If there's one thing I've learned between being a new engineer and a senior eng is that you can just take a small slice of time in your work schedule to learn. You don't have to clear this with anyone. You're salaried, take an hour or two a week to learn something new. You're getting paid for your technical judgement, use it to invest in something relevant and deepen your ability to judge. It pays off for both you and your employers even if they're not willing to formally fund training in large dedicated chunks.

Edit: clarified schedule to work schedule.

I've honestly never found myself in a position where I didn't had some spare time whilst at work. Even at my current job, I've transitioned from frontend work to backend work (I had backend experience already in Node), and I've always been able to keep up with our sprint. Other engineers complain they don't have time to improve our code base, or they can't learn anything new because they're always busy, but I think that's just an excuse. It's just a matter of organising yourself and looking for opportunities to learn.

I actively picked up stories I wasn't familiar with, just to learn it. Other engineers pick up stories because they're already familiar with the subject, that's not how you learn new things.

I've shot down two companies in the past three days because they made it known during the recruitment that they expected more than 40 hours a week, sometimes well in excess of it.

It's always couched in some doublespeak about "ownership". Trust me, if I were owner or part-owner in the enterprise, I wouldn't mind. But I'm not.

People complain about entitlement attitudes among the young. They need to look at employers if they really want to see entitlement.

It sounds like your boss feels entitled to your time without taking an ownership stake in your professional development.

The other thing about those places is that they only attract the desperate devs. So you know when they pull out that bullshit in the interview that if you were to take a job there you'd be on a team chock full of juniors with a few "seniors" that just fill a chair for 50 hours a week and haven't learnt anything new in the last decade.

I got that impression. At the first shop, the people I met didn't seem like they would be employable anywhere else.

The hiring manager also spent some time whining about the state of the developer market and said they couldn't afford the higher end of the range they had posted on their website.

Eugh, annoys me that people talk about entitlement in this case then management is surprised when developers don't stay any longer than 3 years

Your lead made a mistake there. Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is worth as much as one of each, especially when they have intimate knowledge of your actual code.

>Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is worth as much as one of each...

Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is valuable in certain situations. Companies love the idea of a "full stack engineer" because they believe they are getting two for the price of one. But in practice, and accounting for exceptions, that's not necessarily the case. A full-time FE with equal experience will be better at the front than a FE/BE and a full-time BE with equal experience will be better at the back than a FE/BE. This is the reality of having deep experience in a specific domain. As an attempt at an example, if you went to college and got an English minor and a CompSci minor you'd be capable in both areas but you would likely not be as knowledgeable as an English major nor a CompSci major within the respective domain.

This divide becomes much more visible when you see a FE/BE architect a solution versus a full time FE or BE. When fixing bugs and implementing straight-forward features a FE/BE has a handy skill set. But when you move past that point, deep experience within an area starts to show it's value.

> This is the reality of having deep experience in a specific domain.

This seems like it should be true abstractly, but concretely I've never met anyone with deep experience in a specific domain who didn't in the process gain enough experience in other domains to have basic competence in multiple domains. Not necessarily as much as specialists in those domains, but it's practically required to achieve the depths of experience in the domain you think they specialized in.

(Which is not usually the domain they thought they were specializing in.)

This is particularly relevant where there isn't a clean separation of concerns and the involved skills are highly transferable.

Basic competence is just as you stated, basic. If you are BE with basic competence in FE then I would argue you're not a BE/FE. You're a BE who has basic knowledge of how FE work is done.

> As an attempt at an example, if you went to college and got an English minor and a CompSci minor you'd be capable in both areas but you would likely not be as knowledgeable as an English major nor a CompSci major within the respective domain.

I don't think this analogy works, because CompSci and English are pretty unrelated to each other as fields, whereas frontend and backend by definition work together to create a product. That makes a person experienced in both worth more when working on either, because they're more likely to have in mind the entire system when they do design decisions pertaining to their side of the network.

I did say it was an attempt. :)

I need to disagree with you here, I consider myself full stack, but if you were to ask, FE would be my deep experience. And for me this is perfect, I have no problems with any FE work, and the same goes for BE work. Sure, we have BE engineers with very deep experience, but I've never found myself in a position where I couldn't keep up with them. I acknowledge a lack some knowledge in BE, especially when it comes to deeper CompSci domains, but it has never held me back.

But in general, I think this is just a different mindset, I love being able to be independent, and complete a stories from FE to BE. I used to be in a position where I could only do FE work, and it really scared me. I had no clue where critical data was coming from, if something went wrong, I couldn't debug our APIs, I was in the dark constantly. Now if something goes wrong, I can switch over to our backend, debug, write extra test cases to cover the bug and push code. I also understand what BE engineers are talking about, and when designing a new feature, it's much easier to come up with new APIs.

Knowledge about how the other side of the fence works doesn't suddenly make a full-stack engineer. I'm sure if we actually came up with a ratio (80/20 vs 50/50) of work it would provide a clearer understanding about when a person is FE, BE, or FE/BE. Alternatively, we could look at the type of work the individual is doing. For example, in your role are you going to be an architect doing solutions for the back-end?

It’s not just knowledge, I can actually do all the work, and yes, I could design solutions. It’s just that my real deep knowledge would be FE. But I consider myself full stack because I can do both sides without a problem.

In my team I’m just the only FE, so naturally most of that work falls on me. There are months where I only did BE stories.

