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I'm currently a frontend engineer. I told my team lead a while back that I'd like to transition to the server side, especially since our server team is woefully

• jpincheira 7y ago
  Bad. Went I went from JS front end to iOS, I was put in a learning period on my own + internship in the iOS team and that worked great. It’s how companies like Spotify also did it. They paid companies like the Big Nerd Ranch to travel to Stockholm and give workshops to future iOS devs. They benefited and I also did, as it helped me evolve into a full-stack (web, mobile & server) developer. This was essential for me to transition into building my own company [1] at a later point, as I could build the product on my own both for web and mobile. [1] https://standups.io https://standups.io
  • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    We have a formal mentorship program and employees get 4 hours a month for professional development. We still feel we fail them.
    • ghaff 7y ago
      >4 hours a month for professional development So half a day a month? That's pretty much nothing. Maybe time to work through a couple chapters of a book on some new topic.
      • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
        Yeah, it's supposed to be on top of their existing 1-1s, but we still feel we fail them.
    • eyko 7y ago
      We do 4 hours a week, and I still feel it's too little.
      • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
        We've just given up on it, I just give people tickets with stuff they want to learn about. "Oh, you want to learn Selenium, here's a ticket that has Selenium"
    • jsjw7sbw 7y ago
      Make that 4 hours a week and maybe you'll feel better.
      • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
        Unfortunately, HR is in charge of 'professional development'. Noone wants to fight HR and would rather keep their cushy job, get paid and let this thing crater.
        • sethammons 7y ago
          Unfortunately, that is when, as a team, you have to not classify things certain ways. Still meet your commitments, but bake in learning time. It just becomes part of what you do during the sprint. Likewise, you should not have a "testing time", "quality", or "security" budget - you just bake those into how the team operates.
          • randomidiot666 7y ago
            ^ This is the way. Learn how to sell it or hide it from those HR parasites.
            • all2 7y ago
              Calling an entire field of personnel "parasites" is an ad hominem attack. Even if you were to justify your statement, it would be an ad hominem attack.
              • randomidiot666 7y ago
                No shit. Cheers for pointing that out for us.
    • rytill 7y ago
      Using the word "still" there is uncalibrated. 4 hours per month is barely anything. Imagine yourself trying to learn a real skill in that allocation of time. If anything, you may even be reducing your tech employees' "professional development" with that metric, because I bet the average tech employee already spends greater than 4 hours per month on active learning with or without management actively allowing them.
  • jamil7 7y ago
    How did it work out for you? I'm also trying to do the same.
    • jpincheira 7y ago
      It worked out great, but you have to want to do this. You have to set out time for it. No wonder why people from Lambda School get well-paying jobs: it's because you have to be motivated to reach the goal. Educational materials/courses are out there, it's all about you, wanting to smash it on the wall and work hard for the goal.
• ken 7y ago
  I’m amazed to hear this from programmers. You can learn this for free, anywhere, at any time. I’m no longer in software and when I want to upgrade my skills, I’m doing it on my own time and my own dime. Often doubly so if I have to take time off work (hourly) for training.
  • imgabe 7y ago
    Your time isn't free. Doubly so when you are spending it to benefit someone else.
  • rifung 7y ago
    > I’m amazed to hear this from programmers. You can learn this for free, anywhere, at any time. Some people are more passionate about their jobs than others no matter the discipline. I love my job but it's still just something I do to fund my actual dreams/passion. Why would I spend more time on it than I need to when I already feel like I don't have enough time for my own interests?
  • darkwater 7y ago
    Well, not doing it on your own time is the exact point of the article linked. I mean, if you want to pivot into a completely different career in a completely different company you should do it on your own, sure, but GP wants to change position within the same company, and wants to move in an understaffed department. Why should they do it on their time and dime?
    • markus_zhang 7y ago
      Well maybe talk to the backend lead at the same time. His own team lead <> the company and the company might not even realize it. From the pov of his own team lead, it might be a purely damaging move (has to find alternative, has to explain to upper management, etc.). TBH I wouldn't expect any manager (especially it's just a lead, not even a mgr) to sacrifice for my own benefit. I thank them and provide material reward if they do, but I'm 100% with them (and study on my own, then leave the company) if they don't. It has to be mutually beneficial, or at least looks like. So my feeling is that both OP and his team leader are not good at communication.
• rvense 7y ago
  Your lead made a mistake there. Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is worth as much as one of each, especially when they have intimate knowledge of your actual code.
