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> IT is a highly skilled and trained job; staff it as such I don't think it's highly trained at all! What kind of training do major tech companies do? I've ne

> IT is a highly skilled and trained job; staff it as such I don't think it's highly trained at all! What kind of training do major tech companies do? I've never done any in my career, outside my degrees, and not everyone does that even! Is that unusual? Contrast that with the military, which is obsessive about training and invests a huge amount of time and effort into it throughout your entire career. So who are we taking lessons from here?

mikewarot 5y ago
It was a bad word choice, I'll agree. Our training is on the job, mostly. I'd bet most of us know many different layers of abstraction, and ways to just get stuff done, that would take years to teach formally, if it could be taught.
Sevii 5y ago
I've done a lot of paid training as an IT employee. Studying for a cassandra certification, getting the Kubernetes Admin certification, regular redundant OWASP security trainings. Export restriction trainings. There were a lot more that I didn't take. We basically had our own khan academy worth of trainings you could take at my last job.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Imagine if when we promoted developers from juniors to seniors they were taken off their project and sent on a six-month residential retreat to focus exclusively on their own professional and personal development. That's the kind of approach to training the military has - beats some online course and corporate certs!
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    I always get jealous when managers at my company constantly go to trainings or are assigned to different roles to add skills. There really is a system for developing managers. That's opposed to developers who are basically asked to stagnate and stay where they are.
    - indigochill 5y ago
      You should probably sort that out with your current employer or find a new one. Mine provides open access to a ton of online resources as well as maintaining a regular budget for developer-initiated things like going to conferences/seminars or buying books. It's actually rare that the training budget gets fully spent, but on the other hand I've never had a request turned down. For a while, my employer was even footing my college bill when I decided to back for my MS. That one came with a contract to stay on longer to "pay" them back, but that was fine because I had no plans to leave.
      - Aeolun 5y ago
        My problem is that my company pays for these things, but there never seems to be time to go.
        spaetzleesser 5y ago
        Same here. It’s not a priority for career development but viewed as a perk
  - mpyne 5y ago
    That's the point Nic was making. Sharp people get assigned to digital/IT management roles straight from operational assignments, with *NO* training at all. Not even "on the job". In some services, even the uniformed staff with IT training will have last had that training 10-15 years prior, with all their skills having atrophied in the meantime. The underlying military organizational management assumption is that operational experience translates to general management effectiveness (e.g. "I commanded a ship of 300 Sailors doing a wide array of jobs, so I can lead an agency of 500 civilians doing a wide array of jobs"). With the right support this can work in a heavily digital office until the leader can pick it up with on-the-job training, but it's not the way you'd plan to do it. This is why the nuclear Navy requires even their senior supervisors to be technically competent to the task of leading nuclear organizations. Navy offices dealing with aviation are led by naval aviators. Shipbuilding offices are led by officers with a career operating surface ships and submarines, etc. etc. But the bench of uniformed talent who have been groomed through a career of working on software teams to lead future software factories is very small. That will change over time as the services work to define specialized communities and agencies to build that bench. But yeah, as an entering assumption you'd like your digital offices and agencies to be led by people with current digital expertise, ideally through a career actually shipping code, and at least part of that time within the DoD ecosystem.
akvadrako 5y ago
The training is just doing the job; it isn't something you can learn in school.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  If training is just doing the job, then we can describe all jobs as highly trained, so what does the phrase even mean?
  - a3n 5y ago
    In context, it means that the people being put in charge, the "majors and lt colonels," have never done the job, so they're unqualified, no matter how smart and dedicated.
  - ThePadawan 5y ago
    I know plenty of people who were hired as mid-level C# developers, kept being a mid-level C# programmer, and will be happy to be mid-level C# programmers (with salary increases of course) for the next 20 years. If you work in an risk-averse industry like banking or aviation, you're not likely to experiment or learn anything new on the job.
    - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
      true; but in the devops world, you absolutely have to keep learning new things constantly. There's always new tools. It's even a hazard that you get too distracted learning new things to be effective at the old stuff, and I've seen that drive horrible decisions to adopt new technologies with no driving business need, just because the engineers want that on their resume. There does need to be a happy medium.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I think it meant "highly skilled and requiring lots of training".
jcranmer 5y ago
> What kind of training do major tech companies do? I've never done any in my career, outside my degrees, and not everyone does that even! Is that unusual? I wouldn't say it's unusual for most tech employees to fail to avail themselves of the training opportunities in their company. But that's not because of a lack of opportunities I would say. Many licensed professions have mandatory continuing education requirements--you're required to take a dozen-ish hours a year of classes in your field--and so there's a pretty big cottage industry of actually providing and discovering those opportunities. Since CS isn't licensed, there's fewer of those opportunities around--although there is some, and if you work at a large company, you might even get periodic mailings about some of these opportunities. Instead, a lot of training in the CS fields tends to be a mixture of hands-on training, learning about stuff outside of the company (and potentially conveying it to other people internally--we've had learning about containers taught to us that way), and going to seminars or conferences. It's worth noting that if you work at a large company, there's a decent chance that the company has already budgeted a certain amount per person for training, so if you find a conference that's not totally irrelevant to your interests, you can probably get manager approval to go to it, fully paid by your company.

mikewarot 5y ago

It was a bad word choice, I'll agree. Our training is on the job, mostly. I'd bet most of us know many different layers of abstraction, and ways to just get stuff done, that would take years to teach formally, if it could be taught.

