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> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool. As
by Terretta 5y ago
> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool.
As kindly as I can put it: I’d argue that within this sentiment are the foundations of everything wrong with the ecosystem of professional software engineering.
Let’s start with, if you don’t let people learn on the job, you have to have at least 20% annual turnover to be only 5 years behind the knowledge curve.
At 10% turnover, you’re 10 years behind. Managers think people shouldn’t be learning on company time, HR tells the board lower turnover is a goal.
Inevitable next step is pausing all productive work to undertake a “Digital Transformation™” to try to replace 20 years of old tech. But the firm won’t know how.
- IncRnd 5y ago>> using your employer’s time to experiment with difficult new concepts and languages when you have a deadline approaching (or long since past) is not cool. > As kindly as I can put it: I’d argue that within this sentiment are the foundations of everything wrong with the ecosystem of professional software engineering. Almost all Software Engineering, as practiced, is not a form of engineering in any way. Many times Software Engineering is really a bunch of commodity workers, who are learning, assembling commodity components that don't really work, under the oversight of a more senior developer who helps everything not fall apart.
- Twisol 5y agoYou might be interested to read Hillel Wayne's crossover project, where he interviewed a number of people who had worked in traditional engineering roles as well as in software development. https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ The upshot is that "engineering" isn't the paragon of excellence we like to think it is. Whether or not you agree, it's a good read!
- IncRnd 5y agoThanks!
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> Let’s start with, if you don’t let people learn on the job… Learning in the job is great, within reason. Abandoning all of your existing experience and trying to write new projects in a completely unfamiliar language with zero prior experience is not reasonable, though. Learning isn’t a binary yes/no feature of a job. There is ample room for learning without allowing reckless decisions like trying to use Elm for server-side code when even the Elm authors are hostile to such a use case.
- amw-zero 5y agoIt’s pretty clear that these numbers are made up. Software engineering is an incredibly multi-dimensional field, and it is not a fact that learning on the job is beneficial to anyone let alone employers. And you assume so many things that will not always be true, like the fact that everything will always be changing in the field. You may feel different, which is ok, but don’t bring made up numbers into it.