  • knightofmars 7y ago
    >Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is worth as much as one of each... Someone with understanding of both FE and BE is valuable in certain situations. Companies love the idea of a "full stack engineer" because they believe they are getting two for the price of one. But in practice, and accounting for exceptions, that's not necessarily the case. A full-time FE with equal experience will be better at the front than a FE/BE and a full-time BE with equal experience will be better at the back than a FE/BE. This is the reality of having deep experience in a specific domain. As an attempt at an example, if you went to college and got an English minor and a CompSci minor you'd be capable in both areas but you would likely not be as knowledgeable as an English major nor a CompSci major within the respective domain. This divide becomes much more visible when you see a FE/BE architect a solution versus a full time FE or BE. When fixing bugs and implementing straight-forward features a FE/BE has a handy skill set. But when you move past that point, deep experience within an area starts to show it's value.
    • naniwaduni 7y ago
      > This is the reality of having deep experience in a specific domain. This seems like it should be true abstractly, but concretely I've never met anyone with deep experience in a specific domain who didn't in the process gain enough experience in other domains to have basic competence in multiple domains. Not necessarily as much as specialists in those domains, but it's practically required to achieve the depths of experience in the domain you think they specialized in. (Which is not usually the domain they thought they were specializing in.) This is particularly relevant where there isn't a clean separation of concerns and the involved skills are highly transferable.
      • knightofmars 7y ago
• datashow 7y ago
  What if someone learned something on their own time, do they get to be reimbursed from the employer? Or, can I ask my employer to reimburse my under-graduate and graduate tuition?
  • cmcd 7y ago
    They aren't going to reimburse you after the fact, but if you get approval in advance many companies will reimburse for graduate programs or other courses.
  • kedean 7y ago
    There's no hard and fast rules. No, a company will never retroactively pay for you learning, but yes a number of companies will reimburse you if you attend graduate programs while employed with them. It's a balancing act. If a company wants employees to keep learning, they need to invest in that. If I, as a salaried employee, am expected to be available outside of the explicit working hours for emergencies, then it's also fair that I be allowed to do things that are directed at my own career during work, bonus if it proves useful to the company.
• michaelcampbell 7y ago
  Your team "leader" sounds more like a team "director".
• doh 7y ago
  Unfortunate approach. My company not only encourage transitions, we actually "pay" for them. That means we will assign a senior developer that will have responsibility for growth of the new mentee and we purchase any educational materials the person requires. We have quite decent amount of transitions within last few years and all were successful. They do require commitment and investment from both sides. I do believe we are stronger for it as people appreciate the opportunity for growth and support we provide. We, on the other hand, re-gain skilled colleague that is not looking elsewhere.
  • oswamano 7y ago
    Man, I wish I actually had a job where I got mentored.
• overcast 7y ago
  So what about the server team lead? What did they say? Seems to me it doesn't matter what your existing frontend guy has to say about it.
  • Bootwizard 7y ago
    They just hired more people but were severely short staffed during a crunch, so the server team just worked 80+ hour weeks until those new guys came on
• znpy 7y ago
  The middle ground here is that I'd try to grasp the basics on my own time, then ask the switch. I can understand your boss though: would you swap a competent employee for an incompetent one, paying the same amount? Probably not. Yes, you retain your knowledge about the front-end, but you wouldn't be using that. My advice would be to work out the basics on your time and then ask somebody in the backend team to be involved, baby steps. If you actually become useful for the backend team, they will advocate themselves for your switch, and bring you up to speed once there.
  • wool_gather 7y ago
    > would you swap a competent employee for an incompetent one, paying the same amount? But this is the glass-half-empty boss. The glass-half-full boss is happy to have a competent employee who can be called upon when needed for important front-end stuff and is picking up backend work at a faster rate than the intern the team would have otherwise, because they're already an experienced engineer (with knowledge of the front-end no less!) and there is skill beyond just writing code that transfers between domains. And that's to say nothing of swapping a competent employee who's already onboarded for an empty seat and a talent search, when the employee quits to expand their skills elsewhere.
    • chrischen 7y ago
      Same could be said for the employee. If the employee invests in his own competency he can negotiate a higher salary or quit and work elsewhere.
  • t-writescode 7y ago
    They’re not incompetent. They have domain knowledge in both the general industry of the company and the fine details of the company itself. They’ve probably been nearby the backend developers while they were talking through issues and even offered insight in the lunch area about specific algorithmic problems some backend developers were having. Languages tend to be super easy. Frameworks are a little bit of work. Domain knowledge is hard.
  • whateveracct 7y ago
• radicalbyte 7y ago
  It looks like you have a pretty inexperienced lead. I'm extremely happy when my team members want to expand their horizons, it keeps them engaged in their work and makes the team as a whole stronger. Your lead should have paired you with a backend developer and have had simple backend tickets assigned to you. This works really well in turning Windows developers into Web developers (together with some coaching).
