Something that’s been concerning me for some time is the cost and benefit of courses and seminars. Most employers and employees would perceive programmer’s training as a positive benefit and I think I’d have to agree but it seems that there is a common view that all training is good because it’s personal development. To deny that training to an employee would make you a bad employer because you are stunting your employee’s professional growth. Well I’m not so sure. I’d even go as far as to say:
A lot of technical training is of limited value.
There I said it. It’s out. I’m probably never going to get to go on a course ever again, ever. The last purely technical course I went on was a compulsory learn Java course in-or-around 1999 (yes I’ve been avoiding courses since then). I remember it not for the content, which was forgettable, but for the fact that I’d snapped my wrist 1 week before and I could only type with one hand. The course, however, was custom designed for our company and our tutors had been briefed about what we needed to know. I would say that this sort of training, i.e. directed, has good benefit but again it only teaches the how. The why is lost. Compare this with the ‘shrink-wrapped’ course. Which is offered by a training company on a technology and is a generic product. In my experience I probably end up using a small-ish fraction of the material learnt on such courses. This is because to attract the candidates they need to give the course a broad appeal. However, the chances are that I’m going on a course for the broad appeal are low, it’s more likely I’m doing it for a very narrow reason. A narrow reason usually defined by the next biggest project of the moment. Sure it’s helpful to know all the aspects of a particular technology, but the things I don’t need to know right now will very soon be forgotten. This is not the only problem with shrink-wrapped courses. There is also a tendency for candidates to choose ‘advanced’ courses that are sometimes beyond their current ability, secure in the knowledge that “it can’t be that hard” and they will pick it up. When this happens the tutor has to work very hard to bring everyone up to the same level so that he/she can teach some of the more advanced aspects. So this sort of leraning is inefficient in that the information that needs to be conveyed is often greater than is needed, but there’s another deeper problem with courses. In my opinion I think that programmer’s would sometimes be better schooled if they learnt good approach first and implementation details later. Take security for instance, almost every application these days needs some sort of built in security. I’d argue that it would be useful for programmers to go on a ‘security for programmers course’ which covered lots of different security aspects relevant to programmers. More useful than, say, a technical course suited to a particular technology which attempts to teach security, amongst a lot of other things. As I’m starting to learn it’s the principles that matter, not the implementations. At least this way you’ll see the entire security picture and then when faced with a situation which could be a security risk you can say ‘here’s a potential risk’ now I need to find a way to mitigate it. In some ways this sort of training is perhaps best delivered inside the organisation by mentors. Big-brothers (and sisters) who can guide the novice through the general principles leaving the rookie to grapple with the fine details of the implementation. Sadly, when you get to my age, big-brothers are most likely to be grand parents so I guess I’ll just have to keep getting my training from Amazon.