I admit, this is a point that I am confused about: are employees generally expected to learn new skills, and if they do, are they expected to do that on company time or during their free time? Before I had kids, I automatically went with “free time”, and only started to reflect on that after the free time disappeared.
In my experience, there are two kinds of companies. Either there is enough slack, in which case I simply do not ask, and just learn new skills on company time, and no one seems to mind. Or it is the kind of a company that makes sure that their employees get enough workload for at least eight hours a day… and in that situation I have actually asked… but the answer was self-contradictory and the boss seemed really annoyed about me asking such “obvious” thing.
On one hand, the boss said explicitly that it is a duty of each professional to spend at least one hour every day learning new things. But also, we worked for an external customer, and we needed to provide detailed reports how much time did we spend doing what, and which of those hours should be billed to the external customer. When I put an hour of learning as a time billed to the customer, the customer complained, and the boss was asking me angrily whether doing that was absolutely necessary, because it made me look incompetent if I had to learn something about a project I was already assigned to. When I put an hour of learning as time not billed to the customer, the boss asked me whether it was related to any project or not: if not, then I was not supposed to do it; and if yes, then it should be billed as a part of that project. When I asked whether I am supposed to learn in my free time, my boss insisted that 8 hours are quite enough for everything. When I asked whether it would be possible to learn something project-related for 1 hour and then work on the project for 7 hours, and bill that as “8 hours of work” so that the customer does not freak out, I was told that absolutely not, the reports to the customer needed to be 100% truthful. (This was already under a quite optimistic assumption that I would be able to learn anything in 1 hour. I must sadly admit that there are things where even 1 day—or more—is not enough.)
So, putting all of this together, I was supposed to do 8 hours of work for the external customer (legible work, such as meetings and writing the code, not learning), and also learn for at least 1 hour, but this all taken together should not exceed 8 hours. And I should not be asking about obvious things.
Despite my autistic traits I already learned to recognize this pattern as “there is an answer, which is obvious to most people except for you, but the answer cannot be discussed explicitly, because some hypocrisy is involved”. We can narrow it down to three possibilities:
you are not supposed to actually learn, only pay lip service to learning
you are supposed to learn on company time, and you are supposed to bill it to the customer as “writing code” to keep the fiction of 100% efficient code monkey, but your boss cannot say it explicitly because there is a risk the customer might learn about that
you are supposed to learn in your free time, but your boss cannot say it explicitly, either because the labor law would have a problem with that, or simply because the employees might realize that their hourly salary is not exactly what they think it is
The first option could be okay for a different company, but not that specific one, because we worked with some latest technologies there and had to be fluent at them. The second option is realistic (the customer will not find out the difference between 7 and 8 hours of typing code), assuming the learning is of the kind that you can fit into 1 hour at a time, because spending the entire day without coding would be visible at a daily standup. The third option… I believe is the one that most of my colleagues actually took.
From my perspective, the problem was ultimately solved by changing jobs, to get more slack.
Why not just ask your company?
In my experience, there are two kinds of companies. Either there is enough slack, in which case I simply do not ask, and just learn new skills on company time, and no one seems to mind. Or it is the kind of a company that makes sure that their employees get enough workload for at least eight hours a day… and in that situation I have actually asked… but the answer was self-contradictory and the boss seemed really annoyed about me asking such “obvious” thing.
On one hand, the boss said explicitly that it is a duty of each professional to spend at least one hour every day learning new things. But also, we worked for an external customer, and we needed to provide detailed reports how much time did we spend doing what, and which of those hours should be billed to the external customer. When I put an hour of learning as a time billed to the customer, the customer complained, and the boss was asking me angrily whether doing that was absolutely necessary, because it made me look incompetent if I had to learn something about a project I was already assigned to. When I put an hour of learning as time not billed to the customer, the boss asked me whether it was related to any project or not: if not, then I was not supposed to do it; and if yes, then it should be billed as a part of that project. When I asked whether I am supposed to learn in my free time, my boss insisted that 8 hours are quite enough for everything. When I asked whether it would be possible to learn something project-related for 1 hour and then work on the project for 7 hours, and bill that as “8 hours of work” so that the customer does not freak out, I was told that absolutely not, the reports to the customer needed to be 100% truthful. (This was already under a quite optimistic assumption that I would be able to learn anything in 1 hour. I must sadly admit that there are things where even 1 day—or more—is not enough.)
So, putting all of this together, I was supposed to do 8 hours of work for the external customer (legible work, such as meetings and writing the code, not learning), and also learn for at least 1 hour, but this all taken together should not exceed 8 hours. And I should not be asking about obvious things.
Despite my autistic traits I already learned to recognize this pattern as “there is an answer, which is obvious to most people except for you, but the answer cannot be discussed explicitly, because some hypocrisy is involved”. We can narrow it down to three possibilities:
you are not supposed to actually learn, only pay lip service to learning
you are supposed to learn on company time, and you are supposed to bill it to the customer as “writing code” to keep the fiction of 100% efficient code monkey, but your boss cannot say it explicitly because there is a risk the customer might learn about that
you are supposed to learn in your free time, but your boss cannot say it explicitly, either because the labor law would have a problem with that, or simply because the employees might realize that their hourly salary is not exactly what they think it is
The first option could be okay for a different company, but not that specific one, because we worked with some latest technologies there and had to be fluent at them. The second option is realistic (the customer will not find out the difference between 7 and 8 hours of typing code), assuming the learning is of the kind that you can fit into 1 hour at a time, because spending the entire day without coding would be visible at a daily standup. The third option… I believe is the one that most of my colleagues actually took.
From my perspective, the problem was ultimately solved by changing jobs, to get more slack.