It's often the case that a company decides to filter down the infinite possibilities of the programming world to a strict subset. What's left can often be a little boring, and that's on purpose.

So in a world where your choices are 1) learn other tech within our toolbox or 2) learn stuff in your domain but outside of the scope of your current work... only one of those is okay to do much of on work time.

All those ES2018 features and CSS variables may be cool things a front-end engineer should be learning, but if we have to support older browsers then I don't get to use any of it.

Until suddenly the requirement to support older browsers is dropped, or you get shifted to another project, and then these ES2018 features would come in handy.

Learning only the stuff that covers your immediate working needs isn't a winning strategy, neither for you nor for the company.

If you are 'learning' stuff open-loop (with no feedback from users or peers), then you are deluding yourself about how much you've actually learned. You're one important but terribly insufficient step above book learning.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. There are tons of strategies I know to solve problems that I never use because it confuses other people (and some of them confuse me too when I look at them six months later). That's experience. That's wisdom. You won't find that in a private github repository, and only those who already know what they're looking for will find it in a book.

> If you are 'learning' stuff open-loop (with no feedback from users or peers), then you are deluding yourself about how much you've actually learned. You're one important but terribly insufficient step above book learning.

Book learning ain't bad; in my experience, most of the developers I know would do well if they picked an actual book every now and then. It's not as good as hands-on experience, but still miles ahead of "learning" by StackOverflow-driven development. Experience is an important piece of the puzzle of wisdom, but it's not the whole thing. You need to also have understanding, and reading (and thinking about what you read) is a good way to acquire insight.

WRT. closing the loop, your users and peers aren't the only way to close a loop (and arguably, they can only provide certain kinds of feedback that are very context-specific). Trying things out for yourself is also a good way to close the loop through feedback from reality itself (e.g. whether something works, or how difficult you find it, are such pieces of feedback). On top of that, peer/customer feedback makes no sense for a lot of useful knowledge - for instance the new ES2018 and CSS features you've mentioned upthread.

I disagree, there is a point when having too much 'deep experience' in either BE or FE (usually BE) becomes counter-productive to performing useful work.

Then why do Google (and others) hire specifically for FE and BE roles?

I have no opinion on the issue being discussed, but the fact that Google does things a particular way is not evidence that that way is correct. It is entirely possible that Google would be better off hiring full-stack developers.

I double majored in English and Economics and consider myself an amazing full stack developer.

"But in practice, and accounting for exceptions..."

Unfortunate approach.

My company not only encourage transitions, we actually "pay" for them. That means we will assign a senior developer that will have responsibility for growth of the new mentee and we purchase any educational materials the person requires.

We have quite decent amount of transitions within last few years and all were successful. They do require commitment and investment from both sides.

I do believe we are stronger for it as people appreciate the opportunity for growth and support we provide. We, on the other hand, re-gain skilled colleague that is not looking elsewhere.

Man, I wish I actually had a job where I got mentored.

Bad. Went I went from JS front end to iOS, I was put in a learning period on my own + internship in the iOS team and that worked great. It’s how companies like Spotify also did it. They paid companies like the Big Nerd Ranch to travel to Stockholm and give workshops to future iOS devs.

They benefited and I also did, as it helped me evolve into a full-stack (web, mobile & server) developer. This was essential for me to transition into building my own company [1] at a later point, as I could build the product on my own both for web and mobile.

[1] https://standups.io

We have a formal mentorship program and employees get 4 hours a month for professional development. We still feel we fail them.

Using the word "still" there is uncalibrated. 4 hours per month is barely anything.

Imagine yourself trying to learn a real skill in that allocation of time.

If anything, you may even be reducing your tech employees' "professional development" with that metric, because I bet the average tech employee already spends greater than 4 hours per month on active learning with or without management actively allowing them.

>4 hours a month for professional development

So half a day a month? That's pretty much nothing. Maybe time to work through a couple chapters of a book on some new topic.

Yeah, it's supposed to be on top of their existing 1-1s, but we still feel we fail them.

Make that 4 hours a week and maybe you'll feel better.

Unfortunately, HR is in charge of 'professional development'. Noone wants to fight HR and would rather keep their cushy job, get paid and let this thing crater.

Unfortunately, that is when, as a team, you have to not classify things certain ways. Still meet your commitments, but bake in learning time. It just becomes part of what you do during the sprint. Likewise, you should not have a "testing time", "quality", or "security" budget - you just bake those into how the team operates.

^ This is the way. Learn how to sell it or hide it from those HR parasites.

Calling an entire field of personnel "parasites" is an ad hominem attack.

Even if you were to justify your statement, it would be an ad hominem attack.

No shit. Cheers for pointing that out for us.

We do 4 hours a week, and I still feel it's too little.

We've just given up on it, I just give people tickets with stuff they want to learn about. "Oh, you want to learn Selenium, here's a ticket that has Selenium"

How did it work out for you? I'm also trying to do the same.

It worked out great, but you have to want to do this. You have to set out time for it. No wonder why people from Lambda School get well-paying jobs: it's because you have to be motivated to reach the goal.

Educational materials/courses are out there, it's all about you, wanting to smash it on the wall and work hard for the goal.

It looks like you have a pretty inexperienced lead.

I'm extremely happy when my team members want to expand their horizons, it keeps them engaged in their work and makes the team as a whole stronger.