  • hinkley 7y ago
    I was going to say 'jealous', which is orthogonal to experience. Either is bad but, only one tends to sort itself out over time.
• Braggadocious 7y ago
  You ever think about how much we subsidize businesses by paying for college ourselves? The older I get the more I think the university to corporation pipeline is a fucking racket. It also sucks for employees because here comes these kids who were allowed to learn about all the new technologies you wish you knew with zero distractions and other obligations, now comin' in hot on your heels to take yer jobs en masse, and because of the larger labor pool they all undercut one another's bargaining ability, lowering wages. If I owned a company and I was lookin to hire I'd be callin that a twofer: free employee training and hiring discounts!
  • yters 7y ago
    University is a total racket. We pay these institutions to be treated like their low level employees to provide job training for companies. Corporations have successfully offloaded their training responsibilities onto a process that used to be much broader than vocational training.
    • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      And if you try to study some of those broader topics, you're a sucker - don't study philosophy when an extra accounting or STEM course would be a "better" use of your time. So you super specialize and then after 4 years of college and 5 years in industry you're burnt out you have few other skills, so the only option is to get back onto the education treadmill to bet on another highly specific vocation where you once again start your career as a junior.
      • GhostVII 7y ago
        At my school I was required to take many courses on broader topics. Personally I didn't like it, I took as many CS courses as I was allowed.
        • yters 7y ago
          Yes, due to the vocational focus, the broader topics are often watered down introductions.
• chewyshine 7y ago
  Maybe the lead made a mistake. Or, I hate to say it but...maybe OP isn't viewed as HiPo and worth the perceived investment. There's always another side to a story.
  • shantly 7y ago
    Company won't help you advance your career = they don't think you can, or for some reason don't want you to = you should start interviewing elsewhere.
  • slumdev 7y ago
    > HiPo I thought this was a new battery technology and had to google it. https://hr.toolbox.com/articles/hr-hipos-identifying-hipos-how-to-find-and-hire-them-and-add-value https://hr.toolbox.com/articles/hr-hipos-identifying-hipos-h...
• greedo 7y ago
  In my company, if you transfer to another team, you're a traitor. Your current mgr can block your transfer, so it's suicide to try to switch teams.
• mirekrusin 7y ago
  You should have said you already did and would like to start today.
• gregd 7y ago
  I'm utterly dumbfounded at someone who manages people, stating this. I budgeted for training on a per employee basis when I created my yearly budgets.
• mdiesel 7y ago
  Where I work (mechanical engineering business, not just software) there's a training course that people are encouraged to take up in their own time. However, the company does support staff taking the course with teaching time from senior engineers - and they make a big deal of having completed it with a certificate, bonus and pay rise. That's in addition to the apprenticeship scheme which represents a more sensible approach to industry funded education.
• avgDev 7y ago
  Oof. I would honestly look for another job and tell them you want to be able to learn new stuff on the job. If you have a job you can go as far as saying, if "I'm not learning anything new I am wasting my time". Companies should encourage people to learn stuff on the job, because no tutorials or classes can really teach you the day to day struggles.
• markus_zhang 7y ago
  From the POV of your team lead, this is perhaps not an advantage move on his side, so I do understand his concern, after all he is not the company, just an employee as you. And from your description it seems that you are a competent employee, thus even the less Nevertheless he should give a more encouraging answer as a team lead. And if you still want to make the change (looks like you are not very interested in it too), maybe just ask to spend a little more time on server stuffs and see what's the reply. It's all negotiation and sometimes it's difficult to ask the right question.
• duregin 7y ago
  >He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home. When somebody says that to you, your responsibility is to either a) change jobs or b) learn during work time anyway.
  • Bootwizard 7y ago
    Currently in the process of (a) ;)
• rooam-dev 7y ago
  If you are interested doing other things at home, then why transition at all? I mean, how much time you will need to become good at "server side" and the company benefit from this? Imho it's about 50/50, company should not expect employees getting new skills only on their own time and the employee should not expect learning only from 9 to 5. Technically searching through the internet for examples, is already learning.
• dv_dt 7y ago
  If there's one thing I've learned between being a new engineer and a senior eng is that you can just take a small slice of time in your work schedule to learn. You don't have to clear this with anyone. You're salaried, take an hour or two a week to learn something new. You're getting paid for your technical judgement, use it to invest in something relevant and deepen your ability to judge. It pays off for both you and your employers even if they're not willing to formally fund training in large dedicated chunks. Edit: clarified schedule to work schedule.
