Why should an IT person take out the brain?

I can be called a victim of training. It so happened that during his working life, through various seminars, trainings and other coaching sessions, he had long since passed over a hundred. I can say that far from all of the educational courses I have passed were useful, interesting and important. Some of them were harmful at all.


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What is the motivation of HR s to teach you something?

I don’t know who told HR that if a person fails at work, it’s from a lack of knowledge. There can be a lot of reasons: internal processes in a company, hidden motivation within a team, an objective situation on the market. Options car and small truck. But sooner or later, the idea of ​​the life-giving power of new knowledge comes from somewhere. And now, dozens of managers rush to closed premises in search of the holy grail. All these meetings are amphitheater, flipcharts, presentations, motivational speeches, cases, brainstorming, absolutely nothing. Time eaters I remember once happened to visit three workshops that were the same on the agenda. It’s just that the person who organized them lived in the paradigm: “Bored and lonely? Gather a meeting! ” And dozens of usually busy people gathered in corporate negotiations, something fiercely discussed, and then dispersed without visible results. And what is most striking, after some time, everything was repeated. Just like in the movie "Groundhog Day." No argument in favor of wasting time did not work. No consolidation of group work results, no visible consequences, nothing. The process for the sake of the process. Needless to say that it cost the company money? Room rental, coffee breaks, travel and accommodation for non-resident employees. And so several times in a row and only in one not the largest subdivision. In the company where I used to work, there were dozens of them.

So why all this? The first is planning. In a large company, the budget is usually built a year in advance. And if according to the schedule you have 256 events, then there will be exactly as many of them, otherwise next year you, as the budget holder, are threatened with “circumcision” in pieces and money.

Another motive for organizing corporate training is leadership. If the boss was in a Soviet school, then Lenin's “Learn, learn and learn again!” Firmly ate in his brain. By the way, this quote has an informal continuation: “Learn, learn, learn, better than work, work, work!”.

I do not want you to have the wrong perception of this publication, they say the author is against learning as such, it’s just that if the educational process is non-alternative, forced and thoughtless, there’s no need to wait for miracles.

Infotsygan ordered?

Every time I get an invitation to attend another training, I remember a funny parable.
Shepherd, herding a flock of sheep, is approached by a car of some type, leans out of the window and says:
“If I tell you how many sheep you have in the flock, will you give me one?”
A slightly surprised shepherd replies:
- Of course, why not.
Then this guy gets a laptop, connects it to a mobile phone, establishes a connection to the Internet, goes to the NASA site, selects GPS satellite communications, finds out the exact coordinates of the place where he is located, and sends them to another NASA satellite that scans this area ultra high resolution photo. Then this type sends a snapshot to one of the Hamburg laboratories, which in a few seconds sends him a soap confirming that the snapshot has been processed and the resulting data is stored in a database. Through ODBC, it connects to the MS-SQL database, copies the data to the EXCEL table, and starts calculating. After a few minutes, he gets the result and prints 150 pages in color on his miniature printer. Finally he says to the shepherd:
- You have 1586 sheep in your herd.
- Exactly! That's the number of sheep in my flock. Well, choose.
A man chooses one and loads it in the trunk. And here the shepherd says to him:
- Listen, and if I guess who you work with, will you return it to me?
A little thought, the man says:
- Come on.
“You work as a consultant,” the shepherd unexpectedly says.
- It's true, damn it! And how did you guess?
“It was easy to do,” says the shepherd, “you appeared when no one called you, you want to receive payment for an answer, which I already know, to a question that nobody asked you, and besides, you don’t understand my work. So give my dog ​​back.

No matter how ridiculous, but the percentage of experts telling about a subject in which they absolutely do not understand anything, much more than the truly highly professional specialists. I am convinced of this quite often. Elementary clarifying questions, beyond the scope of the stated topic, are capable of putting the speakers to a standstill. And, most often it is found at seminars on a wide range of topics: “Innovative marketing”, “Digital in terms of digitalization, etc.”. When it comes to applied topics "backend", "frontend" or C #, such stories are rare.

I will teach you to live ...

In addition to the classic educational seminars, several years ago, large companies were carried away with personal growth trainings and all sorts of life spring technologies. Mostly it seemed that the fish were running into your brain and you were starting to lose touch with reality. I confess, even with me, usually skeptical about all sorts of manipulations, at times there were “differences”. The technology is understandable, you are emotionally shaken, restrained by group guarantee and obligations, and then immersed in uncomfortable training conditions. As a result, the brain melts, values ​​shift, and ambitious corporate oaths of loyalty are made. It is as if the Stakhanovists were hypnotized and asked to go out into space tomorrow.

There is such an old joke:

- Boy what do you call?
- Lech !!!
- And what do you want to be?
- Astronaut !!!
- Why astronaut?
- Lech!

In other words, corporate mantras usually do not give a large field for maneuver. He mounted the horse and “Alga!” (Kaz. Alka - forward).

The hardest of all accounted for familiar IT people. Have you noticed or not, but usually in IT people work with structured thinking, with a formed system of values ​​and attitudes. And imagine that you are such an independent, authoritative and accomplished professional, suddenly begin to publicly declassify and try "on the weak." Do not become a victim of manipulation in this situation is extremely difficult, especially if everyone is sitting with their heads bowed in this ill-fated training circle, without sleep and rest for the second day. In addition to the emotional load, anxiety for the future is also added, since, usually, a group of managers of different levels, temperament and ambitions is selected. Not to be derailed and not to lose your head in this race for common sense is not at all easy. People really followed the results of such exercises, changed jobs, left families, started doing strange things. For example, throwing work for the sake of painting or knitting. I don’t think that the company has set itself such goals when it conducted such educational projects at corporate expense.

For what…

At one of the past trainings, a respected person said: “It would be good every time you start something important, you ask yourself the question:“ To what? ”. And you know, I agree with him. When you yourself offer to send you to a particular educational course, seminar, conference, you usually understand why you need it. Well, or so you think. In the case when the company decides it for you, it would be good to have in your head an answer to the question: “What?”. Otherwise it is time and money thrown away to the wind. What do you think?

Instead of epilogue

- Hello! We are starting the seminar “How to make a million rubles in one day”. Question to the hall. How much did a seminar ticket cost?
- Thousand rubles.
- How many places in this room?
- Thousand.
- Thank you, the seminar is over.