Your lead should have paired you with a backend developer and have had simple backend tickets assigned to you. This works really well in turning Windows developers into Web developers (together with some coaching).

I was going to say 'jealous', which is orthogonal to experience. Either is bad but, only one tends to sort itself out over time.

The middle ground here is that I'd try to grasp the basics on my own time, then ask the switch.

I can understand your boss though: would you swap a competent employee for an incompetent one, paying the same amount? Probably not. Yes, you retain your knowledge about the front-end, but you wouldn't be using that.

My advice would be to work out the basics on your time and then ask somebody in the backend team to be involved, baby steps.

If you actually become useful for the backend team, they will advocate themselves for your switch, and bring you up to speed once there.

> would you swap a competent employee for an incompetent one, paying the same amount?

But this is the glass-half-empty boss. The glass-half-full boss is happy to have a competent employee who can be called upon when needed for important front-end stuff and is picking up backend work at a faster rate than the intern the team would have otherwise, because they're already an experienced engineer (with knowledge of the front-end no less!) and there is skill beyond just writing code that transfers between domains.

And that's to say nothing of swapping a competent employee who's already onboarded for an empty seat and a talent search, when the employee quits to expand their skills elsewhere.

Same could be said for the employee. If the employee invests in his own competency he can negotiate a higher salary or quit and work elsewhere.

They’re not incompetent. They have domain knowledge in both the general industry of the company and the fine details of the company itself. They’ve probably been nearby the backend developers while they were talking through issues and even offered insight in the lunch area about specific algorithmic problems some backend developers were having.

Languages tend to be super easy.

Frameworks are a little bit of work.

Domain knowledge is hard.

If that competent employee wants to switch career tracks and you won't facilitate that, they'll just go get hired somewhere else that will.

>He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home.

When somebody says that to you, your responsibility is to either a) change jobs or b) learn during work time anyway.

Currently in the process of (a) ;)

So what about the server team lead? What did they say? Seems to me it doesn't matter what your existing frontend guy has to say about it.

They just hired more people but were severely short staffed during a crunch, so the server team just worked 80+ hour weeks until those new guys came on

I'm utterly dumbfounded at someone who manages people, stating this. I budgeted for training on a per employee basis when I created my yearly budgets.

If you are interested doing other things at home, then why transition at all? I mean, how much time you will need to become good at "server side" and the company benefit from this?

Imho it's about 50/50, company should not expect employees getting new skills only on their own time and the employee should not expect learning only from 9 to 5.

Technically searching through the internet for examples, is already learning.

Your team "leader" sounds more like a team "director".

Oof. I would honestly look for another job and tell them you want to be able to learn new stuff on the job. If you have a job you can go as far as saying, if "I'm not learning anything new I am wasting my time".

Companies should encourage people to learn stuff on the job, because no tutorials or classes can really teach you the day to day struggles.

What if someone learned something on their own time, do they get to be reimbursed from the employer?

Or, can I ask my employer to reimburse my under-graduate and graduate tuition?

They aren't going to reimburse you after the fact, but if you get approval in advance many companies will reimburse for graduate programs or other courses.

There's no hard and fast rules. No, a company will never retroactively pay for you learning, but yes a number of companies will reimburse you if you attend graduate programs while employed with them.

It's a balancing act. If a company wants employees to keep learning, they need to invest in that. If I, as a salaried employee, am expected to be available outside of the explicit working hours for emergencies, then it's also fair that I be allowed to do things that are directed at my own career during work, bonus if it proves useful to the company.

In my company, if you transfer to another team, you're a traitor. Your current mgr can block your transfer, so it's suicide to try to switch teams.

I worked on a small project where it was just two people: one back-end developer, and one front-end developer. The project was not important enough to hire more people, but important enough that the manager complained about the "bus factor" and asked us to plan our vacations responsibly (i.e. not more than one week at a time).

Because both of us were interested in the other part of the work, we offered a solution that we could spend some time teaching each other. At the end, both of us would know both parts of the work, and be able to substitute for each other during the vacation.

"No, that would be a waste of time."

From the POV of your team lead, this is perhaps not an advantage move on his side, so I do understand his concern, after all he is not the company, just an employee as you. And from your description it seems that you are a competent employee, thus even the less

Nevertheless he should give a more encouraging answer as a team lead. And if you still want to make the change (looks like you are not very interested in it too), maybe just ask to spend a little more time on server stuffs and see what's the reply.

It's all negotiation and sometimes it's difficult to ask the right question.

Maybe the lead made a mistake. Or, I hate to say it but...maybe OP isn't viewed as HiPo and worth the perceived investment. There's always another side to a story.

Company won't help you advance your career = they don't think you can, or for some reason don't want you to = you should start interviewing elsewhere.

> HiPo

I thought this was a new battery technology and had to google it.

https://hr.toolbox.com/articles/hr-hipos-identifying-hipos-h...

Where I work (mechanical engineering business, not just software) there's a training course that people are encouraged to take up in their own time. However, the company does support staff taking the course with teaching time from senior engineers - and they make a big deal of having completed it with a certificate, bonus and pay rise. That's in addition to the apprenticeship scheme which represents a more sensible approach to industry funded education.

You should have said you already did and would like to start today.

