4 ms·

I tell you one thing. If you think that a company will be offering you new tech after every X months or Y years then you are wrong. Tech world does not like tha

by pknerd 6y ago

I tell you one thing. If you think that a company will be offering you new tech after every X months or Y years then you are wrong. Tech world does not like that. Think of the investment a company does to bring in a tech stack. It is not all about downloading a new tech, it is about finding and hiring resources. If they all start changing tech based on wish list then they never can progress. I remember something my ex Boss said years back: We have not married with companies hence we should not try to change company as per our will. In order to fulfill what you want you should work on side projects. Side projects are great way to vent out tech frustration. Working on PHP and got bored? Try python at home. Tired of using bootstrap? Try Tailwind. Feel angry seeing monolith CRUD apps? Try Docker at home and start making micro-services. You have endless options. You can also put code on Github to improve your resume.

IshKebab 6y ago
Also I work on side projects at work. Not officially sanctioned but as long as you still have time to do your main job and the side project is useful to the company, nobody has complained so far.
sbergot 6y ago
...or move to another company where you will use those tech from 9 to 5? Of course you should not expect a company to refactor every month. Meanwhile companies cannot expect tech enthusiast to stay with them if they don't offer interesting technical projects. It is a negotiation. I have seen many stack decisions being pushed by HR and it makes a lot of sense.
dentemple 6y ago
The company can provide educational reimbursements (and set aside some learning time each month) for their employees, as well as provide a stipend for them attend relevant conferences. A company does not necessarily need to keep pushing new tech to production to ensure that their employees stay up-to-date. They just need to actually invest in their employees.
- pknerd 6y ago
  Probably 1 in 100 companies offer such offers? Why depend on a company when you can learn on your own? I am self-taught programmer. I learnt Pascal and C back in Uni. After that I never tool formal education for learning new tech. Youtube rocks.
  - tedmiston 6y ago
    In my experience most companies will offer partial or full conference reimbursement if it's relevant to your job.
    - alexbanks 6y ago
      I would say, with respect, I don't think this experience is normal or standard. I've never been reimbursed for a conference even if it was exactly for the technology that company built their entire product with.
      - tedmiston 6y ago
        That is interesting. My personal experience as a software engineer has been getting reimbursed for one or more conferences per year at every job. I've never had a software engineering manager say no to a relevant conference requested framed in a way that benefits the business. I wonder if there's an aggregate data source available to see how common / uncommon this is. Have your companies offered a general professional development budget?
        alexbanks 6y ago
        Literally none of them.
  - dentemple 6y ago
    The idea is that if more companies offer educational benefits, there'd be less need for employees to bounce jobs just to stay up-to-date on technologies. (Obviously, this doesn't account for job-hopping for straight salary reasons)
golergka 6y ago
Rewriting existing code in a new shiny language just to keep employees happy is a pretty stupid thing, sure. But when you're just solving problems and maintaining old software, there's a lot to be gained from thoughtful, measured inclusion of new tech, transition to new libraries and such. This is technical investment in the company's future: improving developer's velocity and code's performance, reduce bug rate and overall quality of the software. At least in my personal experience: moving from SVN to git, moving development from C++ to JS (and company was making simple mobile games that are never CPU-bound) and then gradually adopting Typescript, migrating a commercial application from MSSQL to Postgres (saving a significant amount of $$ in license while actually improving performance), and many, many smaller refactorings, improvements and new shiny libraries — all resulted in direct positive consequences for the business. If the company never adopts any new tech ever, it's a sign that it's lost its way.
- dls2016 6y ago
  > If the company never adopts any new tech ever, it's a sign that it's lost its way. So you're telling me I wasted last week installing the VB6 IDE on Windows Server 2016?
- pknerd 6y ago
  There is something called tech debt and I can understand it but just replacing a Bootstrap/jQuery based app wit React/VUE just because it is new does not make sense. I will not mind upgrading from Python 2x to Python 3x but I will always resist to replace Flask with Django, unless there is some really genuine reason behind it.
brundolf 6y ago
I don't think this is necessarily an indictment of the company, though. It's reasonable for a company to keep the same stack for five years, and it's also reasonable for a developer to want to move on at that point so they can learn something different. If you stay in the same bubble for too long you do stagnate; not because you always need to be learning the very newest thing, but because you always need to be learning: diversifying your skillset and broadening your understanding of your field. Hobby projects are well and good, but there's nothing like having to solve full-scale problems that you don't get to pick and choose. When a hobby project gets too hard in a way that isn't fun, I drop it, because I'm doing it for fun. But some of the best lessons I've learned have come from things I was forced to solve.

