Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 59: Buying Training and Unrelated Experience

Episode Date: May 11, 2017

Thanks to all the people who pointed us to the Single Level of Abstraction Principle which we obliquely referred to in episode 57. We answer these two questions: How can I convince management to pay for developer training? Should I mention unrelated experience on an application?

It takes more than great code to be a great engineer. This is Soft Skills Engineering episode 59. I'm your host Dave Smith. I'm your host Jameson Dance. Soft Skills Engineering is an advice podcast for developers and aspiring developers and retired developers and people who want to destroy software development. They just hate it and are trying to bring it down, I guess, but we'll give you bad advice because we will not support you in your goals. Actually, i changed my hairdo recently for the first time in maybe 15 years oh wow and i'm going for like the slicked back draco malfroy look and i feel i feel a little bit more evil doesn't you have like a jacket with big collars they come up next to your head uh not yet but it's like the bad guy

from the 80s movies hairdo i don't know my wife likes it or depending on the 80s movie the good guy yeah okay that's true it's a definitely 80s it supports a wide spectrum of ideologies it's inclusive it is yeah all right uh let's see i have a comment here to share from a listener who wrote in with an interesting story uh this is from listener nate it's oddly specific by the way this opening opening sentence um october 9th 2013 uh nate did not include a time but i'm going to guess this was about 3 p.m uh captain's law center october 9 2013 the company i was working at closed with no forewarning there were six of us and they paid us through the end of the month because of my network i had a job eight days later and had offers from just about every

place i interviewed four years before that i wouldn't have ever thought of building a network and it wasn't even something i set out to do but as i did freelance i met some people as i worked at a company i met other people as i interviewed people for open positions i met recruiters and they all helped me out three and a half years later i have the best job i've ever had i get to help define my own career here i've created new initiatives like coaching that the entire company has adopted networking without me even realizing i was networking changed my professional life thanks nate cool it worked out i think sometimes we we think of networking as like a like a slimy ulterior motive thing to do like you're taking advantage of your friendships

yeah i was just thinking that it's it feels like we need a different word that has different connotations because you just meet people at work and at work related things and it turns out you work with those people later on maybe we could call it linkedinning linkedinning yeah what if we turn it into uh like uh you're like mining your friendships like a resource what if we call it like friend fracking or something hydrofracking for friends and profit yeah anyways thank you i'm glad that worked out thanks for sharing that we also have a comment about uh an episode a couple weeks ago where we mentioned that kind of keep all the things at the same level of abstraction like in a meeting right yeah in a meeting it turns out that does have a name and

it's called the single level of abstraction principle and a bunch of smart people linked us to to uh references to that which we will share in the show notes so thank you yeah that's cool also that one is a cool acronym slap yeah slap i'll just say it randomly in meetings and pretend like everyone knows already what it means make sure to remember slap and then just continue on and if you say it forcefully enough uh no one will question you because they'll be scared of what slap means yeah and then maybe that will keep the meeting efficient anyways i don't want to get slapped so i'm gonna shut up yeah i guess all right i will read the first question this is from a listener boyan do you have any tips on how i can sell management on training for example

buying course licenses going to conferences etc it seems like no one in my current company sees the value of developers going to conferences while some people from the marketing department are at a conference right now oh that's the best part yeah it's like hey can i go to a conference no there's no budget for that why is marketing at a conference shut up and go back to your desk why aren't you working on your jira tickets seems like if you were really doing your job you'd be too busy to ask questions i think this question is interesting partially because the topic is interesting but also because is to stand in for how do i convince management to do something that i think is valuable that they

do not understand the value of like refactoring pair programming uh pushing back on deadlines whatever like there's the specifics yeah installing a ball pit um installing two ball pits there's the specifics and then there's the general skill of like convincing people who aren't developers to to do things that you think are good things that are intuitively obvious to you but no one wants to give you them yeah i think we've talked about profit and cost centers on the show before dave but it's been a while um have you heard of those oh yeah do you want to define them for me so i can just piggyback off of your knowledge i just said i had heard of them they were i've heard those words

yeah if you put them next to each other they make different words that mean something so traditionally parts of the company make money like sales could be a profit center because they sell your product to clients and bring in money and then there might be like hr which could be a cost center because they don't directly bill or bring in revenue um they they take in money and then produce value in other ways but it's not the the output isn't like higher numbers of revenue and why are they called centers uh what else would they be called i don't know like maybe like a profit bullseye and a loss bullseye or like profit like are you thinking of like a collective now kind of like a murder of ravens or whatever like a profit gaggle a giant bag of money of