At my employer:

--

"Get your brokers license"

ok provide me with a course

"well, we've got a limited number of people that can do it at a time"

ok so make the material available to me for learning at home and I'll do it on my own time

"We appreciate your feedback. You could purchase a course on your own, with your own money, and study on your own at home"

-- This is an actual event, with the person parroting the 'we value degrees' line being the head of HR for our opco at the time, on the phone with me cutting me off every time I started to say anything, with me at one point saying a vulgarity and "would you give me some respect and allow me to finish a sentence":

applies to position above me that finally opened up and interviews

"We just wanted to let you know we went with another candidate, we suggest you get a bachelors degree and then an MBA if you'd like to move up"

at entry level position for 13 and a half years I don't want a degree, what sort of a degree

"Oh business is good"

How would a business degree benefit me in any role in this office, at all?

"We prioritize education"

I don't want to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to make an extra 10% so that would mean I could pay the loans off in a decade from the raise

"With tuition reimbursement you could get a degree in as little as 6 years"

In 6 years I'll be 40 and you'll give the job to a 22 year old that's been here 6 months, why don't you create some sort of system for advancement internally that is equal to degree work

"We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really work on a 4 year degree and then an MBA"

Why

"We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really..."

That's classism

"We prioritize..."

I don't want your defacto dues card, I guess I'll just keep working for people above me that have been at the company a fraction of the time that I have because they have a 4-year degree in Artisan Baking Social Media Marketing with their minor in Mayan Whittling from 2000BC to 1990BC.

--

Sigh. There isn't even a degree in what I do, and the university my employer has partnered with only has one degree you can do, some random super-specific business degree that has literally nothing to do with what I do.

Even if I wanted to get a degree, by the time I do 8 hours of this work my brain is shot. Processing large amounts of data, with all sorts of legal and fiscal ramifications, while being under pressure to not only meet but exceed production... yeah do that all day and the last thing you want to do is go home and study/research/write papers that have to be in some asinine format scheme or you fail outright.

Then even if they did come up with some way to teach us on the job, it wouldn't even work because due to the nature of the job if someone leaves it can take 6-12 months to replace their processing capacity and business volume grows so we're always chugging along with no downtime and we hot bunk desks so when your shift is up, someone else will be along in a couple of hours to sit down and keep going.

Follow the money.

Lots of companies blow smoke about a lot of shit, especially after a merger. What they actually value is what they're willing to invest in. If an initiative has no funding, it's not an initiative.

It sounds like their system is meeting it's design goals.

Or just switch? The knowledge will come once you fix your first bug.

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

You ever think about how much we subsidize businesses by paying for college ourselves? The older I get the more I think the university to corporation pipeline is a fucking racket. It also sucks for employees because here comes these kids who were allowed to learn about all the new technologies you wish you knew with zero distractions and other obligations, now comin' in hot on your heels to take yer jobs en masse, and because of the larger labor pool they all undercut one another's bargaining ability, lowering wages. If I owned a company and I was lookin to hire I'd be callin that a twofer: free employee training and hiring discounts!

University is a total racket. We pay these institutions to be treated like their low level employees to provide job training for companies. Corporations have successfully offloaded their training responsibilities onto a process that used to be much broader than vocational training.

And if you try to study some of those broader topics, you're a sucker - don't study philosophy when an extra accounting or STEM course would be a "better" use of your time. So you super specialize and then after 4 years of college and 5 years in industry you're burnt out you have few other skills, so the only option is to get back onto the education treadmill to bet on another highly specific vocation where you once again start your career as a junior.

Most STEM courses aren't vocational training and aren't super specialized. I think you might have a biased negative view for what STEM courses are?

Edit: Let me state it a different way that might shed more light on my point. A CS major can pass all of his/her classes with a perfect GPA and still be incapable of writing software ready for a production system (even at small scale).

The STEM degrees emphasize fundamentals that are rarely (if ever) used in day-to-day "real jobs".

For some value of 'super specialized' you are correct. For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture and what it means to live a good life, an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.

>For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture

Sure

> and what it means to live a good life

That's just self-aggrandizing bullshit. There is no class that will tell you what it means to live a good life. Anyone who thinks so is dearly lacking perspective.

>an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.

An exclusive focus on STEM will include the philosophy of science and what it means to seek truths about the physical world. IMO that has immensely more value in a philosophical sense than you seem to imply.

I believe you are proving my point. For example, the goal of much ancient philosophy was exactly what it meant to live a good life, and the theory of such was very well developed. Most of the culture you take for granted as 'common sense' is directly based on this philosophical development.

STEM at best tells you how to do something, but can never tell you what to do, or why to do it. For that you need philosophy, much more than philosophy of science.

Hell, most of S&M is about maximally far from "vocational" training.

Sorry, yes S&M courses are generally poor to include in that list. A calculus or chemistry course or two aren't going to affect your career potential.

This is a very pessimistic world view. I found in the engineering faculty that the subjects we were taught were very broad. However, I continued to learn on my own in my free time after I got my degree. I've been doing this consistently for the last 8 years or so. I now have completely new skills and much more depth on knowledge on CS topics than I had coming out of university.

The point is that while for you it is your choice and pleasure to spend your free time doing something with a direct career benefit, for others, there are often other valid and important uses of their free time and so there is a cost to that.

The question is if that cost an individual occurs if they choose not to spend their free time on career-related skills is ethical or good for society.

