May 31, 2012 at 8:23 am
Interesting editorial. Not sure it's about empowerment, though. To me, empowerment means giving people the ability to take decisions within their competence instead of having to send requests up a long management chain or through a bureaucratic maze. It doesn't mean taking away all their clerical assistance. No organisation can operate efficiently without some reasonable empowerment. Equally, no organisation can operate efficiently if management decides to waste people's time by incompetent cost-cutting masquerading as empowerment.
I learnt to type properly in the early 70s (and became a reasonably proficient touch typist) before the age of computer-based document production. At the time I had a technical clerk who did my typing and filing and other secretarial things for me, but the company was happy to teach me to type. If I wanted something typed ouside normal office hours I did it myself. Teaching me to type efficiently was empowerment; teaching me to type efficiently but taking away my technical clerk would not have been empowerment, it would have been incompetence.
Tom
May 31, 2012 at 8:28 am
Great Reply,
It seems even I forgot about that. Yes, assistants and secretaries were a great time saver for executives and managers, they kept you focused on the real work and organized everything. This seems to have been lost, I wish I had an administrative assistant and not just to type and do coffee. They would really keep me on task.
May 31, 2012 at 10:02 am
L' Eomot Inversé (5/31/2012)
djackson 22568 (5/30/2012)
Does anyone recall how bad the majority of VB development used to be, how bad Cobol development could be, when development was turned over to untrained individuals?I've seen far worse spaghetti code in C++ than anything I've seen in Cobol. And it was written by trained individuals.
Not sure how that is relevant. The language used has nothing to do with it. The point I made was that untrained people with no development experience wrote stuff they had no business writing. I didn't see any value in listing C++, Java, Power Shell, VB Script and on and on and on.
Training for developers can have value if it's done properly, but most of what's done is worse than a waste of time. It bores the recipients excruciatingly, teaches them to do things wrong instead of right, and risks making them believe that because they've done the course/passed an exam they know everything.
This reminds me of the "a square is a rectangle, a rectangle is not a square" logic. Your argument that some training is poor does not mean all training is poor. In fact, there is absolutely no correlation at all. You get what you pay for.
In a relational database forum it seems very odd to see a claim that untrained individuals perform badly, since people like Ted Codd and Chris Date had no computer training other than a brief induction. Actually it seems odd to have anyone concerned with software development claiming that, because in the area of software architecture, development methodologies, and language design most of the good things came from people who had to teach themselvs (Hoare, Dijkstra, Jones, Abrial, Colmerauer, Milner,...) not from people who were trained. Of course will change now (in fact the change has already begun) since the industry is becoming dominated by people who were trained.
Again, I am confused by your logic. Your post seems to indicate you feel untrained individuals perform superior to those with training. Obviously you have had some bad experiences. More obviously, most people would agree that training employees is critical. Would you want police working who were not trained to use their weapon? Astronauts flying into space without training?
The fact that some people are able to train themselves, and do so using resources freely available to them, and that their intelligence allows them to self train to a level superior to some others, does not prove that "untrained" is better. In fact, it goes to show that training in some form is required, and lack of training leads to poor performance.
Dave
May 31, 2012 at 10:18 am
I think what he was getting at was that a lot of "experts" receive the wrong type of training. This is common in any industry. What I think Steve was getting at in the original article was that many companies have come to the sense that "empowering" managers and other consumers of data with tool sets that require a special set of skills, like traditional developers and DBA's have, has become counterproductive. On paper, it looks good but in my experience, I've seen smart people who's expertise lies outside of databases and software, build systems that don't take into account how things work.
I would equate it to a brain surgeon doing his primary task of removing a tumor and also having to run anesthesia. They are both physicians and experts in their fields but they have different specialty skills.
May 31, 2012 at 10:34 am
jarick 15608 (5/31/2012)
What I think Steve was getting at in the original article was that many companies have come to the sense that "empowering" managers and other consumers of data with tool sets that require a special set of skills, like traditional developers and DBA's have, has become counterproductive. On paper, it looks good but in my experience, I've seen smart people who's expertise lies outside of databases and software, build systems that don't take into account how things work.I would equate it to a brain surgeon doing his primary task of removing a tumor and also having to run anesthesia. They are both physicians and experts in their fields but they have different specialty skills.
You hit the point exactly, and it matches nicely with what I said. There is a reason we have experts - but too often business decides they don't want to pay for it, so they try to find ways to "save money" that ends up costing more than they saved.
