Why you need a home lab to keep your job
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
This growing push for work to be extended into the family home really erodes the necessary work life distinction that allows for a happy life. Thats not to say you shouldn't have a lab at home to train yourself on things that interest you in your own free time, but if staying at a job means investing unpaid hours at home then one should probably consider whether the job is worth it.
After all, if a company expects you to do unpaid training in your own personal time then what will it expect from you in the future?
Furthermore, these articles constantly push the message that more work is better for your career than less. My father always told me its not the quantity of time you spend at a task but the quality.
Company's job isn't to help you find a work-life balance. Its goal is to find the long term plan that extracts the most work out of you. It can involve giving you some cool perks to keep you healthy on the long run, or it can involve churning through new hires all the time and overworking them while they last. Depends on their strategy.
> there is only one thing worse than training (or growing)
> your staff and having them leave, and that is not training
> or developing them and having them stay.I totally agree.
You should have all the things you need and love for both your job and your passions, but keep a line between home-time life and work life.
Anyone who says otherwise is likely <30 and has no family at home.
It is wise to do this even when you have roommates and are not living with an SO / our own family.
:-(
You sound like an idiot.
My current job involves me writing code for robots. This sounded interesting to me, until I realized that I am working with some ancient software here - I'm talking .Net 1.1 on Windows 2000! Not to mention that writing software for robots isn't really all that challenging.
If it weren't for my after-hours exploration of open-source technologies, my skill-set would be severely outdated, and my career would effectively be dead here.
You expressed perfectly what I was referring to: make sure you have the tools you need to explore and expand your job and your passions.
I.e. when I go home, work turns off, but if the need arises I have everything I need to perform my work- even for extended periods of time.
I also have all that I need to follow my passions and hobbies. This is a tool set I M building on constantly.
But you really need to have an "offline" mode where no matter what you are completely in a Be Here Now mindset that is 100% devoid of any work-thought
...it's not unpaid training, it's lifelong learning, and you do it because it's fun! The purpose shouldn't be to learn about what your employer wants you to or what your employer might need from you. You shouldn't need to justify having a home lab to your employer or family or whatever. The article's author got it all wrong indeed. Fuck your employer, you have your "lab" 'cause it's fun!
For example, my old day job happily dropped $10k to fly me to JavaOne so that I would more effectively map XML files and JavaBeans together, but "Most efficient cog in an Enterprise Java consulting shop ever!" was not a long-term career aspiration of mine. They were pretty understanding about providing for career growth during work hours but when they didn't I did it on my own time. That eventually cost them my services but, hey, capitalism happens.
Generic career advice for everyone: You are the captain of your own ship. You will have mentors, employers, and other folks who you are to some degree reliant on, but at the end of the day you have both responsibility for creating and authority to mandate forward progress.
Obviously neither statement is (completely) true. At the "rockstar" level, all learning is self directed. And rockstar employers expect and rely on that. But for everyone else I think it's reasonable that there be some level of support for education from employers, and some level of self motivation from good employees. Neither is going to make up for a total shortcoming in the other.
> At the "rockstar" level, all learning is self directed.
This is a bit of brain damage that is, as far as I can tell, limited to programming, for various weird cultural reasons.
Go to Goldman Sachs and ask them how many of their "rockstar" traders learned the craft at home on their free time. Or go to a top research hospital and ask them how many of their surgeons did the same. Or go to a top architecture firm and ask them how many of their architects learned skyscraper design on the weekends. They will probably all laugh at you.
Rockstars can be created through institutional processes by identifying, nurturing, and systematically training talent. All industries have their rockstars, but ones more mature than the software industry have saner and more efficient ways of taking raw talent and nurturing them into rockstars.
The difference in all these fields is that the practitioner, to learn, needs to things that cost significant amounts of money (trading/building skyscrapers), cause people to live or die (surgery) or go to jail or be executed (law), or need to do things that require significantly altering the real world to create an artifact(setting up skyscrapers). Hence the need for supervision, and systematic training with a lot of 'apprenticeship' feel.
In most programming, the real rockstars (say Carmack or Linus or whoever) are self taught, and did learn on their free time, because all you need is a laptop and the internet and you are ready to go and creating a significant artifact (a programming language, a game, an operating system) needs only knowledge (easily acquired from books and the internet) and time.
Not to take away from your larger (and valid) point that company training can be effective. But your analogies are a bit 'off' and that affects the power of your argument (imho, feel free to ignore).