I believe this is the crux of the problem - it favours people with minimal external life factors or responsibility, and they’re quite often the ones to rise to power, therefore creating a “well it was good enough for me” sentiment lacking empathy.

While by contrast, there are some people who want to kick back and simply collect a pay check, there is a whole segment of people in the middle ground who are hungry to learn, but are stretched so thin that they can’t outside of work — a whole segment that isn’t being catered for, and therefore an opportunity exists to tap into this.

It's not realistic to expect to go to school for 4 or 5 years and then work for the next 30 without learning anything new. Or rather, not if you care about advancing and making more money. Maybe I'm lucky that I actually enjoy it, so it doesn't feel so much like work to me.

I'm a bit confused what you're arguing against in my point - you continue to super specialize in your off time. If you wanted to switch vocations from something in the CS domain, how much of what you now know and have self-taught would apply?

At my university engineers were offered two elective courses in the faculty of arts or sciences. That's not a particularly broad education.

A B Eng covers so much "basic" knowledge that you never really have time to specialize at anything. Doing physics and math courses is hardly becoming specialized in SE. It takes a long time and years of work afterwards to become specialized at something.

The good news is, you can do it without going back to school. IMO an SE will get little benefit out of going back for another degree. You'll get much more ROI spending your time contributing to OSS projects and making a name for yourself.

I think this is really dependent on your choice of field to enter into. In the tech space, so many engineers didn't major or necessarily even take CS courses in college. I have interviewed and hired plenty of people with diverse colligate focuses.

Sure, CS or STEM courses are probably really solid to pair with a non-CS major because it teaches you stuff that helps extend your abilities in your own field. So I can see why my friend that was going to school to be a nurse might have wanted to take a CS course or two instead of minoring in sociology.

CS, being still a bit of a wild west, still has flexibility, but you definitely couldn't take some nursing courses (which, let's be honest, aren't even offered) and switch to that after burning out in comp sci.

fair point.

At my school I was required to take many courses on broader topics. Personally I didn't like it, I took as many CS courses as I was allowed.

Yes, due to the vocational focus, the broader topics are often watered down introductions.

The courses I took were the same that anyone getting a major in that field would take, and I was required to take them beyond just an introductory level.

They were total jokes at my (admittedly) second-rate-at-best state school. Most of the gen-ed courses failed to go beyond material we'd covered back in 10th grade or so. The English courses were probably the nearest to being remotely "serious" since they at least expected writing and critical reading on a slightly-above-high-school level, usually pretty early in the course.

Yes by ultra focus on tech, we can provide a decent living, but lack the bigger picture and become the peons of those who know better, and can articulate their view clearly and logically.

E.g. look at any PG essay that tried to talk about broader philosophical or political issues and you'll see this limitation. His frame of reference is stuck in a recent enlightenment framing of the world. Granted, PG is indeed a great communicator in technical fields.

We were supposed to take "History of Technology" which I guess is supposed to be the corollary to "Business Math" classes or whatever. I really enjoy the humanities so I took all the real electives I could.

I found that studying philosophy has had an extremely useful application to software development and architecture.

I disagree. I went to a state University and it really made me a better person. I worked in groups with diverse group of people and while it was tough I enjoyed the experience. Plus, it wasn't really that expensive considering my income now and before.

However, I guess non-technical/engineering degrees have different results.

I had a good experience at undergrad, but that was due to its divergence from the norm. It actually gave me the broader perspective by having me read thousands of pages of the primary literature for the Western canon, along with in depth critical group discussions of the texts, and learning to write coherent papers. Nothing in my CS degree impacted my life, except making me marketable. Much of the CS I could have picked up on my own, and very little have I actually used in day to day jobs, except the programming experience. On the other hand, the literature program has indeed changed my life.

This seems to be a very unpopular thought within CS culture and I find that really unfortunate. It feels like people are rushing to reduce their education, their lives, to optimized market interactions and that's a terrible lens for a human life. There may be an argument that it's a method of successfully navigating our society, thus enriching one's personal or familial existence, but it seems to me that would just lead to a poor societal structure with few common bonds among the people within it.

It's a side effect of no safety net, knowing that the slightest mishap could put you into crippling debt. To stand still but for a moment is to be trampled by the masses.

By the time you are in a financially stable situation, old habits are ingrained.

I like how a liberal arts education is "divergent from the norm" now. The primary function of university is to make people read for four years. Business degrees, CS degrees, essentially job training programs are a bastardization of the institution.

I think the classic ideal of a liberal arts degree is awesome... as a second or mid-life degree. The option to read and think in-depth and breadth seems to have more potential once you've lived a little more than the average 18-yr-old, just because you tend to have more experiences and viewpoints than a high school grad heading to uni.

On the other hand, by that point, you'll have a bunch of habits and ways of thinking hardwired that you did not choose for yourself. It also becomes something of a Sapir-Worf dilemma, where it becomes very difficult to even realize one's thinking has been shaped in this way.

My experience of interacting with older, more stable 'intellectuals' who do not have a broad background of reading is an acquired indolence towards foreign ideas and older ideas, subsisting on a shallow 'tolerance' as a sign of their broad mindedness.

My particular liberal arts program is "divergent from the norm," including modern liberal arts programs. Just about all programs, liberal arts or otherwise, are completely framed within an enlightenment view of reality, largely due to dogmatic materialism. Classes that do diverge from materialism have lost a coherent way to talk about an alternate worldview, leaving their terminology sounding very wishy washy and illogical, like a woo woo Deepak Chopra.