Dave
May 31, 2012 at 10:40 am
It's like a mechanic says, "Pay me a little now or a lot later." Companies are overly concerned with the next quarter's profit statements at the expense of long-term sustainability.
May 31, 2012 at 1:30 pm
jarick 15608 (5/31/2012)
It's like a mechanic says, "Pay me a little now or a lot later." Companies are overly concerned with the next quarter's profit statements at the expense of long-term sustainability.
Exhibit A: Sony.
May 31, 2012 at 4:41 pm
Revenant (5/31/2012)
jarick 15608 (5/31/2012)
It's like a mechanic says, "Pay me a little now or a lot later." Companies are overly concerned with the next quarter's profit statements at the expense of long-term sustainability.Exhibit A: Sony.
Exbhibits B, C, D .... ZZAZ omitted for brevity.
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May 31, 2012 at 4:47 pm
djackson 22568 (5/31/2012)
L' Eomot Inversé (5/31/2012)
djackson 22568 (5/30/2012)
Does anyone recall how bad the majority of VB development used to be, how bad Cobol development could be, when development was turned over to untrained individuals?I've seen far worse spaghetti code in C++ than anything I've seen in Cobol. And it was written by trained individuals.
Not sure how that is relevant. The language used has nothing to do with it.
Then why did you choose to mention two langauges instead of mentioning none? Seems a pretty odd thing to do if the language really has nothing to do with it.
Training for developers can have value if it's done properly, but most of what's done is worse than a waste of time. It bores the recipients excruciatingly, teaches them to do things wrong instead of right, and risks making them believe that because they've done the course/passed an exam they know everything.
This reminds me of the "a square is a rectangle, a rectangle is not a square" logic. Your argument that some training is poor does not mean all training is poor. In fact, there is absolutely no correlation at all. You get what you pay for.
I don't claim that all training is poor. I do however claim that most training in the IT and/or Computing field is bad. I though my use of the phrases "training for developers" and "most of what is done" would make that clear, but apparently those phrases two don't mean the same to you as they do to everyone else I know. Even my absolutely clear statement that training for developers can be valuable when done properly didn't prevent you from reading into that paragraph the sbsolutely unmade assertion that all training is bad.
As for "You get what you pay for", that seems to be somewhat optimistic. Some of the most expensive training is the worst.
In a relational database forum it seems very odd to see a claim that untrained individuals perform badly, since people like Ted Codd and Chris Date had no computer training other than a brief induction. Actually it seems odd to have anyone concerned with software development claiming that, because in the area of software architecture, development methodologies, and language design most of the good things came from people who had to teach themselvs (Hoare, Dijkstra, Jones, Abrial, Colmerauer, Milner,...) not from people who were trained. Of course will change now (in fact the change has already begun) since the industry is becoming dominated by people who were trained.
Again, I am confused by your logic. Your post seems to indicate you feel untrained individuals perform superior to those with training.
Then your imagination is running away with you. The point I was making is that our profession is sufficiently new that most of the major contributions to progress were, until not so long ago, made by people who had no training in it - simply because there was no training available. That of course makes the position that people without training (other than self-training) are not competent a difficult one to maintain.
Obviously you have had some bad experiences.
No more than most people in computing, I imagine, probably fewer in fact; but I've seen the results of other peoples experiences with trainers who hadn't a clue. I've also had some good training experiences (or perhaps it should be called education rather than training) in CS - but they were because the company I worked for at the time was very very keen to get the best possible for its people and decided on short (1 week) intensive courses run at universities by very senior academics with a view to getting people up to speed on the state of the art in whatever area the course was aimed at (and one of my responsibilities was arranging ocassional one day seminars by senior academics on their research topics, which of course was also good training for those who attended).
More obviously, most people would agree that training employees is critical. Would you want police working who were not trained to use their weapon? Astronauts flying into space without training?
Why do you think that most IT and Computing training being bad would mean that training in completely unrelated fields would be equally bad? Or do you thing that it's IT training for police officers that would be used to make them better able to handle their weapons?
The fact that some people are able to train themselves, and do so using resources freely available to them, and that their intelligence allows them to self train to a level superior to some others, does not prove that "untrained" is better. In fact, it goes to show that training in some form is required, and lack of training leads to poor performance.
Remarkable. I thought it was pretty clear that the training I find is mostly bad is not self-training, but apparently I failed to put that over.
Tom
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