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> You-guys are taking a possible method used by some and turning it
> into a condemnation of how I lead my life.
I'm not condemning you, John. I'm personally disagreeing with you. And
I admit I used to spend countless hours outside of work on
professional development, and have given up vacation time for
professional development. I do not any longer, and I don't feel it
should have to be this way. If you choose for it to be this way and
you can make it work, great. But there's no condemnation.
> Wanna know how we spend our two weeks vacation? Sitting on a beach in
> Jamaica wearing smiles, SPF4, flipflops, with mudslides dripping down
> our chins. There's nothing wrong with my quality of life. ya mon
You're better off than I, then. ;-) I spend it on Cape Cod with good
beer and gin. ;-)
> But I'm also not afraid to take a few days and invest it in
> professional development, either
Oh, fear's got nothing to do with it. And I do take clumps of days at
a time for professional development. It just happens that I do it all
on the company dime and not my own. I go to training, seminars,
conferences, buy new software even if I don't intend to use it for a
project... my company pays for it so long as they know what they're
getting out of it.
I also encourage this of my team. I bought one writer a license for a
JDE because she wanted to learn Java. She doesn't work on a Java
product. Why did I do this? Because she'll learn something and I'll be
able to apply her skills to something different down the road.
If I condemn anything, it's the act of some companies not paying for
their employees' professional growth, because it'll only come back to
bite them when the employees get the training on their own and then
leave for a better gig.
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