Dev: I think we should send Dev2 for some training and certification

Manager: We do not train people or have them certified. When you train people and especially if you have them certified they always leave the company for better offers so we no longer do that.

Dev: So the plan is to have a the company operated by a bunch of untrained uncertified people?

Manager: 😡 You are being disrespectful again

The real conversation didn’t go like this I am sure. And not all companies can pay high salaries and training people(extra cost) just to lose them sucks.

@aviophile > "The real conversation didn’t go like this I am sure"

Not word-for-word, but it's happened here. Management talked about training and certification, but when it came to actually doing it, training "wasn't in the budget", "We're re-prioritizing our technological focus", etc..etc. Came down to fear of change. At that time, dept mgr 'John' was so scared that devs would go to a conference, learn, for example, that Agile methodologies actually work, tell the rest of the organization about it, and challenge his authority that only the best orgs use Waterfall.

What is the bigger failure? If you train them and they leave, or you don't and they stay? :D

.

If you train them and they leave for "better offers", then your offer clearly sucks.

As a company an offers is not what you make once.

It's a continuous thing, which increases with seniority (promotions & wage scales), and comes with its own interest system (raises, inflation corrections, etc).

Or, you are indeed accepting that employee quality and career advancements aren't part of the hiring & retention strategy -- Which is fine, but then just be honest about that. I mean, if you're making the twelfth reskin series of the same buy-gems-to-merge-dragons-cocks-into-fairies and buy-diamonds-and-match-3-licorice-pieces-for-a-cum-explosion Android game, you don't really need to train employees, they just need to STFU, create some artwork, and patch a bunch of terrible dialogue into some language files.

I agree about training but certification is 5% training the devs and 95% showing off to customers.

In other words, certificates provide value for your employer, not for the devs.

Unless the company demands certification, I wouldn‘t want to waste my time on it.

@Lensflare I do not agree. Certification makes sure that you have studied and understood the concept at core level. For example a trained network engineer can't compete with the knowledge with a certified one.

@blindXfish it may be true for other professions but certainly not for devs.
Have you ever done a certification? No matter the topic, they are all laughable and don‘t have anything to do with the daily business of a dev.

@Lensflare No, I am doing network certs

@blindXfish

I kind of disagree... I wrote a lot of router firmware and network equipment management panels in the 90s/00s for Cisco, Zyxel, Compuserve and Orange, before certificates were that much of a thing in IT. I got my Cisco certification after writing firmware for their routers, and found it very tedious and unnecessary.

I got a whole bunch of Microsoft certs while working for them on Office 2003, all of which were laughably stupid in my opinion.

Of course you'll learn new things from studying for certifications, it's not all wasted time.

But in my opinion, it's a very inefficient method for gaining knowledge, because you'll also spend a lot of time on "vendor says you gotta learn this awful tool" when you have already have a superior offbrand tool in your toolbox.

@bittersweet @blindXfish

A certificate is just the declaration that at a specific point in time you achieved a calculated score of XY on a limited pool of questions or tasks.

It has no meaning, no value, nothing at all.

You learn *during* the process… but usually the certificate is only once in a life time.

Which is the reason why certificates are pointless in my opinion. Multi choice and other ""questionnaire" training lead to learning by heart, which prevents any practical use of knowledge.

It's natural to forget things, to not remember stuff all the time etc... - the 100 % score doesn't mean anything a few days afterwards, as it's most likely not reproducible.

When people _want_ training, I usually recommend them to write me a proposal.

What, when, cost, required days off.

Technical explanations why and how this is useful and related to the daily work.

Company doesn't take over costs usually - but the days off for training are paid leave if authorized by me.

Taking days off to focus on stuff helps in my opinion more than getting money for a piece of paper that is worthless.

XD

(Training can mean anything - Webinar dev wants to participate in, tech conference, studying on a specific book, learning new tech stack, having an appointment with a tech consultant... )

@IntrusionCM very well explained and to the point. Agree 100%

@IntrusionCM my cert expires in 3 years.

@blindXfish sure they can, what they could have trouble with is selling that they can with some organizations.

The certificate is a proof of value, not the value as such.

I have actually trained people for a certification I never got and most of them managed to nail the certification test ;)

But neither I nor the company saw the need to pay for the certification for any of us since our customers never asked for it, and I have never needed it

The same when I switched job, despite no higher education or certificates or similar I got a salary in the upper 15% of the running range and have since then advanced to a new position above all the others, all of who have some academic education as base and in most cases some certification or other specialized education on top of that.

@Lensflare
CEO: "So we are ISO9001 and ISO9004."

Employee: "So what does that concretely mean?"

CEO:"No idea, but it sounds professional in front of customers."

Wait, that sounds like a Dilbert comic strip. FML

@PepeTheFrog yeah. Basically customers which look for a company to get some website or app done.
They will look at the dev company’s website and there are certificate badges everywhere. "Our devs are certified XYZ, bla bla".
The customer compares the number of certificate badges with a competitor and decides based on that shit. The customer has no fucking clue what those certificates mean and he doesn’t even care.
But one thing the customer knows: That this one company has more of them than the other company. And that’s all that matters.

This is the sad value of certificates in the dev world.

@PepeTheFrog and we all know Dilbert comics are hidden camera documentaries :)

I know I have looked around the room for hidden cameras when reading some of them over the years.

@Lensflare I remember when ISO certifications for companies was a big thing in the 90’s.

And a general joke was that you could get a certificate for process documentation.

It was a guarantee that you had documentation for how your processes worked.

They did not have to be good or really actually work, just be well documented ;)

But customers was just looking at the certification and never actually on the documentation it promised.

That was during the years when the dot-com era was on the rise, just a few years before the crash …

This reads like a Dilbert comic.

By any chance did the manager have dark spiky hair that looked like Wi-Fi antennas?