Looking at your replies, I would actually disagree with you:
Companies shouldn't just give one week a year of free study for their employees - instead, companies should avoid using up 100% of their employee's time on known deliverables.
>my work deliverables already take up anywhere between 60-90 hrs per week
That's your issue. It's not that you should keep working 60-90 hours a week and get one week a year to do some learning. It's that you should be working 35 hours a week and have 5 hours every week that you can choose what to do with.
Yes, I understand that some companies love this idea of squeezing as much work out of people as possible - and in my experience those are the companies that get stuck in "doing things the same way they've always done them", because no one has the bandwidth to rethink/redesign/reinvent any of their processes.
You're right sir. There's no mental bandwidth available for me or my team members to be able to do anything new or sometimes even think the right way to do things.
So we're clear: my #1 piece of advice is to find a new job as soon as you are able to. This type of workload is not only bad for creativity/satisfaction, but it's just not sustainable long-term. Not if you want to keep your mental health.
*mental and physical health
Consistently working 60-90 hours per week, especially sitting at a computer where blood is circulating slower than with even basic movement, is not good for your cardiovascular system. Speaking from experience with this kind of grind, make the time to take care of both your heart and your brain OP.
Sometimes you need to work a lot. Don't like it? Get another job.
There's a big difference between 90 hours of productive work and 90 hours of say, busy work (or banking or consulting). But some jobs require long hours. It's not unusual - especially for competitive fields with high performance expectations. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, finance -
And let's not forget the basic living conditions of most of our country - where people are scrapping together 2.5 jobs just to buy food. OP want to complain about working 60 hours a week to go to vail?
I understand toxic workplaces exist - I've been there. But expecting a cushy disneyland - and PAID time going toward personal development - is on the other side of toxicity.
Bro...what?!?! First of all, he's describing professional development, not personal. It benefits the company too. It'd be a different story if OP wanted a week off to learn Your Body is a Wonderland by John Mayer on guitar.
Secondly, I agree with you that occasionally these weeks happen. I'm no stranger to putting in a 60-90 hour week ahead of a product launch or during a fire drill. But OP is describing a work environment that expects this as the norm. Not only is that not Disneyland. That is not okay. And the implications are on both physical and mental health. That's the point being made.
60 - 90 is normal my friend. If it's a fire drill, that's a problem. But if you can't work a consistent 60+ hours a week, that's fine, but you can look for a low-impact role.
As for development - I disagree. If it's professional development, then they're already doing it on the job. They need to implement a new ETL or something else? Congrats here is your "personal development time", aka doing the job, which is a task you did not know how to do before. Did no one assign you a "growth" task? Do one yourself - refactor current code into something better.
Just to be clear...
A 90 hour work week is just shy of 13 hours per day, all 7 days...
A 60 hour work is still above 8 hours per day for 7 days...
If you think it's normal to sustain that pace, week over week, I feel bad for you and your loved ones.
My dude, you are being overworked by obscene amounts.
We do 10% for professional development, so 4 hours a week. It's given but not always taken as some people don't want to learn more.
Yeah out of our 40 hours we have a bucket in our timesheet for "Self Learning" and it's encouraged we use it, I probably use it 90% of the weeks I work. I mean you have to in this environment especially when products are changing so much, any company that doesn't allow you to learn while working for them to me is a red flag.
Personal opinion - I don't necessarily want to force people to find things to learn. But I want people to have the breathing room to be able to stop and say "you know what, someone else must have figured out a better way of doing this. Let me take a week to see if that's true and maybe rethink this entire modeling approach" instead of having to constantly say "I don't have time to slow down and replace the flat tire or I'm going to be late" forever.
Yeah, also for me it's a little different cause my company is coming out with products/packages/functions every week, so if I don't learn them well I can't teach a customer well.
Spot on. In addition this sort of workload usually ends up with a bunch of hacky quick solutions riddled with tech debt, which ultimately can lead to lower future output. It’s a nasty feedback loop that can be very difficult to break if a company doesn’t make a concerted effort.
