume allowed me to avoid the types of interviews where the candidate is essentially put on the spot for an entire day in front of a whiteboard or laptop. To their credit, I believe that's a direction TripleByte might be attempting to go in, but I don't pretend to be able to speak for them.

How often do legal frameworks change?

As a non-expert, I think there's a 50% chance it costs 10x more to teach each new hire for a month.