Off topic but that still sounds like it's framed within the enlightenment period. If you're reading books and valuing literacy, (ie individual interpretations of texts, as opposed to being told what a book means) then you're still framed within the "enlightenment view of reality."

By 'enlightenment' I'm referring to a particular worldview perpetuated to denigrate the Western tradition and broader philosophical outlook in favor of a focus on empirical sciences and radically egalitarian social mores. The basic idea of 'enlightenment' is there is no objective and learnable purpose to the natural world and human society, and instead once we learn how to manipulate the natural world we can subject it to whatever ends we desire. In general it results in an implicit rejection of the ontology and teleology discovered by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. This rejection may be valid, but students are not even given a clear view on the matter so that they know what they are rejecting. Instead, they tend to be educated in the criticisms offered by enlightenment writers, and filter the rest of history through that very limited lens.

It's strangely refreshing to see this particular criticism of the Enlightenment; I'm much more accustomed to hearing criticisms from the postmodernist direction. I disagree with your statement in a previous post that their arguments are incoherent, particularly the early exponents like Foucault or some of the Frankfurt school. I'd also point out that much of the Enlightenment tradition is not ontologically materialistic; in particular, German Idealism embodied in Kant, Schopenhauer etc. stands against materialism.

Based on what you're saying here, are you arguing for a kind of Scholasticism?

Finally, your criticism of a "radically egalitarian" view is somewhat perplexing to me. Would you mind expanding on that point?

In my opinion the idealistic variant of the enlightenment is conceptually not significantly different from materialism. The big thing is rejection of teleology, which also results in the radical egalitarianism since there is no longer a purposeful ordering to reality and no longer a natural law.

And yes, a teleological philosophy like scholasticism makes the most sense if we are trying to figure out the best way to live. Otherwise we just end up with the specious word game philosophy that everyone hates

That's sortof what the enlightenment was about... The enlightenment period was a decentralization of information caused by the reinvention and widespread use of the printing press in europe. During the dark ages europe's literacy rate was comparable to pre-mesopotamia. The fall of the roman empire lead to a fracturing of european civilization, the near-total loss of literacy, latin fractured into a dozen languages because priests wrote and read at a first grade level, misspelling words, reading with one finger slowly scrolling the text, mouthing each word phonetically...Ancient Greek texts were completely lost for a time...

Because nobody could read and copies the bible were sparse the catholic church was the single source of word of god. The printing press changed things. The bible became widespread and people read the bible for themselves. With that came an important shift, that one's own interpretation of a text was a valid interpretation. Tons of important literary works became widespread. The middle class valued literacy and saw it as a ticket to wealth and began teaching their kids to read and write competitively at younger and younger ages. They invented the education system we have today; the entire idea of a sequential learning system based around books, and becoming an adult when you could read at a certain level (as opposed to the catholic belief that you were an adult when you were old enough to fight at age ten), that was also the enlightenment and romantic period. Protestantism came about because people valued individual interpretations of the bible, which the catholic church had serious qualms with since that was their entire claim to authority...

So the fact that you grew up in a family which valued literacy, which sent you to a university where you spent four years reading books, and then came out of that with your own valid and rational ideas about what those texts mean, and your rite of passage into adulthood is based on your ability to read and write at a university level, that is still very much framed in the values of the enlightenment.

The precise narrative you just articulated is that of the enlightenment in the 18th century, which is a period much latter than the invention of the printing press and Protestantism.

A good book for you to check out is Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God", written by a secular historian debunking much of the above narrative.

The fact that many educated today take your narrative for unarguable fact also illustrates the problem. The 'enlightenment' narrative is ironically very self limiting.

The brutality of the dark ages has been debunked. The timeline I just gave you about illiteracy, the printing press, the enlightenment, and our 400 year old education system remains in tact. Neil postman's a good source for the history of education (see "The Disappearance of Childhood") or you can simply wikipedia it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) There's some graphs that show how the enlightenment coincides an exponential growth in mass publication.

As far as protestantism and the printing press being invented prior to the enlightenment, yeah. Without widespread use of both you don't get the enlightenment for reasons I mentioned previously. And neither were really new ideas, either. Ancient greece had the printing press, high rates of literacy and a belief in interpreting texts for yourself, but these ideas were lost during the dark ages.

Hmm, I've received different information than yourself. There were more printed books, but that doesn't mean there was significantly less learning and literacy that came before, although a different proportion of the population was literate. And lack of general literacy does not necessarily entail lack of learning or understanding. For example, much of the iconography comes from that era, and the lay person was taught through imagery and liturgy, not necessarily to their detriment. As far as I know, the university system we know today came into being mostly within the context of Catholic Church's clericalism and much of the great philosophical synthesis came about during that time, especially with Thomas Aquinas.

At any rate, we are obviously referring to different things by the term 'enlightenment', definitely different historical epochs.

People going to university in order to get a good job are playing the wrong game. Anyone looking primarily at the "cost vs. future earnings" for any particular program or course in a university setting is

1. not going to find a good economic deal

2. not going to get any true value

3. not going to have fun

You're better to take a 2-year programming diploma or go into the trades if you want the highest short/midterm pay-off.

If you're playing a longer term strategic game and actually enjoy learning for the sake of growing (i.e. you do it on your own regardless) look at the career-long pay-off.

