Home time is personal time. Here I deal with family, chores and self-connection. If you want me to learn stuff and be better and my job you will have to give me time, company time, for that. We are not machine.
In France it is mandatory for the company to give time for training. Thanks unions.
Counterpoint: if you want to stay relevant in technology and be above regular level, you gotta have the passion for it and that implies doing your homework.
Look at it from another perspective. If you want to play a guitar in a band for money, you don’t require the band to give you “time to learn”. You learn on your own time.
If you don’t want to learn, you become irrelevant and get replaced.
You think doctors/nurses do homework? They go to paid courses/conferences all the time to stay up-to-date on the latest medical techniques. Hospitals have entire teaching departments for that kinda stuff. Why should it be different for engineers?
My late father was a physician and he absolutely stayed up late doing homework. He'd study for hours before an usual case.
I remember as a kid helping him swap out the latest updates to these massive binders of the latest and greatest info in medicine, which were expensive subscriptions he paid for. They'd send sections of text and instructions on what pages to remove and replace with the update so you'd always have the most current information.
Now we have web-based solutions that do the same thing, and they're often not free, either.
How is that related? That can already happen if a company decide to have this approach. See also companies that have PIP targets.
Presumably companies have a good idea of employees' skill sets when they hire them, or they terminate the contract by the end of the probation period, so they can also plan for this necessary learning.
It’s related in the sense that if your set of skills becomes irrelevant, you get replaced. Want to keep your job then learn the things reqiured to keep your job.
Say you’re a truck driver. You have your license to drive a truck and every year you need to do your vision test to keep your license. If one day you have to buy glasses, well, tough luck - they come out of your pocket. Otherwise you can’t drive and your employer cannot put you on a truck.
What's wrong with those two? I'm genuinely interested, software engineers are overpaid as is with benefits that nearly every other industry can only dream about and you're upset about not being able to put extra 5 hours of time a week to improve your skills related to something that's your career?
And we wonder why quality of everything is awful and why people are unreliable and entitled.
> software engineers are overpaid as is with benefits that nearly every other industry can only dream about
Then why do companies keep on paying these salaries? Besides, that doesn’t really apply outside of unicorns and SV. I’ve been doing this for a while and have never had catered lunches or dry cleaning etc provided by my employers.
Also, what are you comparing to? Professional athletes or traders are overpaid compared to SE. if you compare to burger flippers then it doesn’t make sense either.
Accountants are paid quite well for instance. Their employers pay for their time and expenses when they go to a seminar and keep their skills up to date. Why should it be any different for SE?
You’re missing the point. It’s that companies shouldn’t expect employees to improve themselves for the companies benefit on their own time. Not that employees shouldn’t improve themselves for their own benefit on their own time if they want to. Ergo if companies expect employees to work specifically to get better at their jobs they should provide resources and training in work time as its part of the job itself.
well after education usually salary can be upgraded, so it’s a benefit for employee. if employee does not educate himself, he may stay the same level with no salary bumps. sucks for both parties I guess?
> This attitude where employees sit like bags of potatoes waiting for knowledge to permeate their brains via osmosis is awful.
I think you misunderstand. A person who is getting paid is already useful. That is why they were hired. By studying you want them to be more useful and that is an extra demand over their contract.
But if things changes and you no longer need their services then should you just fire them? Telling the employee that they can keep their job if they update their skills is a nice thing to do, it is much better than just firing them without giving them a chance.
You're paying your employee because they are suitable at this moment. Expecting someone to study in their free time is nonsense. If you want that you either need to pay for it or allow study time during the work time.
I want to provide service to clients that we're paid for. I want staff to actually know what they claim they know. I want to deliver so we can all get paid and go home and do whatever else interests us.
That's what I want.
But I'm the proxy between staff, clients and government. So when I stay up late every night in order to reconcile all the warring parties, the comment I get is "pay more if you want to get more".
Or I could not deal with entitled underskilled staff, right? That's also a viable option? Why beg people to sharpen their craft if they don't want to? I might be old fashioned and I might take pride in what I do because I want to do it to the best of my abilities. I might have wrongly assumed that the rest of fellow programmers are similar to that, but it seems not.
I doubt highly skilled modern workers would want to work for someone with the attitude expressed. Those people have options and working for a company that has a one-sided old-fashioned attitude that refuses to train them for the companies chosen development stack would be foolish.
This reads as "My work-life balance sucks, but rather than fight for improvement, I'm going to complain about how others have it so good."
You sound like you live to work rather than work to live. It's a sad way to live your life. Years from now, you'll be on your death bed wishing you allowed yourself to relax a bit and have more fun.
exactly, you are paying for current skills. If employer is fine with current skills, and employee wants a better salary, which would require new skills, who should make effort?
>software engineers are overpaid as is with benefits that nearly every other industry can only dream about
Maybe in some parts of America. Even highly paid developers generally do work that not many people outside of the industry can't do (though I encourage everyone I know to try programming).
In my mind software developers and other tech workers are one of the driving forces of human development, though not quite so much as those working on the forefront of technology (ie proper engineering/research and development). The industry I hold in the highest regard is the medical industry; doctors are just amazing and I appreciate what they do and their importance (fair warning that this is a non-American/public healthcare perspective).