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My company got acquired by a larger, public company. 80-90% of us are still here after 3 years. Acquiring company was also a technology company, saw that our pr

My company got acquired by a larger, public company. 80-90% of us are still here after 3 years. Acquiring company was also a technology company, saw that our product filled a gap that they needed, and believed that acquiring a company was worthless if the people left. The worst thing that happened was that after two years they took away our lunches (you think I'm kidding, but all my lunch conversations are now dedicated meetings which is a massive drag on productivity). I speak as an individual contributor, not a VP.

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago
So during your lunch...you have a meeting? Every day?
- winrid 7y ago
  At my current company people will assign meetings during lunch because "that's the only time people are available." I now have that time blocked off so they can't do that to me anymore. But they try. :)
- frenchie14 7y ago
  Sorry, let me clarify: conversations that used to take place over lunch at the table can no longer happen because everyone is off eating different things / at different times. So instead, all of the one-off conversations that I used to have over lunches require dedicated meeting time (outside of the lunch hour). This results in a lot more meetings than we used to have.
- splittingTimes 7y ago
  There is also the "lunch and learn" events. These things come when your company does not want to be called out for their lip service that is "employee training".
  - roel_v 7y ago
    Honest question: are there companies that do "employee training" in tech? What does that look like?
    - com 7y ago
      Yep. In our case typically stuff that is important enough to take time out for, and which we evaluate (in a couple of different ways - survey sampling, outcomes, etc) aren’t being structurally addressed in the quotidian team knowledge and craft sharing that occurs doing the job itself.
    - indigochill 7y ago
      At my company, every team manager has a "learning and development" budget but they never think about it, so if you have some conference you want to go to, educational course, book, etc, all you have to do is convince them it's at least tangentially related to your work and you get it covered out of that budget, which is usually full. I actually prefer this arrangement over top-down employee training since it means I have more control over what I spend my time learning.
    - itronitron 7y ago
      security awareness training, sexual harassment training, time reporting, etc.
    - Viliam1234 7y ago
      In my experience, there is never enough time to complete the existing projects comfortably before the deadline. (If there is enough time, it means some team member should be moved to another project, or a new project should be created. Otherwise the managers are not doing their job.) So the actual problem with employee training is usually time, not money. If you could learn a new work-related skill in literally zero time, most companies would be happy to pay the expenses. It wouldn't be different from buying a new chair, or a larger monitor. But if learning the skill takes a few days (forget about weeks!), in short term it means that a project that is already late would become even more late. Which is why the company totes supports investing in their human resources, but sorry, you can't get the training right now, because there are higher priorities. (Spoiler: there will always be higher priorities.) Which is sad, because in many cases what is needed is time, not extra money. There are free tutorials, free online courses; the employees have skills they could teach their colleagues. In theory, the company totes supports employees with initiative to offer internal trainings, until they realize that this actually requires some time, too. Then you get the usual "yes, but not anytime soon". (Translation: it means "no".) I have also seen it from the other side. At some point of my life, I was providing courses for companies. Generally, there are companies willing to pay you for lessons of MS Word, or MS Excel. (Also Photoshop etc., but I wasn't doing those.) But with anything more complicated, time became an issue. Like, there would be a market for e.g. Enterprise Java lessons, assuming you could teach the whole thing from scratch in one day. Two days, maybe. But three days is definitely too long. Literally, I once had a potential client asking me whether I could teach their new employees, who had zero programming skills (in any programming language, ever), make Java Enterprise applications. They gave me the checklist with dozen required topics, like web services etc. How quickly can I get my students from zero to expert? I thought about it, and concluded that perhaps in one week, I could at least tell them something about each topic; with no hope that they would remember it all, but perhaps if I also gave them detailed written notes, they would be able to reconstruct parts of it later. When I made a schedule and showed it to the potential client, they were horrified why should it take so much time; there were expecting at most three days, preferably two. At that moment I understood how much the complexity of technical knowledge is underestimated by those who make the decisions. tl;dr - you are supposed to learn in your free time (and sometimes the company is willing to pay for it)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

tenaciousDaniel 7y ago

So during your lunch...you have a meeting? Every day?

winrid 7y ago
At my current company people will assign meetings during lunch because "that's the only time people are available." I now have that time blocked off so they can't do that to me anymore. But they try. :)
frenchie14 7y ago
Sorry, let me clarify: conversations that used to take place over lunch at the table can no longer happen because everyone is off eating different things / at different times. So instead, all of the one-off conversations that I used to have over lunches require dedicated meeting time (outside of the lunch hour). This results in a lot more meetings than we used to have.
splittingTimes 7y ago
There is also the "lunch and learn" events. These things come when your company does not want to be called out for their lip service that is "employee training".
- roel_v 7y ago
  Honest question: are there companies that do "employee training" in tech? What does that look like?
  - com 7y ago
    Yep. In our case typically stuff that is important enough to take time out for, and which we evaluate (in a couple of different ways - survey sampling, outcomes, etc) aren’t being structurally addressed in the quotidian team knowledge and craft sharing that occurs doing the job itself.
  - indigochill 7y ago
    At my company, every team manager has a "learning and development" budget but they never think about it, so if you have some conference you want to go to, educational course, book, etc, all you have to do is convince them it's at least tangentially related to your work and you get it covered out of that budget, which is usually full. I actually prefer this arrangement over top-down employee training since it means I have more control over what I spend my time learning.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    security awareness training, sexual harassment training, time reporting, etc.
  - Viliam1234 7y ago
    In my experience, there is never enough time to complete the existing projects comfortably before the deadline. (If there is enough time, it means some team member should be moved to another project, or a new project should be created. Otherwise the managers are not doing their job.) So the actual problem with employee training is usually time, not money. If you could learn a new work-related skill in literally zero time, most companies would be happy to pay the expenses. It wouldn't be different from buying a new chair, or a larger monitor. But if learning the skill takes a few days (forget about weeks!), in short term it means that a project that is already late would become even more late. Which is why the company totes supports investing in their human resources, but sorry, you can't get the training right now, because there are higher priorities. (Spoiler: there will always be higher priorities.) Which is sad, because in many cases what is needed is time, not extra money. There are free tutorials, free online courses; the employees have skills they could teach their colleagues. In theory, the company totes supports employees with initiative to offer internal trainings, until they realize that this actually requires some time, too. Then you get the usual "yes, but not anytime soon". (Translation: it means "no".) I have also seen it from the other side. At some point of my life, I was providing courses for companies. Generally, there are companies willing to pay you for lessons of MS Word, or MS Excel. (Also Photoshop etc., but I wasn't doing those.) But with anything more complicated, time became an issue. Like, there would be a market for e.g. Enterprise Java lessons, assuming you could teach the whole thing from scratch in one day. Two days, maybe. But three days is definitely too long. Literally, I once had a potential client asking me whether I could teach their new employees, who had zero programming skills (in any programming language, ever), make Java Enterprise applications. They gave me the checklist with dozen required topics, like web services etc. How quickly can I get my students from zero to expert? I thought about it, and concluded that perhaps in one week, I could at least tell them something about each topic; with no hope that they would remember it all, but perhaps if I also gave them detailed written notes, they would be able to reconstruct parts of it later. When I made a schedule and showed it to the potential client, they were horrified why should it take so much time; there were expecting at most three days, preferably two. At that moment I understood how much the complexity of technical knowledge is underestimated by those who make the decisions. tl;dr - you are supposed to learn in your free time (and sometimes the company is willing to pay for it)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]