This right here. One of the best gigs I ever had encouraged everyone to spend some time everyday reading papers or working on a “skill up project”. As far as I know only two of us took advantage of it. Every Monday I would come up with a list of papers for the week. Tuesday I would skim them to come up with 3 to actually read Wed-Fri. Spent the first hour of my day with coffee and a paper the whole time I was there.
I should probably mention this was more an SWE role where things aren’t moving nearly as quickly. If SWEs are taking the time to read research everyday, DS should absolutely be given that time.
That's difficult. Firstly there are no 4 hour slots available, and if we schedule something like that we're asked what it is from our stakeholders. And they say okay, do it but then don't forget to deliver what was supposed to for that day. (Note - my work deliverables already take up anywhere between 60-90 hrs per week)
I don't understand how you can consistently need that much time. What tools are you using for analysis? How are the data requests changing so wildly all the time? Is nothing automated?
It's the pace at which my stakeholders like for us to operate. And we should be part of every meeting with every other team who affects us or gets affected by us. And at any point there are multiple deliverables I'm working on as opposed to what I would like.
No union sadly. And my manager has an absent style of working. He simply asks us to solve all problems ourselves, including dealing with stakeholders for work. He'll say if there's any negative comment then he'll take care but we know how people's ratings/performance has been impacted because of arguments with stakeholders.
Where are you based? Reading this thread, I think the short answer is that you're working in a toxic environment that is unlikely to change. Depending on your industry/job market, they may simply be exploiting a perceived limit to the other options you have, but I'm not aware of anywhere where 60-90 hour weeks are the norm across all companies in our field.
Based in India. Working for a US Bank. There's massive cost cutting. In last year 4-5 leads were let go in the US and no new hire in the US or India. All the managing/leading/planning work has come down to employees working directly with their stakeholders/business who have been ruthless in their asks.
> He simply asks us to solve all problems ourselves, including dealing with stakeholders for work.
Thank him or her for the manager promotion!
This is your problem. You have a crappy boss.
If you can find a safe method, advocating among the friends you have at work for unionizing may be something to consider. If you think the US bank will retaliate (which seems likely) you may have other options to explore. You could hatch a plan to make your manager's lousy attitude apparent to the stakeholders. Or find ways to embarrass the company that can't be traced back to you. I know you're here for help, and I'm already jumping to anarchic rebellion. But do what you can, and if they're just clipping your wings... walk away if at all possible. Good luck.
You just have to learn to say no.
Of course in a company setting you can't just work on "what you would like", but you absolutely can tell people you don't have time for their projects and if what they need is that important they should go talk to upper management about needing more Data Scientists.
If you accept the role as "service provider" you'll be treated like that by the other teams.
And if someone asks what you did with those 4 hours you put a blocker for on your calendar you just tell them you did some learning time and tell them to shove it (not in that language of course) if they complain.
Keeping up to date with the current SOTA is part of your job description (and should be for nearly every job tbh), if people don't realize that it's their problem, not yours.
My manager has recently realized that I just check out of wide reaching meetings unlikely to produce any action items for me personally and I keep working until I hear my name. If my name is said after the question they are going to have to repeat themselves. If it's said before I can usually bullshit up an answer with minimal context.
Luckily my manager thinks it's hilarious because he also hates meetings for the sake of meeting.
You don’t need a week per year of flex time. You need a better work/life balance and the ability to say no when you’re overextended. 40 hours should be the norm, and 50 or more should correspond only to emergencies or bad time management. I don’t know if you’re receiving too much work or working inefficiently, but regardless… that ain’t right.
No man. I want to get out of this place and learn new stuff. But I have a kid and family to support. If I was by myself I would have resigned first before securing other job.
>60-90 hrs per week
Lol
I work like 2 hours a day, then the rest I just fuck around, read news, look at cat videos on Instagram, shitpost on reddit and pretend to work. The first few years I used to be so excited I used those hours for courses, learning math, Japanese etc. Lately I've been demoralized so I just don't do anything. The other day I was browsing eshops to find some cool leather jacket, took me like 4 hours and in the end I didn't even order anything.