profit and a black hole of cost or something yeah that's i like those metaphors better okay it's a lot easier for companies to spend money on profit centers because they can more easily say like if we give the sales people a higher limit on their credit card they bring in more money in sales yeah yeah it depends on the company but sometimes software can be a cost center because you just pay them money and they do stuff and that indirectly affects your bottom line so some of it could just be the dynamics of your company like marketing could be on the sales side and they have a higher budget because they bring in money and and software costs money and salary and benefits and stuff like that and even if you do think of software development as a profit center

where you're building product that can be sold for revenue um it's probably hard to see the direct correlation between investing and training and conferences for developers and what the outcome of that will be in terms of profit or revenue right like if i send my developers to a conference it's pretty clear what the loss is right or what the cost is i'm going to pay for the airfare i'm going to pay for a hotel and for the conference ticket and i'm going to pay for three or four days of lost productivity and lost engineering output but what do i get in return well dave as someone who runs a conference let me tell you what you get incalculable value the numbers are literally so big computers can't hold them

yeah that's why it's hard to communicate to management about it it's like the black hole of profit that's that's a good point i mean there are lots of kinds of training and investing in developers besides conferences conferences are really great for uh like hearing about new things and meeting people and they often have workshops around them which you can really dive down into and get training i have found that in most conference talks i i kind of like learn about stuff to dig into i don't come back and say like wow that talk really helped me solve problem x i've been having it's like now i know what to google instead of right now i know the solution now i know how to get started yeah they're they're great for exposing me to a wider variety of things

but they're not necessarily outrageously practical most of the time because that's not i don't know i kind of expect conferences to be a little showier than that and a little more like they have a little more pizzazz i don't know how to say it more pizzazz less substance less not substance i mean it's not it's not substance it's like less that there's the there's the spectrum of pragmatism to like showmanship i guess and they're kind of a little more on the showmanship and and like yeah cutting edge side and less on the like we have 10 million lines of java code that all depends on this one file like how do we refactor this i don't know all the nitty-gritty like boots on the ground business software problems you have it's almost

like a little bit more on the entertainment side actually i would say in some cases yeah in some cases which is great i like to be entertained by software me too but it's a little bit hard to sell your boss because you may as well say i want to go to a movie theater for three days and watch movies will you support that yeah no i i don't think it's purely this might be a tangent um but and also i'm super biased because i run a conference that everyone should go to because it's amazing it's called react rally and you will learn and benefit and become a better human being and better software developer but i think the entertainment is is not just entertainment for entertainment's sake it's like seeing what is new and exciting about your field and generally

what is new and exciting is is a little bit further out from what you can use in your day job that's true and i don't know there's a chance that it will be a preview of what is coming and you can kind of get up to speed early but some of it will just like never i don't know some new and exciting stuff never comes to pass so that's true or it might just install permanent envy in your heart for the people who get to use the new stuff yeah well the new stuff will always change there will always be someone using newer stuff that you can't use you want to talk about training like the courses yeah i mean there's lots of things besides conferences because aside from ignore the whole conversation about how valuable our conferences really they are really expensive um you can get

a subscription to like plural site or egghead or front end masters or any of these like online video training sites for way cheaper than that and you don't have to cover travel it takes up less time you can like squeeze it in in between your tasks yeah and some people get i would say for practical like problem solving those those might be um a lot more useful because they cover very pragmatic things it's like how do i use this specific tool yeah exactly to solve this specific problem yeah um so so there's there's also a large spectrum of ways you can invest in training conferences aren't the only way i think when it comes to online training courses it's basically a no-brainer if one of your developers says i want to get this license and it's going to cost a few

hundred bucks a year it's like just write the check it's like they're going to learn it's going to be very focused stuff they'll be able to search for material that's directly relevant to their work just write the check like any manager that puts up a fight about that i'd be surprised i mean i think you have to consider their perspective they're just seeing a developer ask for money and they need to see some return on investment i feel like we've danced around that but that's like the magic thing you're going for why don't we go there let's go right okay right to the return on investment uh the company will do it because it's good for them they're not i don't know companies companies are weird creatures that don't do anything out of the goodness of their

