I severely overestimated the number of conferences my jobs would send me to

i never went to why conferences when i was in computers, although i wish i had. culture definitely doesn’t promote it, although they should. it’s just dumb not to foster professional growth in some of your most valuable employees.

now that I’m in medicine they actively encourage it and i still haven’t gone lol. hopefully will get to one or two this year though.

I’m in medical devices and they two big conferences for my specialty are strictly sales degenerates only. They breathlessly blog about how nice it is to connect with people and see things and the software org just sits there and takes it.

bizarre how corporate cultures get things so wrong sometimes

Feature, but a bug - we’re just not the end user of the corporate system.

If you let the software guys think they’re important then they’re going to try and get more money in salary or go to more conferences and then you’re spending money, not saving it.

If you make sales feel important by sending them to every convention that they want then you can pay them less and will get orders - you’re making money.

Cost versus revenue.

Works also for the medical personnel - send them to a conference and they learn something new that saves you money or makes you more money.

i think it has more to do with the culture of continuing education in medicine that people really prioritize. still happens with the engineers obviously, but the higher ups haven’t prioritized it like they should. fostering growth in your employees makes good business sense, it’s just not immediately obvious to the bean counters.

You see it more with credentialed engineers - people who get their PE and are required to have a certain amount of professional development to keep it. Lots of orgs employing them will go out of the way to maintain that because they need to for their business to function.

My company throws a PluralSight subscription at us, assigns us some regulatory training, and then closes the dungeon door.

if unions worked the way they should these are the sorts of issues they’d be good at negotiating.

Every software engineer I’ve talked to seems to be very anti-union. Some of them have even said “unions are for blue collar workers, not professionals like me!”

Software engineering is a lot more like being a carpenter, electrician, plumber, welder, or even a construction site foreman than it does with being a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or actually credentialed engineer.

yeah it’s a shame.no reason professionals can’t unionize though when they’re cogs in a big corporate environment. the civil servants, including all the engineers, were unionized when i was at nasa. unions aren’t entirely blameless for the state they’ve fallen to, though.

From: MasterOfMagic at 2021-09-27 20:59:07
Every software engineer I’ve talked to seems to be very anti-union. Some of them have even said “unions are for blue collar workers, not professionals like me!”

Software engineering is a lot more like being a carpenter, electrician, plumber, welder, or even a construction site foreman than it does with being a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or actually credentialed engineer.

100% agreed

From: MasterOfMagic at 2021-09-27 20:59:07
Every software engineer I’ve talked to seems to be very anti-union. Some of them have even said “unions are for blue collar workers, not professionals like me!”

Software engineering is a lot more like being a carpenter, electrician, plumber, welder, or even a construction site foreman than it does with being a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or actually credentialed engineer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

the libertarian streak that is so ingrained in this shitshow of a career path i chose is one of the biggest pet peeves i have

California was a mistake