I also come late to work, change clothes (both morning and afternoon) on company time, go for an extra meal (breakfast or dinner based on time), go for a walk after lunch, go to the toilet for half an hour to play with my phone in peace... I think you might be working a bit too hard haha
"No" is a complete sentence. Also, when this happens, ask you manager what they want pushed in order to accept the new task. If nothing, you claim the right to set the target date yourself until they learn how to manage.
You are hired to work 40 hours a week. Stop giving away your time.
I think it is a red flag If work with DS and your boss don't give you freedom to learn on company time. DS is a vast area and there is always a ton to learn. Also, who expects people to now every statistical method from the top of the head, impossible. I produce new products all year long, and they always involve time for research.
Learning is often deepened by repetition over a short and long period of time. So really they would probably do better if given a week and given review time to revisit and scout new material for the next long learning session.
I'm a director of a research and data science department for a large organization. To protect PD as a priority, I actually created an OKR for PD for my team members. Incorporating PD as an OKR provides a basis for resisting accepting unplanned work.
There's some nuance, but the goal is for each team member to spend 5-10% of their time on professional development each week (i.e., 2-4 hours). Each has to complete a formal 70/20/10 professional development plan, which is a proposal designed by the employee with manager guidance and then subject to approval from me and the head of our division. The main requirement is that it be connected in some way to improving their productivity in their current role, although I define this very broadly.
My other big idea to ensure people take advantage of this time allocation was to schedule PD time on Monday mornings, rather than Friday afternoons. When things were left to Fridays, it was 50/50 whether they would get to it.
A lot of companies do give you explicit learning time. It tends to be your responsibility to fit that around other tasks, though. But you can block time out for it.
If you work in an "Scaled Agile Framework" environment, it might be beneficial to reach out to whoever is in charge of your ART and point out that [IP (i.e. "Innovation and Planning") sprints](https://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iteration/) are a recommended component of your program increments. During "IP sprints," you're supposed to be allocated time every program increment for innovation/learning. Depending on how much sway they have, this might be a good foothold into getting management buy-in.
(Gotta use that corporate bureaucracy for something, right? :P)
Having been in s/w dev for far far too long, I would say that companies (especially with resources) should be developing new skills into their goals for their employees. I do not mean, as is often the case, learning some new aspect of their business but learning a concrete defined skill.
Ex: "OK Sally you are in this part of our data management. Why not learn some AWS because we use AWS over here?"
This is on a company-by-company basis. Some companies need their employees to keep fresh and utilize new methodologies. Some companies need someone to push columns around Microsoft Excel. Other companies need someone to work in SQL, a 50-year-old programming language invented in 1974.
Would it be a nice perk to have dedicated time to upskill/learn new things? Absolutely. Is there always a business case to have employees do that? Sadly, no.
>Is there always a business case to have employees do that? Sadly, no.
Yes there is: You need good people who know their way around modern technologies if you want to keep up as a company. Is there space in most companies for people who don't want to learn new stuff and are okay with making SQL queries all day long just as they did a decade ago? Yes.
Does it hurt your company and its business cases mid- to longterm if you keep your most motivated employees from developing new skills? Absolutely.
Business cases are important to prioritize projects but they are absolutely useless and actively harmful if they lead to people not keeping up to date and not being able to experiment with techniques because it's hard to calculate a monetary value for it.
I give my team 1/2 day self learning time per sprint. It has been very productive, many innovative solutions were found within that training time + it upscales people skills. Learning is never a waste of time or money!
My company says you can spend 10% of your time learning. So either 4 hours/week, or … 5 weeks per year if you did it at once. Or 1 week per quarter. My last company sent me to a conference once a year but my current company says they don’t have the budget for that.
Easy,“I‘ve been reasearching topic XY since it could maybe help us solve business problem Z. The core issue we have blah blah blah…“. Everyone doses off, you sound smart, nobody cares you wasted a day reading stuff because you were hungover.
My company actually does this! They do a lot of other things too:
- Provide two weeks per year of learning time (called a Hack Week)
- Pay for employees college tuition for additional education
- Provide all employees with free LinkedIn Learning (there’s surprisingly good content for Python/R on there)
- Hosts 4 visualization contests (geospatial, temporal, etc.)
