Gerry Giese
Posts: 18
Nickname: gerryg
Registered: Feb, 2003
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Re: Ask Artima: Developer Education on Employer Time?
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Posted: Mar 20, 2003 1:34 PM
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I have a few points (and opinions!) to note from my own experience (as a programmer and occasional project lead):
The first company I worked for required that every employee have a certain percentage of their time devoted to self-study training (usually 1-2 hours per week) if project pressures were minimal (they estimated well, so crunch time was rare). Every manager was to have budget enough to send an employee to 1 to 1.5 weeks of training per year. No manager that I knew of ever had their training budget denied or axed. Training on demand was always OK but usually charged to the customer (we were consultants for the most part).
Brown-bag lunches and internal training seminars were frequent, requests for books were only denied if you over-did it, and employees were asked to monitor and report on their training status and skills. On thing we had was a periodical, book, and software library so everyone could stay in touch with technology and our customer's business fields. All periodicals were routed to interested individuals and everybody generally had one or two in their inbox at all times. Many people at this company spent time reading during off-work hours to go above & beyond, and it showed.
This company was not large (80-120 during the time I was there) but was composed mostly of high-performing and technically sound developers, designers, and analysts. It was one of the best places I've worked at, and the above is one of the major reasons.
Later jobs I've had were tighter on their budgets, so training was more difficult to get, motivation/morale was lower, and the employees tended to be less skilled or more specialized and unable to adapt to new technologies quickly. It was more difficult to get new technologies to be approved for use, and open-source/free software often came in (sometimes under the radar) because the "approved" tools and technologies didn't meet the programming needs and/or training in the "approved" stuff was non-existent. Or the other scenario is consultants are hired because the employees don't know the technology. Vicious circle, stuff, here.
To summarize good programmers will be supported by training time and budget (classes, periodicals, books, etc) and will generally be more motivated and skilled in doing what they are asked to do. Alterniatively, you can have good programmers without the above support who go the extra mile to read/experiment on their own time, attend extra seminars/brown-bags, and keep up-to-date on many technologies, not just those related to their specific job function. I did this when not supported, only because of my experience from the first job and the realization that I needed new skills to get out of my current job! Great programmers only happen genetically or when both supported and motivated to go the extra mile, and for an extended period of time.
If all a manager can do is provide some books and a few routed periodicals, encourage self-study, and organize monthly brown-bags (maybe even providing sandwiches!), that manager will have better programmers than the manager who does not provide those items.
The bottom line is that a manager needs to make a conscious decision to cultivate their programmers and grow them into something better, or those programmers will generally stagnate, leave, or turn bitter/sour and cause harm to projects and morale.
Appreciation/depreciation of programmer talent should be an easy equation for a manager, but the unfortunate fact is many don't recognize this, and realize it too late to save projects or even companies. The same goes for a programmer - one day it may be too late to save a job or a career.
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