Sevii 5y ago

I've done a lot of paid training as an IT employee. Studying for a cassandra certification, getting the Kubernetes Admin certification, regular redundant OWASP security trainings. Export restriction trainings. There were a lot more that I didn't take. We basically had our own khan academy worth of trainings you could take at my last job.

chrisseaton 5y ago
Imagine if when we promoted developers from juniors to seniors they were taken off their project and sent on a six-month residential retreat to focus exclusively on their own professional and personal development. That's the kind of approach to training the military has - beats some online course and corporate certs!
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I always get jealous when managers at my company constantly go to trainings or are assigned to different roles to add skills. There really is a system for developing managers. That's opposed to developers who are basically asked to stagnate and stay where they are.
  - indigochill 5y ago
    You should probably sort that out with your current employer or find a new one. Mine provides open access to a ton of online resources as well as maintaining a regular budget for developer-initiated things like going to conferences/seminars or buying books. It's actually rare that the training budget gets fully spent, but on the other hand I've never had a request turned down. For a while, my employer was even footing my college bill when I decided to back for my MS. That one came with a contract to stay on longer to "pay" them back, but that was fine because I had no plans to leave.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      My problem is that my company pays for these things, but there never seems to be time to go.
      - spaetzleesser 5y ago
        Same here. It’s not a priority for career development but viewed as a perk
- mpyne 5y ago
  That's the point Nic was making. Sharp people get assigned to digital/IT management roles straight from operational assignments, with *NO* training at all. Not even "on the job". In some services, even the uniformed staff with IT training will have last had that training 10-15 years prior, with all their skills having atrophied in the meantime. The underlying military organizational management assumption is that operational experience translates to general management effectiveness (e.g. "I commanded a ship of 300 Sailors doing a wide array of jobs, so I can lead an agency of 500 civilians doing a wide array of jobs"). With the right support this can work in a heavily digital office until the leader can pick it up with on-the-job training, but it's not the way you'd plan to do it. This is why the nuclear Navy requires even their senior supervisors to be technically competent to the task of leading nuclear organizations. Navy offices dealing with aviation are led by naval aviators. Shipbuilding offices are led by officers with a career operating surface ships and submarines, etc. etc. But the bench of uniformed talent who have been groomed through a career of working on software teams to lead future software factories is very small. That will change over time as the services work to define specialized communities and agencies to build that bench. But yeah, as an entering assumption you'd like your digital offices and agencies to be led by people with current digital expertise, ideally through a career actually shipping code, and at least part of that time within the DoD ecosystem.

akvadrako 5y ago

The training is just doing the job; it isn't something you can learn in school.

chrisseaton 5y ago
If training is just doing the job, then we can describe all jobs as highly trained, so what does the phrase even mean?
- a3n 5y ago
  In context, it means that the people being put in charge, the "majors and lt colonels," have never done the job, so they're unqualified, no matter how smart and dedicated.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  I know plenty of people who were hired as mid-level C# developers, kept being a mid-level C# programmer, and will be happy to be mid-level C# programmers (with salary increases of course) for the next 20 years. If you work in an risk-averse industry like banking or aviation, you're not likely to experiment or learn anything new on the job.
  - Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    true; but in the devops world, you absolutely have to keep learning new things constantly. There's always new tools. It's even a hazard that you get too distracted learning new things to be effective at the old stuff, and I've seen that drive horrible decisions to adopt new technologies with no driving business need, just because the engineers want that on their resume. There does need to be a happy medium.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I think it meant "highly skilled and requiring lots of training".

jcranmer 5y ago

> What kind of training do major tech companies do? I've never done any in my career, outside my degrees, and not everyone does that even! Is that unusual? I wouldn't say it's unusual for most tech employees to fail to avail themselves of the training opportunities in their company. But that's not because of a lack of opportunities I would say. Many licensed professions have mandatory continuing education requirements--you're required to take a dozen-ish hours a year of classes in your field--and so there's a pretty big cottage industry of actually providing and discovering those opportunities. Since CS isn't licensed, there's fewer of those opportunities around--although there is some, and if you work at a large company, you might even get periodic mailings about some of these opportunities. Instead, a lot of training in the CS fields tends to be a mixture of hands-on training, learning about stuff outside of the company (and potentially conveying it to other people internally--we've had learning about containers taught to us that way), and going to seminars or conferences. It's worth noting that if you work at a large company, there's a decent chance that the company has already budgeted a certain amount per person for training, so if you find a conference that's not totally irrelevant to your interests, you can probably get manager approval to go to it, fully paid by your company.