I went to community college but didn’t get my Associates because the final class was me paying to work in the computer lab. It was so mind numbing I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Yes, paying so much money is absurd. At least in many European countries higher level education is free.

In france, companies all pay quite a lot of money to some fund. The fund’s purpose is to finance employee education if they want to switch careers.

For instance, my friend was a mechanical engineer at Total, and after 3 years left to go study ML 1 year. Not only was the school all paid for by this fund, but the now student got a decent share of his salary everymonth. Best of best, he can go work for another company after his degree without any problem.

I thought that was a great idea. Although in practice, not every one is eligible to this particular program. I forgot how its called, CIFRE maybe

this particular degree isnt paid for by the government like the rest french education. Although it is taught at a very famous engineering school in france

The name got changed several times. CIFRE is a PhD course paid for by a company and subsidized by the state. So you get to do real work and get a PhD.

The thing you are thinking about is probably Compte Personnel de Formation (CPF) which was called Droit Individual à la Formation (DIF) a few years back.

Note that this is not some incredible sum of money, however a year in a classic STEM university costs a few hundred euros in France, so what you get from CPF is quite enough.

For five years of engineering school I spend about 3500 euros which included insurance. A full pension with private room costs a bit more than 300 euros per month. The difference with US education prices is just staggering.

You're correct but the difficulty is finding an alternative. Training employees who are then free to take their skills to another company that didn't bother with training gives that company the ability to lure workers away with higher salaries. There is a bit of tragedy of the commons in the skilled labor pool.

There is an old adage about this:

Q: What happens if we provide education and training to our employees and they leave?

A: Well, what happens if we don't, and they stay?

Growing a company's knowledge and skill base is an investment, not charity. Companies that don't do it reap exactly what they sow -- they're the same companies whose CEOs will otherwise loudly complain about how difficult it is to find skilled employees, especially at a senior level, and decry the terrible state of universities. As if everyone else just stumbles upon people with twenty years of experience in a particular niche on the street.

Yes, some people will leave. The smart thing to do is to convince as many of them to stay and to stay on good terms with those who leave. Keeping a loyal employee base whose knowledge and skills remain largely unchanged after joining the company doesn't provide any kind of meaningful growth.

HR loves to trot out this saying, attributing it to the enlightened CEO or such. In my experience it's about 50-50 if someone stays because we offer advanced training or leverages their new skills to get a new job.

Convincing them to stay means people need to be given competitive pay once they have upped their market value.

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to.” — Richard Branson

Well it's also a pool, meaning it rotates, you get some, lose some, get some, lose some, etc. Maybe a dev will take 2-3 jobs to learn the trade (PHP here, Js there, some fundamental web stuff to top it off, and here's your "professional-grade developer". Great.) But you get to hire equivalent devs at each step, then it's just about $/skill.

Now, if all companies made it part of their "offer" to train people "enough" (say, 1d/w), then you'd expect all the workforce to become more qualified, better in time and in age.

You could actually pay/recover the "investment" of training the equivalent of university/grad/postgrad/etc for all employees simply by the fact that everyone else would do it too (and it would certainly lower wages a bit for the early years of these newcomers, since they'd skip the idling 20's decade of many youths currently).

I don't know, it's clearly not something you could do overnight or even over a generation, it's likely to be deeper and more 'revolutionary' than that in people's minds; but mathematically, economically, it tends to make sense (we've done that for years with "guilds" and "companions" in the medieval ages and actually since forever in some trades).

I think the current mainstream / massive education (take hundreds, thousands, and grad them each year) is just the result / need of industrialization (requiring an educated workforce), a novelty of the late 19th and 20th century.

I think the cursor is moving and the explosion of alternative means and times/ages of learning is a strong indicator of that.

One approach that reduces the tragedy of the commons:

Some places require spending a certain percentage of payroll on training by law, failing which the employer must pay the difference to a government training fund. I live in the Canadian province of Quebec which is such a place. I think at least one major tech city in the US has a similar law, though I'm not sure.

Won't it mechanically increase skilled people's wages?

up until the moment you realised that your very specific skill is not that worth much more elsewhere.

Plumbers and electricians don’t go to school for multiple years to learn a trade, they apprentice - learning on the job, until they get to the point where they propel themselves forward.

Well, no (or at least I guess it depends which educational system you are talking about).

On a few educational systems, you have dedicated curriculums for technicians and artisans/craftmen, with theory in classes, practice in labs and internship on the job.

Even if learning on the job is a big part (roughly half of the training), it's not purely that.

they apprentice after become a [trade]-apprentice. If you're brand new you go to school & do a mix of lab work and on-the-job placements.

The key (which I think you're making) is that once you're an apprentice you learn by doing and get paid.

> You ever think about how much we subsidize businesses by paying for college ourselves?

1. Generally, education leads to productivity. 2. College education is typically tranferrable -- learning CS topics improves worker productivity regardless of who they work for. 3. Education is sticky to the individual; it can't be repo'd (or confiscated by fascists / nazis). 4. Employers generally try to match wages to productivity. Even if they pay as little as possible, in a fair market they will have to be prepared to bid close to worker productivity or lose out to a competitor who will.

Given these factors, I think the status quo is going to do a better job optimizing things than requiring employers to pay for training. When deciding who should bear the costs of training, it's appropriate to remember who the benefits accrue to. It's not only fair, but also ensures the incentives are aligned. When the topic is general and tranferable, the benefits of training largely accrue to the trainee.

