

Ask HN: Formalized training plans for developers - peteretep

I'm exploring the option of having a formalized skills development program for my dev team, and wanted to hear experiences people may have had.<p>Frequently - it seems to me - teams have a reasonable amount of ad-hoc training. Someone brings in an expert in `git` to help the team transition, or a big-name developer is passing through town who's roped in to giving a day or two of training.<p>I'm interested in providing something a little more rigorous for my team - perhaps a day a fortnight specifically set aside for skill development, using a mixture of intra-team training, external courses, external trainers coming in, auto-didactic exploration of certain topics.<p>Has anyone tried this successfully? Unsuccessfully? Can anyone provide examples of things that worked well or didn't work at all?
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codeonfire
Formalized training is waaay too slow. I have a thousand tech videos I want to
watch but can't because there's no easy way to watch them at 2x speed. A live
instructor is just a slow IRL video. the best material is usually slides.
Transcripts of tech talks would be ideal. When those are missing or lacking,
developers will go straight to the code as the best source.

There's two types of training, enrichment and learning things to get stuff
done. If it's learning stuff to get stuff down, a developer usually only has a
few seconds to review a dev guide, manual, or API. Ir he/she were to spend an
hour on each, reading the whole thing out it would not be feasible.
development is an endless stream of hundreds of tiny bits of knowledge that
have to be assembled. So there's not really any training available in getting
stuff done because it's an exercise in knowledge triage.

So to answer this, yes I have sat through countless hours long training
sessions that could have filled a half sheet of paper. What works well is one
to one conversations with experts where the developer has already built up a
large list of critical 'why' questions. The 'how' questions are easily
answered in seconds through q&a websites. Insight into why things work a
certain way are the best.

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peteretep
Regarding the 'formalized' part, really I was thinking of there being time
formally set aside for training.

As you point out, for senior developers, there's often a huge list of things
they want to work through on their own - I'm thinking really about supporting
their doing that, and making sure that there's a small amount of discipline
there where they set out what they want to watch, and why, and jot down some
thoughts on what they learned afterwards.

~~~
Khurrum
Might be good to schedule both some personal learning time as well as
scheduling time for the tea to share new insights and discuss standards they
think are worth adopting.

If you want company standards, you can use software like Brainshark to build
presentation slides with questions that can be answered and reviewed so that
you can be sure that people understand and are on the same page.