heart so you need to convince them that it is good for them to have you learn more and be a better developer you can use things like um metrics which this starts to get difficult to measure but you might be able to measure how much time you and your team are spending thrashing looking for solutions and then backtracking when you find bad stuff or you when you discover that the path you've gone down is suboptimal and if you can measure that and then say look if we had some some of this course material we could probably focus our efforts a little better and just go down one path and agree on patterns instead of having to like each be going a million directions or wasting time backing out changes that turned out to be bad stuff like that yeah looking at

bugs and and architecture problems that caused you to to spend more time than you expected um often this can also come as a team picks a new technology so say you're building a new project or migrating a project to a new thing you pick the thing and then like you want to make sure you're productive in it so um it's it's relatively easy at that point to justify we need to invest a couple hundred bucks in getting better at it it'll make us build way faster but i think both i think both these things have at their heart is that you as the person asking for this need to know why you're asking it do you really need this training and how do you know is it just a feeling did you see some advertising you know what is the actual benefit and until you can quantify that you

really shouldn't go asking for it yeah i i think people have different philosophies about this some people think um your job as an employee is to do the work of the company and if you want to get better at stuff that isn't directly related to the company you kind of do that on your own time some people think that you should invest in making your developers better no matter what and that'll keep them around and it'll create like a culture of excellence kind of you know and and those are just different values yeah yeah if you if you can sell it to your manager as if we become known as this place that really invests in developers that helps them train and become better and helps them learn new things people stick around people want to work here it'll

be easier to hire we'll have uh we'll get smarter and better work done also but it's kind of like the culture we want to create but again you have to you have to convince them that that's a thing they want and it's worth the price yeah what about on-site trainers who actually come to your company and spend a couple days with you um i have done that for someone you were the trainer or you were the trainee yeah i was the trainer and i think i sucked at it um i've never had it i've never been part of a training um but i've been around teams that have and they seem to really like it i don't know it's it's cheaper than conferences overall it's generally like more expensive as a one-off thing but you don't have to pay for travel or hotel or anything

you think it's cheaper um i think it's only cheaper if you have enough participants yeah that's what i mean like a conference is probably going to be a few thousand bucks including travel and hotel and the ticket which will be the smaller part of the cost and a trainer might be like 10 grand or something oh yeah so yeah at least it could be tens of thousands of dollars so if you have 50 engineers who are going to benefit from it and you can start dividing that cost among the engineers it starts to be pretty good but i still think the cost um could be close to conference costs if you divvy it out per engineer sounds like i undercharged well i think i think most trainers do actually uh who are just starting out like it's a pretty lucrative market

uh yeah i don't know i've never been a part of one it feels like like in-person training is as far as you can get on the super pragmatic boots on the ground like help you with your day job thing because someone is like looking at your code and and the benefit of them being there in person is they can answer questions and yeah and talk about specifics and video trainings are all uh very pragmatic and specific but there's not much interaction exactly exactly i want to play devil's advocate for just a minute so as engineers we have to learn new stuff all the time some new technology comes out some new market emerges or whatever you've got to be able to jump on that and get up to speed do you think that we should depend on trainers conferences

and online like paid training material to ramp up on new technologies that is a great question i don't think we should depend on it for the cutting edge stuff it feels like the role of conferences is to expose you to new things but if there were no conferences it would be a lot harder to hear about like the new rising javascript framework or serverless or containers or kubernetes or all these like kind of newish technologies and they kind of diffuse through the developer consciousness from people speaking about them at conferences over and over again but you don't learn about them at conferences really true you just learn what they are yeah i don't know i look like i'm kind of thinking of the tools that i use day to day and it's like you know

there's operating system stuff there's source control stuff there's editors there's frameworks libraries programming languages um infrastructure tools like if i had to do like a multi-day training on each of those things as i learned them and pick up new ones i would probably spend like a third of my time just training and and so what i do instead is i kind of learn things on demand and honestly pretty superficially just to get the job done that i need to get done it sounds like we should talk about return on investment dave oh you can totally learn all this stuff on your own if you have help from someone theoretically that help makes it so you learn them much faster and then you struggle less you get through the gotchas you learn about all