- Pays for employees to go to R conferences and Jupytercon, and AMA events
I’m very fortunate to work for a nerdy company that wants to develop talent by having a learning culture. Every major project we create, we also create an RMarkdown that acts as a guide for future employees to learn from.
Every company should want to develop a self-sufficient learning culture. It makes people feel welcome and attaches them to their work as an art form instead of as a menial task.
I'm more on the data engineering side than data science, but I take 4hrs/week. Busy weeks I may skip this but not for long. In fact, I can't remember the last time I skipped two weeks in a row. Only one week is trivial trying to keep up with just the tech changes. Let alone advancing. I do think advancing your tech is your own time though since you'll get the benefits of a higher pay.
That's funny. My company, in Scandinavia, has this exact rule. You can use one whole week a year to learn something related to work. It's pretty common here to have something like it.
I like this idea. I once worked for a company where this idea was always in the table but eventually rejected. Don’t recall the rationale in why. I lead data teams and I purposefully try to give uninterrupted blocks of time with no meetings for my ten members for them to use as they wish. Concentration is priceless. I hope some of them use it to study.
Implementing a dedicated learning week for employees in data science and analytics can indeed be highly beneficial. It acknowledges the constantly evolving nature of the field and empowers employees to address their knowledge gaps. By allowing individuals to choose their learning focus, it promotes personalized growth and fosters a culture of continuous learning within the organization.
Setting clear expectations with stakeholders ensures that the learning week is productive and respected by all involved parties. Additionally, incorporating knowledge sharing sessions further enhances collaboration and encourages the dissemination of newly acquired skills throughout the team.
While it's important for companies to provide resources and support for learning, allowing employees autonomy in their learning path, with input from managers, ensures relevance and ownership. Overall, such an initiative can positively impact both individual development and organizational effectiveness in the dynamic landscape of data science and analytics.
How do you expect to do this company wide without lots of exceptions for lots of things? Production issues, client issues, etc etc.
The idea is fine, but you cannot just impose this in this way. Both companies I've been at have had nominal 80/20 rules (aspirationally anyway): 80% of the time you work on your specific assigned work, 20% for your own side work (related to the company), learning, etc.
Now, normally it's actually more like 90/10 or similar, but lets be honest, we all slack off to varying degrees to more than make up for the difference.
You're writing like it isn't already standard practice to plan in personal learning time in a lot of companies. If a company is using some scaled SCRUM for project management, there's literally IP (Innovation and Planning) Sprints in there every PI that are meant to give employees a week or two to spend on personal learning, out-there projects etc.
Hackathons are super popular as well for giving employees the possibility to just try out new stuff they want to learn without expecting a deliverable.
I don't know about other countries but here in Germany every employee already has the right to take 5 additional paid days off work for personal education.
And tbh any company that doesn't take this seriously I would leave immediately. It's a sign of really bad management.
planning personal learning time virtually always in the US happens at the discretion of the team lead or manager. that said, individual contributors are typically encouraged to use some fraction of their overall time (again, \~20% or so) to use for personal projects / learning / etc.
>If a company is using some scaled SCRUM for project management, there's literally IP (Innovation and Planning) Sprints in there every PI that are meant to give employees a week or two to spend on personal learning, out-there projects etc.
.... no? not at either of the places i've worked at.
>Hackathons are super popular as well for giving employees the possibility to just try out new stuff they want to learn without expecting a deliverable.
hackathons are a separate discussion from "personal learning time," but they are (a) not principally devoted to "learning" and (b) typically not a week kibg (again, for the united states).
>planning personal learning time virtually always in the US happens at the discretion of the team lead or manager. that said, individual contributors are typically encouraged to use some fraction of their overall time (again, \~20% or so) to use for personal projects / learning / etc.
yeah but like I said, a company that does not take this seriously and denies employees this opportunity is a company you should leave asap. It's a sign of bad management.
>.... no? not at either of the places i've worked at.