Which is why I'm sitting in a training class about how our software works and code review culture, and not one about Python or Go.

The state de-funding of the university is great for corporations in a lot of ways. First, as you note, it's a way of getting you to pay for your own job training.

It's also a clever way for tech companies to externalize a lot of their R&D costs—because academic labs often rely on private grant funding more than the state, corporations can determine research priorities by extending grants, and then have the costs of that research partially subsidized by tuition-paying students!

This is an interesting talk on the subject. Haven't listened to it in a while but it really shaped my thinking about the university while I was a student: https://wearemany.org/a/2014/06/fall-of-faculty

Not to undercut your point too much, but no one comes out of university learning about the latest and greatest tech unless they went to a graduate program where they did research in tech. They may have played around with it more on their own time, but most universities aren't teaching cutting edge stuff.

And yet so many dev interviews are focused on the things that they grill you on in CS classes for four years, yet most devs will then hardly touch for the rest of their careers.

You are correct. But that also frees us to study what we want. Which is why some people end up studying Liberal Arts and have very little employable market demand.

When corporations start sponsoring degrees you will see a lot less "fluff" in those forms of higher education.

I’m amazed to hear this from programmers. You can learn this for free, anywhere, at any time.

I’m no longer in software and when I want to upgrade my skills, I’m doing it on my own time and my own dime. Often doubly so if I have to take time off work (hourly) for training.

There is a difference between:

  1. learning outside of work for your own personal enjoyment;
  2. learning for professional growth and;
  3. for professional needs.

Category 1 is where learning for free, at anytime is valuable, you are doing it as a hobby or as a personal curiosity, so taking your own time for that is fun and enjoyable.

Category 2 is murky, I've definitely done a lot of studying on my own dime to improve myself or learn technologies I could apply on my day-to-day work but... When I could I did it on company's time, on this category I'm using my time for something that will have a direct return to the company, if I can get paid for it I'd always choose so.

Category 3 SHOULD NEVER be done on your own time.

This mentality of needing to use your own time to do any kind of professional development only fosters the race to the bottom, where you are required to use your own time to improve yourself because the company you work for is only interested in extracting maximum value out of your billable hours...

I agree that in the parent's comment case they could have used some of their free time to improve their backend skills and then try a lateral move in their job but it shouldn't make you "amazed" that someone isn't willing to sacrifice their free time to earn a little bit more of salary while their company extracts a higher multiple out of that same work.

> I’m amazed to hear this from programmers. You can learn this for free, anywhere, at any time.

Some people are more passionate about their jobs than others no matter the discipline.

I love my job but it's still just something I do to fund my actual dreams/passion. Why would I spend more time on it than I need to when I already feel like I don't have enough time for my own interests?

Your time isn't free. Doubly so when you are spending it to benefit someone else.

Well, not doing it on your own time is the exact point of the article linked. I mean, if you want to pivot into a completely different career in a completely different company you should do it on your own, sure, but GP wants to change position within the same company, and wants to move in an understaffed department. Why should they do it on their time and dime?

Well maybe talk to the backend lead at the same time. His own team lead <> the company and the company might not even realize it. From the pov of his own team lead, it might be a purely damaging move (has to find alternative, has to explain to upper management, etc.).

TBH I wouldn't expect any manager (especially it's just a lead, not even a mgr) to sacrifice for my own benefit. I thank them and provide material reward if they do, but I'm 100% with them (and study on my own, then leave the company) if they don't. It has to be mutually beneficial, or at least looks like. So my feeling is that both OP and his team leader are not good at communication.

I do too, but in a large amount of cases the skills I want to learn in my own time often only tangentially relate to the skills I maybe should acquire to become a better worker at my current job. Unrelated stuff like painting, modeling and playing an instrument. Most of it is still software related, but not specifically to my job. Getting that out of your head from time to time seems to help. Of course there are compromises, but certainly not most of the time.

If companies want efficient and capable workers, they have to be willing to train themselves. We are < 500 people and are currently building a training center just for that purpose (not software focused). Granted, a culture where job hopping is common, that can come at a steep price.

Isn't capital expenditure usually the company's responsibility? If you wanted to have nothing but opex you would rent all of your equipment and hire contractors - but that would get expensive quick.

Though paying an engineer to learn a new skill is not going to be capex on a financial statement. If it was companies would be more willing to do it.

You can do stuff on your own time, especially if it's pretty much orthogonal to your day job. But I expect any job to include material time for relevant/adjacent training. Otherwise, it's in the same category as hiring manager expectations that you're working in open source in GitHub repos in your spare time.

I think spending about a third of my waking hours thinking about stupid computer shit is already plenty. If an employer doesn't want to help me use some of that time to get better at what I do, I bet someone else does.

I don't want to spend my time outside work hours developing skills needed for my job. That's effectively the job stealing my time and money.

And those who do, have a competitive edge over you. It's an investment in yourself that qualifies you to leave and find a better paying job.

Leaving and finding a better paying job is already Easy Enough after a few years at one place regardless.

I've got better ways to spend my time for my career and life than learning things for the benefit of my current employer.

If you end up in that spiral you will never get out of it, there will always be someone else working harder than you on improving some skill.

Time is the only thing you have in life, use it wisely and balanced.