
Why Startups Should Train Their People - iuguy
http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/14/why-startups-should-train-their-people/
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preek
My current employer's original wording: "We strongly feel that education is to
be performed by every employee himself if he has an urge to learn." This quote
is from our last personnel review meeting.

Note: we are a Swiss company producing "solutions", not software - even every
second employee is a programmer.

I actually do have learned my lesson and am about to leave this company for
good.

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neworbit
...and we don't because we are (too) focused on the sprint, not the marathon.

This is solid advice. But you need to start by training the people who need to
train others. If you have a bunch of great individual contributor engineers
who don't know how to manage, instruct, and the like - you will spend a lot of
time reinventing the wheel.

But once you crack that and can build a broad knowledge base for instruction
and a corporate culture that supports it, you can scale. And that is why
startup entrepreneurs should like this concept. Well, that and superior
employee morale/retention.

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larsberg
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that startups should take more time
to train their people.

Back when I was doing a lot of hiring, I found that post-startup developers
tended to have gotten broader (more technologies and spattering of
business/customer skills) than college hires, but had neither better problem-
solving skills nor had they improved their core development abilities
(estimating, engineering at larger scope, etc.). That's as opposed to veterans
from some of the shops with either training or mentoring programs like Google,
where someone with even a couple years of experience has far superior
fundamentals than a new college grad.

Though I hate to reference him, I think it's related to the Gladwell
distinction between just hacking up code and dedicated practice with the goal
of learning and improvement.

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dkarl
Management training, maybe. Why you shouldn't train your technical startup
workers:

1\. They will learn on their own.

2\. They will train each other.

3\. They will learn by training each other.

4\. They will often have to learn skills for which no training is available.

Maybe I've been lucky, but my coworkers have always been extremely generous
with their time, and I've tried to be the same way. These days there's also a
huge amount of information on the internet: tutorials, technical
presentations, and so on. Anything that's common enough to have in-person
training available, there's a multitude of articles in addition to the
official documentation.

If there's professional training available but a lack of free or reasonably
priced documentation, then it's a scam anyway and you might as well save your
time and just give all your money to the nearest consultant.

~~~
eru
Aren't your four bullet points arguments in favour of training? Just not in
favour of hiring a dedicated in-person trainer. But setting up a system to
disperse knowledge and allocate time for helping each other out seems useful.

~~~
dkarl
Management doesn't call it "training" unless it's organized and restricted in
some way. One developer going to another and saying, "Hey, I need help with
this," and the two of them going through it with a terminal or a whiteboard is
not "training" unless it done on management's schedule or recorded in some
training web site. From management's point of view, if they can't track and
report it, it doesn't exist. So if you want informal training run by
developers, you tell management you don't need any training at all.

~~~
eru
I am glad my workplace is a bit less pathological.

~~~
dkarl
You did say "setting up a system to disperse knowledge and allocate time."
That's management talk. Nobody should need to get time "allocated" so he can
use the "system" to disperse knowledge. There's your pathology right there:
the idea that developers can't or shouldn't manage their own time, not to
mention the idea that developers don't know how to teach each other or write
documentation without management setting up a system to help them.

~~~
eru
Oh, my talk may sound strange because English is not my first language.

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kin
In terms of new hires, yes, they should absolutely be trained. Getting hired
at a new company, I am always lost. There's so many things that you don't know
about the existing code base. Thus, the solution of FB's two week boot-camp to
get employees up to speed is IMO what every company should do.

But for start-ups my experience has been that everyone is learning and
teaching one another and developing simultaneously. The whole process of being
in a start-up is itself training.

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lelele
If you don't train your employees, they will learn on their own and they will
make mistakes... at your expense.

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gthank
Does anyone know of startups that put this advice into practice?

