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"If you are currently working on one of these startups, you probably are justifying with “but I get to learn/do more than working on a large company, etc. etc.”
by praptak 14y ago
"If you are currently working on one of these startups, you probably are justifying with “but I get to learn/do more than working on a large company, etc. etc.”. No you don’t really. You can learn more by being in a company that offers reasonable hours while you can have a side project. "
It is important to understand this "learning on the job" thing. It's no use hiding the basic fact: just as with the salary, there is a conflict here between your interest and your employer's. When you are learning, you are not producing and what grows is your market value - the employer might have to pay you more to keep you at the company, so for them the benefits of having a trained employee are at least partially offset by this fact. To put it bluntly - if at all possible, grabbing an employee whose learning cost is already covered by another company looks much better from the profit perspective.
It's not to say that learning on the job never happens - just as with high salaries, there are obvious situations when the employer can afford to pay you more or take the cost of your learning. The less they compete on cost, the better for you.
- vanderZwan 14y ago"When you are learning, you are not producing" I beg your pardon?
- praptak 14y agoYou are reading the docs, asking peers, trying to Google things while an already learned employee could have finished what you are working on. Edit: obviously it's not literally either 100% production and 0% learning or 100% learning and 0% production. This doesn't even have to sum to a fixed "100%" value. The point is that learning has it non-ignoreable cost.
- jaggederest 14y agoA majority of my value as an engineer stems from the fact that, in general, I can learn new things extremely rapidly. "Learning" is what I sell, and business is pretty decent.
- praptak 14y agoObviously the more learning is necessary (and on good jobs it is) the more it makes sense for a company to minimize its cost, hence going for fast learning folks. If a company hires for learning ability then it is a good prognostic for your learning on the job. Conversely if the job ad specifies software versions to the third dot and years of experience going longer than a technology exists then you might not learn too much there.
- olivier1664 14y agoYour value = f(your actual knowledge, your learning potential); with some other arguments as motivation, coding efficiency, communcation skill, etc.
- ed209 14y agoIt doesn't matter how good you think you are or how much you think you already know - but if you are not learning something new every day, you're already behind the times. The thing with this industry is that it's moving ever faster. So rather than hiring an expert now, based only on the fact they are an expert is a short sighted gain. You should actually be hiring people who want to learn, who learn fast and who iterate and innovate on what they just learnt. Learning is not a destination, it's a process you should actively participate in every day.
- kamaal 14y agoWhen you learn, you focus to learn to build. Not to learn the tools required to build. If you are building something big, you will learn the tools anyway. I never ask anyone what they know, I simply ask them what they have done. When I check up on what they have done, what they know becomes clear(or isn't even relevant). Putting it all together. Technical learning today is hardly an issue at all. The issues are searching big impact projects and working productively to achieve them.
- buro9 14y agoI guess it depends on the employer, employee and culture. We hire those who want to learn, and we go way out of our way to ensure that those working for the company really do learn and improve. The benefit to us, the company and founders, is substantial. And the benefit to the employee is obvious. If we can't offer a killer salary yet, and the equity is toilet paper for a few years, then the biggest thing we can offer is a vibrant environment in which skills are developed and mastered, in which we can understand more of each other's role and how all of the bits fit together. At the moment I can say that every person in the company is learning every day. Real learning. We drop tools to educate each other, to teach and learn. We really believe doing so is the key to producing good work faster, that works with the output of everyone else.
- michaelochurch 14y agoWhat's the company?
- buro9 14y agoJust a small London startup in the community space: http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ There's only three of us considered full-time right now, with an additional pool of volunteers and helpers that churn around us. Our core team have different skills, and so we think it's good to cross-fertilise that knowledge, to teach and learn more of each other's skills as well as to support the mastery of our own skill in sharing it and learning how to communicate it. We have people - freelancers mostly - who help for a month for free, and then go do something else for a bit before coming back between jobs to help more and learn more. They get to work on something they care about and learn new things at the same time. We're not kidding ourselves about wanting to pay well, to build a successful business, and to only be bootstrapping this hard while we have to... but this process is really helping build this strong learning and teaching environment and that's been a real benefit to us, so we can all see that staying even after the numbers side adds up more. The core value that has emerged is that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn. By helping improve career security for all of our workers, we really feel we're improving security for us as employers and job security for the employees. There's no downside to this.