by pknerd 6y ago

IshKebab 6y ago

Also I work on side projects at work. Not officially sanctioned but as long as you still have time to do your main job and the side project is useful to the company, nobody has complained so far.

sbergot 6y ago

...or move to another company where you will use those tech from 9 to 5? Of course you should not expect a company to refactor every month. Meanwhile companies cannot expect tech enthusiast to stay with them if they don't offer interesting technical projects. It is a negotiation. I have seen many stack decisions being pushed by HR and it makes a lot of sense.

dentemple 6y ago

The company can provide educational reimbursements (and set aside some learning time each month) for their employees, as well as provide a stipend for them attend relevant conferences. A company does not necessarily need to keep pushing new tech to production to ensure that their employees stay up-to-date. They just need to actually invest in their employees.

pknerd 6y ago
Probably 1 in 100 companies offer such offers? Why depend on a company when you can learn on your own? I am self-taught programmer. I learnt Pascal and C back in Uni. After that I never tool formal education for learning new tech. Youtube rocks.
- tedmiston 6y ago
  In my experience most companies will offer partial or full conference reimbursement if it's relevant to your job.
  - alexbanks 6y ago
    I would say, with respect, I don't think this experience is normal or standard. I've never been reimbursed for a conference even if it was exactly for the technology that company built their entire product with.
    - tedmiston 6y ago
      That is interesting. My personal experience as a software engineer has been getting reimbursed for one or more conferences per year at every job. I've never had a software engineering manager say no to a relevant conference requested framed in a way that benefits the business. I wonder if there's an aggregate data source available to see how common / uncommon this is. Have your companies offered a general professional development budget?
      - alexbanks 6y ago
        Literally none of them.
- dentemple 6y ago
  The idea is that if more companies offer educational benefits, there'd be less need for employees to bounce jobs just to stay up-to-date on technologies. (Obviously, this doesn't account for job-hopping for straight salary reasons)

golergka 6y ago

Rewriting existing code in a new shiny language just to keep employees happy is a pretty stupid thing, sure. But when you're just solving problems and maintaining old software, there's a lot to be gained from thoughtful, measured inclusion of new tech, transition to new libraries and such. This is technical investment in the company's future: improving developer's velocity and code's performance, reduce bug rate and overall quality of the software. At least in my personal experience: moving from SVN to git, moving development from C++ to JS (and company was making simple mobile games that are never CPU-bound) and then gradually adopting Typescript, migrating a commercial application from MSSQL to Postgres (saving a significant amount of $$ in license while actually improving performance), and many, many smaller refactorings, improvements and new shiny libraries — all resulted in direct positive consequences for the business. If the company never adopts any new tech ever, it's a sign that it's lost its way.

dls2016 6y ago
> If the company never adopts any new tech ever, it's a sign that it's lost its way. So you're telling me I wasted last week installing the VB6 IDE on Windows Server 2016?
pknerd 6y ago
There is something called tech debt and I can understand it but just replacing a Bootstrap/jQuery based app wit React/VUE just because it is new does not make sense. I will not mind upgrading from Python 2x to Python 3x but I will always resist to replace Flask with Django, unless there is some really genuine reason behind it.

brundolf 6y ago

I don't think this is necessarily an indictment of the company, though. It's reasonable for a company to keep the same stack for five years, and it's also reasonable for a developer to want to move on at that point so they can learn something different. If you stay in the same bubble for too long you do stagnate; not because you always need to be learning the very newest thing, but because you always need to be learning: diversifying your skillset and broadening your understanding of your field. Hobby projects are well and good, but there's nothing like having to solve full-scale problems that you don't get to pick and choose. When a hobby project gets too hard in a way that isn't fun, I drop it, because I'm doing it for fun. But some of the best lessons I've learned have come from things I was forced to solve.