  • woutr_be 7y ago
    I've honestly never found myself in a position where I didn't had some spare time whilst at work. Even at my current job, I've transitioned from frontend work to backend work (I had backend experience already in Node), and I've always been able to keep up with our sprint. Other engineers complain they don't have time to improve our code base, or they can't learn anything new because they're always busy, but I think that's just an excuse. It's just a matter of organising yourself and looking for opportunities to learn. I actively picked up stories I wasn't familiar with, just to learn it. Other engineers pick up stories because they're already familiar with the subject, that's not how you learn new things.
• ryanmercer 7y ago
  At my employer: -- "Get your brokers license" ok provide me with a course "well, we've got a limited number of people that can do it at a time" ok so make the material available to me for learning at home and I'll do it on my own time "We appreciate your feedback. You could purchase a course on your own, with your own money, and study on your own at home" -- This is an actual event, with the person parroting the 'we value degrees' line being the head of HR for our opco at the time, on the phone with me cutting me off every time I started to say anything, with me at one point saying a vulgarity and "would you give me some respect and allow me to finish a sentence": applies to position above me that finally opened up and interviews "We just wanted to let you know we went with another candidate, we suggest you get a bachelors degree and then an MBA if you'd like to move up" at entry level position for 13 and a half years I don't want a degree, what sort of a degree "Oh business is good" How would a business degree benefit me in any role in this office, at all? "We prioritize education" I don't want to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to make an extra 10% so that would mean I could pay the loans off in a decade from the raise "With tuition reimbursement you could get a degree in as little as 6 years" In 6 years I'll be 40 and you'll give the job to a 22 year old that's been here 6 months, why don't you create some sort of system for advancement internally that is equal to degree work "We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really work on a 4 year degree and then an MBA" Why "We prioritize education, if you want to move up you should really..." That's classism "We prioritize..." I don't want your defacto dues card, I guess I'll just keep working for people above me that have been at the company a fraction of the time that I have because they have a 4-year degree in Artisan Baking Social Media Marketing with their minor in Mayan Whittling from 2000BC to 1990BC. -- Sigh. There isn't even a degree in what I do, and the university my employer has partnered with only has one degree you can do, some random super-specific business degree that has literally nothing to do with what I do. Even if I wanted to get a degree, by the time I do 8 hours of this work my brain is shot. Processing large amounts of data, with all sorts of legal and fiscal ramifications, while being under pressure to not only meet but exceed production... yeah do that all day and the last thing you want to do is go home and study/research/write papers that have to be in some asinine format scheme or you fail outright. Then even if they did come up with some way to teach us on the job, it wouldn't even work because due to the nature of the job if someone leaves it can take 6-12 months to replace their processing capacity and business volume grows so we're always chugging along with no downtime and we hot bunk desks so when your shift is up, someone else will be along in a couple of hours to sit down and keep going.
• slumdev 7y ago
  I've shot down two companies in the past three days because they made it known during the recruitment that they expected more than 40 hours a week, sometimes well in excess of it. It's always couched in some doublespeak about "ownership". Trust me, if I were owner or part-owner in the enterprise, I wouldn't mind. But I'm not. People complain about entitlement attitudes among the young. They need to look at employers if they really want to see entitlement. It sounds like your boss feels entitled to your time without taking an ownership stake in your professional development.
  • BigJono 7y ago
    The other thing about those places is that they only attract the desperate devs. So you know when they pull out that bullshit in the interview that if you were to take a job there you'd be on a team chock full of juniors with a few "seniors" that just fill a chair for 50 hours a week and haven't learnt anything new in the last decade.
    • slumdev 7y ago
      I got that impression. At the first shop, the people I met didn't seem like they would be employable anywhere else. The hiring manager also spent some time whining about the state of the developer market and said they couldn't afford the higher end of the range they had posted on their website.
  • oswamano 7y ago
    Eugh, annoys me that people talk about entitlement in this case then management is surprised when developers don't stay any longer than 3 years
• Viliam1234 7y ago
  I worked on a small project where it was just two people: one back-end developer, and one front-end developer. The project was not important enough to hire more people, but important enough that the manager complained about the "bus factor" and asked us to plan our vacations responsibly (i.e. not more than one week at a time). Because both of us were interested in the other part of the work, we offered a solution that we could spend some time teaching each other. At the end, both of us would know both parts of the work, and be able to substitute for each other during the vacation. "No, that would be a waste of time."
• Aeolun 7y ago
  Or just switch? The knowledge will come once you fix your first bug.
• arnold_palmur 7y ago
  Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.