the weird little stuff that would trip you up learning on your own okay so i don't think i mean i don't think you need it like you could just go read the linux source code that's good training instead you could read the blog post that someone who wrote the who read the linux source code wrote for you or you could pay the guy who wrote the you could pay linus torvalds to come to your office i think the only thing you could pay him to do is like come slap you in the face i don't know what he would do all right i mean there's there's one more issue about conferences you mentioned them specifically there's one more issue that we didn't talk about which is something that often happens when people go to conferences and what's that besides

getting amazing food free hotel have yeah just have the time of their life um sometimes they quit their job and get a new one at the conference like you meet you meet someone they have a great company yeah yeah you run into like some programming hero and they're like oh you seem super cool come work with me and then the company that sent you has now sent you to a new job hooray on their dime yeah yeah they they probably don't love that i mean yeah one of the purposes of conferences is to network and networking gets you different jobs as our first comment so this is this is not a theoretical situation like jameson and i have both seen this happen yep for sure yeah as a conference organizer it makes me happy um because we're like connecting

people and making people's lives better but if if the company sent you to the conference only to lose you as after they invested in you then they would be sad so you might want to bring that up with management to say look i know that you might be worried about me getting another job but i promise to avoid being recruited maybe they weren't worried until you mentioned it they were like oh that can happen that's another reason we're not gonna pay for you what no one is ever going to conferences ever again all right question answered i think so question answered question answered okay do you want to read our next question yeah sure um this one comes from an anonymous listener and it says my recruiter thinks that he may be able to get me an interview in the

next few weeks for a junior developer position at a major health insurance provider a little over five years ago i took and passed three actuarial exams this is a significant achievement is this something that i should put on my resume or mention in an interview i'm afraid that the elephant in the room will be why don't i have an actuarial job my degree is listed as being in mathematics with the emphasis in actuarial science omitted employers in actuarial science are interested in people with a near perfect academic record and my journey through university was long and winding with lots of self-discovery that is such a good way to say that you didn't get a perfect academic record i'm gonna i'm gonna cop that that's a good one i'm gonna start saying that

you might have a future in marketing actually my journey to weight loss was long and winding with lots of self-discovery about oreos oh that we don't mean any offense here i think that's actually you know your story is obviously your story and we have no uh it's not a fat joke no no no not at all how will your employer know what a significant accomplishment getting an act or passing the actuarial exam is i would have no idea yeah me neither if someone just listed like passed the actual aerial exam, I'd be like, okay, is that like the driver's ed test where you should read it for 10 minutes and then you pass it? I think that's going to be the biggest challenge you have is translating the achievements that you've completed and the effort

you put in into the only thing the potential employer cares about, which is, will you do a good job and produce value for me and my company? Yeah. So if you want them to know it's a big deal, you would have to kind of explain it to them like pass this exam which most people don't pass and shows that i'm real good at numbering or i don't yeah i don't know what's involved in it so i i actually have interviewed someone who was an actuary for a software developer position um they did pretty good in the interview they uh they had been pretty well in the interview dave i passed the english exam you're an english actuary yep they did english excuse me they did pretty well in the interview they were self-taught completely in software development and it was obvious that

they were pretty smart um we didn't talk about the actuarial experience at all in fact uh i had no i didn't know anything about it my boss though he was interviewing and he knew that was a big deal um so if i hadn't had that input from my boss i would have just written it off as completely irrelevant non-transferable experience and i wouldn't have even considered it as something that makes them smart which usually when you're hiring engineers you're looking for a level of smartness is that a word jameson i don't know the exam didn't cover that ah what do i do so i think from my uh understanding of this and my experience hiring people if they have non-trans non-directly transferable experience um what the only thing you want to communicate is that

you're smart and you can't just say i'm smart you have to somehow you have to somehow explain the data points that support that and let the interviewer come to that conclusion on their own it'll be more more ingrained that way listen dave let me tell you something about myself i'm pretty smart i'm really smart i don't think i've ever heard a smart person say that to me by the way i think there are transferable skills but you need to explain why they are transferable if you come from a career that is not software i think it's helpful to have a story about why you moved into software why you moved away from your old career and why that will give you a unique advantage often that can be uh advantages in people skills and communication where you had

to work a lot more directly with other people your work wasn't as much kind of like sitting alone crafting this code artifact but there can be other benefits too but but those are not obvious to people like dave said yeah and part of your job is to use that to show the value that you have uh i assume if you pass the actuarial exam you you could probably say something about how like you did the numbers on the career in act in actuarial science and they sucked or something i don't know yeah i used my skills that i used to pass the exam to determine that the career was bad that's a good idea just let me just give like a silly example to help illustrate how hard it is to communicate that your skills in an unrelated field could translate to software development