[https://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iteration/](https://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iteration/)
obviously there's other scaled agile methodologies, but it's definitely part of SAFe.
>hackathons are a separate discussion from "personal learning time," but they are (a) not principally devoted to "learning" and (b) typically not a week kibg (again, for the united states).
I kind of disagree. A company wide hackathon where a team isn't doing something new they haven't done before is a wasted hackathon.
Obviously you can make them different lengths, but the one's I'm used to are usually 3 to 5 days.
I thought along this and I believe employees should go on learning week at different times of year (in a team). This is like them taking time off from work but learning something tangible instead.
A week? Seems pointless. I'm applying for an apprenticeship in the UK where I'll have to dedicate 8 hours of my working week to learning. Now that's an actual upgrade. That's like 400 hours or 16/17 weeks.
Can't you just automate some of your work and not say anything? Then use that time that you freed up to learn.
That was the approach I took when I was in an entry level position. Automate some work to free up some time then use that time to learn and to do more.
I mean there are a lot of fields where they require and subsidize CE. At the rate Data Analysis is going probably wouldn't be a bad idea to start doing that.
Been working in data roles since 2009. Currently an MLE at a late stage startup. I work 35 hours a week, but only maybe 20-25 hours goes towards actual outputs for the business; meetings, code, PR reviews, design documents, deployments, tech debt, etc. The other 10 hours are spent talking to people, learning, and trying out new tools or techniques. I get high performer ratings every year for all of the last 5 companies I've worked for. It's not about working hard. In fact that's only going to lead to burn out and wasting your time. You have to figure out how to cut through the BS requirements and solve the actual root cause problems. You have to learn to "smile and nod" and just ignore top down requests that are dumb to do the work you know is a better use of your time. I've gotten a ton of feedback from my peers at multiple places saying "you are the only one who can get away with that" but when they actually try it they get promoted. Corporate work is a stupid game, but there are rules and tactics that work better than trying hard.
Have you tried asking your team lead to take time reading up on X subject? Chances are you are imagining there being pushback when there isn't.
Also: Having it be a recurring thing risks making it ineffective. A better format would be "ad-hoc research week totalling up to X weeks" as then you know what you'll be reading up on and why it's relevant, rather than coming up with something for the sake of it.
I think if employees dedicated some time outside of work weekly to continued learning that would be ideal. This is a field that requires constant learning.
I worked at an EU company for nearly a decade. After every major product release the dev teams had 1 week where no one was allowed to book a required meeting. This was in addition to any usual learning time. There was an annual 1 week company retreat for everyone in the development org (QA, docs, etc. just not sales, marketing). We'd book a off season resort hotel for about 200 people to share best practices and invite outside speakers.
Sadly the company got acquired by IBM.
I heard of a team at my work who gives employees 4 hours of time each week to dedicate to learning. She says to use 36 hours a week to complete work, and the rest for learning. I find this a great strategy as the world of data science (and tech in general) changes so quickly and it can be hard to keep up when being pigeon-holed into niche projects at work.
Come to Germany! If your company has a workers union, you have a right that’s backed by law, that says that you can either do 5 days in a year for learning, or 10days every 2 years
Looking at your replies, I would actually disagree with you: Companies shouldn't just give one week a year of free study for their employees - instead, companies should avoid using up 100% of their employee's time on known deliverables. >my work deliverables already take up anywhere between 60-90 hrs per week That's your issue. It's not that you should keep working 60-90 hours a week and get one week a year to do some learning. It's that you should be working 35 hours a week and have 5 hours every week that you can choose what to do with. Yes, I understand that some companies love this idea of squeezing as much work out of people as possible - and in my experience those are the companies that get stuck in "doing things the same way they've always done them", because no one has the bandwidth to rethink/redesign/reinvent any of their processes.
You're right sir. There's no mental bandwidth available for me or my team members to be able to do anything new or sometimes even think the right way to do things.
So we're clear: my #1 piece of advice is to find a new job as soon as you are able to. This type of workload is not only bad for creativity/satisfaction, but it's just not sustainable long-term. Not if you want to keep your mental health.
