Re: Management attitudes to Education (was COMMON rates )

Jon, you seem surprised by this.  Hans, you've hinted that you suspect you know 
what happens "out
there".  And, perhaps by virtue of working for a fine corporation such as IBM, 
you have come to
expect education as part and parcel of the work you do.

This is not the case in *most* of the "real world".  

Yes, there are the Dekko's of the world where the boss hands Leif's MI 
presentation to one of his
programmers, but I'd guess that these are, by far, the exception to the norm.  
Obviously, there
*are* companies that send people to COMMON.  BTW, anyone have a count of how 
many companies are
represented by visitors at the last few COMMONs?  (Don't count visitors who 
attend on their own
dime or who are employed by vendors working the show.)  Compare that number to 
the number of
companies in the country that employ AS/400 programmers.  I think the ratio 
would be telling.

In my experience, especially over the past ten years, most corporations treat 
IT strictly as a
cost center.  Some go as far as treating IT as a commodity, the lowest cost for 
the whole IT bag
wins.  As such, any approval for expenses that would be incurred to improve an 
IT employee's skill
set would be laughed out the manager's door.  Well, I'm sure they do the 
laughing *behind* the
closed door; what the employee usually hears is "not in the budget right now".  
It never is with
these companies.  One company I worked for even verbally acknowledged that I 
needed training for a
new area, but never provided it, even though I drew up a convincing memo that 
provided the
rationale for doing so.

Re: Jon's story about the boss who reverse-engineered the RPG-IV pgm back to 
RPG-III.  A few years
ago, I wrote a new, simple program in RPG-IV.  Everything in this shop was 
RPG-III, except for one
program that did a lot of complex string manipulation.  The new program I wrote 
could just as
easily been written in RPG-III, but it was so simple that any RPG-III 
programmer could have
understood it.  Didn't matter, I got called on the carpet for that 
transgression and had to
rewrite it back to RPG-III, which took maybe five minutes.  I should have not 
been surprised when
it came up in my annual review as a negative.

And, yes, I have worked for a company that expected that I still get the full 
40 hours of "real"
work in, despite attending a half-day user group presentation on a topic that 
we were exploring
for use in our shop.

I no longer work for those companies.

Even though I am currently working for a good company (we use RPG-IV, 
modules!!!, some Java, we're
actually on the current release, we do code reviews and test our work using 
test plans, and
company as a whole does well on benefits), I have given up trying to do 
anything associated with
education like COMMON or any other seminar that requires travel.  No one here 
subscribes to any
AS/400 trade rags except for me.  The best they'll do here is get the ATS 
tutorials.  Still, I
consider this company to be one of the better ones i've worked for in my twenty 
years in this
career, which includes between 30 & 50 companies I've done contracting work for 
or been employed
with.

I've become more and more cynical with this career choice over the past several 
years.  Can you
tell?

- Dan

--- Jon Paris <Jon.Paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  >> Omigawd!?! That's got to be the most depressing and disturbing thing
> I've read since returning back to work from my LOA.
> 
> I agree with you Hans - although I don't find it as disturbing as the story
> told to me by one programmer who returned from vacation to find that his
> boss has reverse engineered his nice RPG IV program back into RPG III
> because "he couldn't understand it".  How one can understand well enough to
> reverse engineer but not to maintain remains a mystery to me!  If that were
> an isolated story it would be bad enough - but similar tales have been told
> by others on this list.
> 
> My feeling is that if the manager is prepared to pay for _any_ education he
> should be able to provide it in a form that he finds acceptable.  So his
> "rules" re what the education should comprise are somewhat restrictive.
> Better that than the poor devils I met a few weeks back who had to return to
> work after a User Group meeting because attending and educational seminar
> didn't count as "work"!

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com