Parse this out logically. I read this as: "self-directed learning is a necessary condition for achieving rockstar level skill." My point is that in other fields, institutional training can create rockstars without self-directed learning. That is to say, self-directed learning is not a necessary condition.
Your point is that programming is different from those other fields, because you can become a rockstar learning on your own. I.e. that self-directed learning can be a sufficient condition for achieving rockstar level skill. But that does not contradict my point, which is that it is not a necessary one.
In context, that quote sounds more nuanced.
"Obviously neither statement is (completely) true. At the "rockstar" level, all learning is self directed. And rockstar employers expect and rely on that. But for everyone else I think it's reasonable that there be some level of support for education from employers, and some level of self motivation from good employees. Neither is going to make up for a total shortcoming in the other."
I suspect if you add "(In programming)" before the sentences "At the rockstar level .. " etc it would make more sense,especially if those sentences are describing present reality than some imagined future.
And as for "the fact that it's easier to learn programming on your own than it is to learn other fields doesn't prove that", sure it doesn't prove anything.
But then if we are to descend to that level of hairsplitting, your quote about other industries training programs doesn't really prove the point that something similar would work in software/programming, and is equally 'neither here nor there'.
It may be true that you can create rockstars by company training, so you have a valid point in that we should probably explore the idea, look for supporting/opposing evidence and so on.
It still remains to be shown to be true,and ajross has a valid argument that "as of today company training programs haven't produced programming rockstars (vs competent devs)", so your comparisons to surgeons or whatever don't really counter ajross's statement.
ajross seems to be describing the present reality (and extropolating off that) and you seem to be saying that a different reality is possible (but unproven).
Not much of a conflict that I can see. (but hey ymmv, I freely admit I could be interpreting all this incorrectly)
And just fyi, I responded to (what I thought was ) excessive rhetorical flourishes like 'brain damaged thinking' in your reply. That phrase conveys no information beyond your annoyance and detracts from your main (and valid imho)argument. You can make a solid point without 'name calling' (note quotes), especially here on HN.
EDIT: rayiner changed his post from when I typed this reply(which is all right, I do that all the time), so this answer may not make as much sense as it should . Now his point is that "self-directed learning is not a necessary condition (to become a programming rockstar)".
It is probably true and certainly an idea worth exploring.
One possible answer to that, especially in a forum called Hacker News, is "Show us".
(to those fond of logic, to prove that a universally quantified argument, "All X s are blah" is wrong, you need to prove that "Not all X s are blah" and that in turn becomes "There exists a Z that not blah" and you have to show that there does indeed exist such a Z - aka an existence proof, what can I say, I'm a nerd).
And with that, I bow out of this thread. Have a nice day.
It's not hair splitting, it's the fundamental question of whether self-directed learning is necessary to achieve rockstar-level programming skills. This seems to be commonly assumed in the programming world, which I think is a bit of cultural brain damage. Indeed, I think the proposition that programming is somehow different from those other intellectually demanding fields in trainability is the exceptional proposition that has the burden of proof.
And seriously: there is none. There are no "trained" rock stars out there that I've seen. Can you find just one? Someone who through diligent classwork or apprenticeship reached a top-tier position in their field? I've never seen it.
My theory is that programming isn't any different in this regard from other intellectually demanding fields except culturally. I think the assertion that it is different is the one that requires proof, or at least an explanation for the mechanism by which it might be different.
As for self-directed learning, I'll point to Dennis Ritchie as an example. He's arguably somewhere in the middle between self-taught and trained. On one hand he started at Bell Labs concurrent with/immediately after Harvard. On the other hand, UNIX was something of a side project. Compare him to his father, who was a scientist at Bell Labs working on switching theory, and received his training in the AT&T engineering machine. What's different about the two men? Why is Dennis's field not trainable but Alistair's field trainable? My assertion is that there is no difference except the fact that there was an established framework for training engineers but not really one for training programmers.
Since learning is my hobby and my passion it serves me well. But I could certainly understand it if you hated what you worked on and wanting to get away from it when you were at home.
I wonder if I could build a simple noise cancellation system with an FX-LMS algorithm?
And I say this as someone who has spent a ridiculous amount of money on tech books in the past year (probably four figures) and who is giving up 1.5-2 nights a week, on average, to tech meetups.
To paraphrase that fount of wisdom, the hippy from The Simpsons: Sounds like you're working for your lab. Simplify, man!