This has been an interesting topic for me since 2005 when I became heavily involved in industrial training. I used to find that the workforce complained that they were not being trained but complained when they were. I could see both sides of the argument, from both the employers and employees point of view. The problem has been the shear cost of training. Many employers try to avoid the expense of training, however training costs money, one way or an other and quality training costs even more. And lack of training costs, also. Ironically, I am on a 5 day course just now that is costing my employer 5150$ USD plus accomodation, travel and food. Fortunately it is in my employers time, but I have had many years where that wasn't the case. There is about 17 of us on the course, so the course provider is raking in a tidy sum! I also noticed that in some cases employers will train new people but not older people yet older folk need retraining when new systems are introduced. And to that end, like you Oss, going back about 10 years plus, I used to train myself.
I am 'older folk' but I am in the camp that creates stuff that it is worth training other people how to use, I take pride in my ability to invent and to derive value from anything new that comes along. The problem these days is that my subject is so huge that it is no longer possible for any one person at any age to understand all of it, something that is no doubt true in many industries but is particularly true in current day computing. The further question though might be, are any of these new systems that are for some reason different from yesterdays systems actually any good and do they actually serve any 'real' business need in the modern day? The trick for me is to understand how things change and to work from first principles to see how any new developments impact your approach to a solution, in my line of work algorithms are king there are only so many of them that are all that useful in business, it's rare for a new one to come along that really changes things, however it is very common for new ways of doing the same old sh*t to come along, sometimes yes the new ways are good but often you spend all your time trying to figure out what is worthwhile investing time in. I should have said 'it never really happened', in any large sense for me, I dd get on the odd course, I went to a course on Sage Sovereign accounting software back in 1991 the cost at the time was probably a couple of grand , Sage have never been cheap, but in the end we never did anything with Sage. A couple of years later I was one of the UK's few experts in a new development language called CA-VO, that got me some spots speaking to large audiences and I was also later invited to a meeting of European experts on the language by one of the authors of its predecessor language, never ever really enjoyed public speaking though as I am quite shy at heart
Its amazing how some older folk's minds can remain so sharp and agile and others deteriorate by comparison. Yep. This is certainly true of the oil industry. Vast subject area(s). No one individual can know even the half of it in depth.
Algorithms. They got a mention on my course today. Something that someone "chucks" in a piece of software for the predictive modelling of a range of scientific / engineering scenarios.
A bit more than "chucks" John An algorithm is a set of successive steps, very specific instructions, that take an input of some kind and produce an output of some kind, if you didn't have algorithms you would have no instructions and no computation of any kind, not just computing as we know it today. This is a good list http://www.risc.jku.at/people/ckoutsch/stuff/e_algorithms.html and I would not pretend to be very familiar with more than a few of these even though it's my job
Anyway.................. companies that cold call me at 8pm at night, I hate that as well! Just to get back on track, his thread is getting very technical all of a sudden, lol
I'm sure I danced the night away to Algorithms? Maybe it was "Burning Spear Rhythms" Can't remember, getting old......