like let's say you're applying for a position to go work on ruby on rails web application but you're really good at organic chemistry and and that's what you're that's the only thing you have to draw on imagine yourself sitting in a chair across from the interviewer and saying look i can identify like the methane and the butane and the octane so fast i'm going to be really good at ruby on rails you know like it's just it just doesn't really come across so i think rather than trying to transfer your experience and and like shoehorn it into software development show them what through their interview process that you're good at software development and then explain that you're smart by describing these other things from your past um i can't tell if

we're saying the same thing or disagreeing no i think i think we're agreeing okay i took organic chemistry i haven't heard what you're about to say though so okay sorry i feel really dumb now i took organic chemistry and it was like this it was like there was a veil in my brain that prevented me from seeing the the knowledge of organic chemistry there's some mental block or something it was the hardest class i ever took i failed it once and then took it again to like barely pass it so i wouldn't have an f on my transcript uh so if someone told me they were good at organic chemistry i would think they were basically a wizard or a sorceress and they could do anything yeah and and they were capable of inhuman feats of of knowledge and productivity

I mean yeah I don't know what being a working organic chemist is like I remember the class was a lot of like visualization and spatial reasoning and and stuff like that and that stuff can definitely help you in software design I completely lack it but uh some people have it and they use it to think about architecture or how code fits together or data structures or I don't know just thinking abstractly about um structure can can be helpful so is that kind what you're saying dave that you you can't just say like i combine the beakers and they make good they they turn lead into gold so therefore i will turn crappy code into good code you have to like pull the more generalizable skills out of your experience

i i think that that your story right now where you just said like because i'm good at these these chemical spatial visualizations and like putting problems together in that field that will mean that i'll be good at producing ruby on rails code for your company i think that if i was hearing that story i'd be like uh okay i don't believe you i just i just can't see it i can't really connect those dots oh man we have different ways of thinking about the world this is interesting that's never happened before i i don't think i would just believe it if someone was like well i've never done it but i believe that these skills will transfer but if they had a convincing story about how they used it as like a way to frame how they thought about code i think

that would be appealing to me because i believe that experiences outside of code can affect how you think about code and and give you metaphors and and kind of frameworks to solve problems beyond just like big o and all the very computing specific stuff you know maybe i'm just in a snarky mood right now but i'm thinking to myself if i were an interviewer i'd be like oh boy if we hire this organic chemist we're going to be in for a lot of chemistry metaphors if if someone had like a degree in literary analysis and they explained to me how that helped them deal with like the meaninglessness of vastly written enterprise code i would oh man i'd be all over that i would love that so much you know on the other hand i have worked with two maybe three

english majors as developers and they were excellent i mean their code was so easy to read and understand compared to many others so maybe that's maybe that's a transferable skill that's a really common example that writing skills transfer into coding skills because it's communication you're communicating to a reader putting structure into stuff i i think that applies to other things we just don't hear them as commonly yeah so i would i think if i were the interviewee in this case i would mention it i would give enough context so that the interviewer can know that it means that i'm an accomplished intelligent uh capable person but i would probably not go much farther than that with this that's just what i would do well we kind of agree

i yeah i think you're you can't just put did this exam um and i think your job is to sell your experience as as relevant to the field cool question answered yeah i think so let us know how that goes yeah we'd love to hear about it i'm sure that there's a lot of different people and some would be i'm sure a lot of people would respond differently to that one you know dave where can people go if they want to hear more from us jameson they can go to soft skills audio although i don't know why you'd want to hear more but if you want to ask us a question you can also go there and fill out a little form and you can give us some information uh you can also find us on twitter at soft skills eng follow us many of you have and that's the best way those are the

two best ways they're both the best also um we have gotten lots of stories recently of people who have like really upgraded their careers um like they've found better jobs they've making more money doing things they enjoy more with you know with people who are really impressive and cool so that's been really cool to hear about and we'd love to hear more about that we also want to hear counter examples if you if you tanked your career by following some of our advice let us know or even if you just like did minor damage yeah you know tanked minor damage either way i'm always on the lookout for things to feel guilty about so that would help me a lot uh i think that does it thank you so much for listening we'll catch you next week bye