Training Sucks
Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. "Do you understand what you are reading?" Philip asked. "How can I," he said, "unless someone explains it to me?" (Acts 8:30-31, NIV).
A couple days ago a coworker lamented the fact that the Design Pattern training course was booked for six months solid. Oh no, how horrible. Guess you're just gonna have to go on being ignorant of design patterns until the middle next year. Can't possibly understand something unless someone behind a podium explains it to ya ...
Dude, it's not like they're going to cover anything you couldn't just read in the Gang of Four book. I'd be willing to lay good money they're not going to say anything interesting, like how design patterns are an incomplete solution, that when you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, the right thing to do is find better tools, instead of laboriously cranking out the drudge work by hand; like Steve Yegge says, a good third of the GoF design patterns are things that programmers in functional languages could do in one or two lines and they would never dream of inventing cutesy names for such obvious things ...
Naw, it's probably gonna be three hours of: "Here is the Bridge Pattern. It looks like this in UML. You use it in these situations. Click, next slide. Here is the Decorator Pattern. It looks like this in UML. You use it in these situations. Click, next slide. Here is the Singleton Pattern. It looks like this in UML. You should avoid using this pattern if you can. It's a fuckin' global variable is all it is. Click, next slide ..."
I had a similar reaction when another coworker suggested we videotape already existing documentation. Because, um, it's easier to have someone explain how to do something, rather than read how to do it in some dry, dusty webpage or Word document.
Deep breath here. Okay, the documentation could be improved. Fine. And sure, different people have different learning styles. I get that. Maybe there's something about seeing a face or hearing a voice which makes the subject material more engaging and more interesting to listen to. Perhaps the human presence is what opens up pathways in the brain that reading the written word is unable to accomplish. Learning becomes more a form of entertainment. I'm positive at the neurological level, that's exactly what's happening.
But gawd, is it inefficient.
I don't mean that reading is a higher bandwidth form of communication than listening. No, humans comprehend speech at a rate of around 200 words a minute, which is coincidentally almost the same speed at which the average adult can read. Of course that rate can vary -- for extemporaneous presentations of technical material, you can count on the speaker umming and ahing at around half the rate of normal conversation.
But that's small potatoes. So I can read your slides in about half the time it takes for you to read them to me. So what. What really bothers me is when you, the presenter, begin to cover material I already know. I can't blame you, of course -- after all, it is a mixed audience, and you can never count on everyone having been exposed to the exact same prerequisite foreknowledge. But when a writer begins to belabor the obvious, I can always skip a few pages. I have no remedy when a real-life presenter does the same. It's just another 15 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Even on video, cueing up the appropriate segment is a major hassle; it doesn't compare to how fast I can scan a written page. With written documentation, if I want to speed up, if I need to slow down -- I'm in control of the speed of the conversation.
I guess I've always been a bit of an autodidact, and that's where my distaste for formalized education comes from. It just seems to me that "training" is an entirely inappropriate word that goes on in our business. Dogs are trained. McDonald's employees are trained. "Training" means teaching a rote task in which mastery can be acheived in a few short hours. Believe me, when you come out of that classroom, you'll have only just begun to learn design patterns or whatever. You've got the rest of your professional career to get good at 'em. What you're really looking for, what you really want is an education, not a training -- and that's not something someone can ever "give" you.
Training sucks. Read a book.