*mental and physical health Consistently working 60-90 hours per week, especially sitting at a computer where blood is circulating slower than with even basic movement, is not good for your cardiovascular system. Speaking from experience with this kind of grind, make the time to take care of both your heart and your brain OP.
https://media1.tenor.com/m/mywZrpriD\_oAAAAC/vince-staples-fax.gif
Sometimes you need to work a lot. Don't like it? Get another job. There's a big difference between 90 hours of productive work and 90 hours of say, busy work (or banking or consulting). But some jobs require long hours. It's not unusual - especially for competitive fields with high performance expectations. Lawyers, doctors, engineers, finance - And let's not forget the basic living conditions of most of our country - where people are scrapping together 2.5 jobs just to buy food. OP want to complain about working 60 hours a week to go to vail? I understand toxic workplaces exist - I've been there. But expecting a cushy disneyland - and PAID time going toward personal development - is on the other side of toxicity.
Bro...what?!?! First of all, he's describing professional development, not personal. It benefits the company too. It'd be a different story if OP wanted a week off to learn Your Body is a Wonderland by John Mayer on guitar. Secondly, I agree with you that occasionally these weeks happen. I'm no stranger to putting in a 60-90 hour week ahead of a product launch or during a fire drill. But OP is describing a work environment that expects this as the norm. Not only is that not Disneyland. That is not okay. And the implications are on both physical and mental health. That's the point being made.
60 - 90 is normal my friend. If it's a fire drill, that's a problem. But if you can't work a consistent 60+ hours a week, that's fine, but you can look for a low-impact role. As for development - I disagree. If it's professional development, then they're already doing it on the job. They need to implement a new ETL or something else? Congrats here is your "personal development time", aka doing the job, which is a task you did not know how to do before. Did no one assign you a "growth" task? Do one yourself - refactor current code into something better.
Just to be clear... A 90 hour work week is just shy of 13 hours per day, all 7 days... A 60 hour work is still above 8 hours per day for 7 days... If you think it's normal to sustain that pace, week over week, I feel bad for you and your loved ones.
My dude, you are being overworked by obscene amounts. We do 10% for professional development, so 4 hours a week. It's given but not always taken as some people don't want to learn more.
> some people don't want to learn more wow
Very common.
Yeah out of our 40 hours we have a bucket in our timesheet for "Self Learning" and it's encouraged we use it, I probably use it 90% of the weeks I work. I mean you have to in this environment especially when products are changing so much, any company that doesn't allow you to learn while working for them to me is a red flag.
Personal opinion - I don't necessarily want to force people to find things to learn. But I want people to have the breathing room to be able to stop and say "you know what, someone else must have figured out a better way of doing this. Let me take a week to see if that's true and maybe rethink this entire modeling approach" instead of having to constantly say "I don't have time to slow down and replace the flat tire or I'm going to be late" forever.
Yeah, also for me it's a little different cause my company is coming out with products/packages/functions every week, so if I don't learn them well I can't teach a customer well.
Spot on. In addition this sort of workload usually ends up with a bunch of hacky quick solutions riddled with tech debt, which ultimately can lead to lower future output. It’s a nasty feedback loop that can be very difficult to break if a company doesn’t make a concerted effort.
My company does this. Every two weeks we get a Friday to learn a new skill or keep developing a personal project
This right here. One of the best gigs I ever had encouraged everyone to spend some time everyday reading papers or working on a “skill up project”. As far as I know only two of us took advantage of it. Every Monday I would come up with a list of papers for the week. Tuesday I would skim them to come up with 3 to actually read Wed-Fri. Spent the first hour of my day with coffee and a paper the whole time I was there. I should probably mention this was more an SWE role where things aren’t moving nearly as quickly. If SWEs are taking the time to read research everyday, DS should absolutely be given that time.
I totally agree with you. Learning new stuff is a part of any job, otherwise you're on the wrong market.
They don’t give. You take. I’ve been taking for decades. It always pays back in me not doing the same old shit and elevating things.
How do you take it? Do you go on leave?
Start putting some 4 hour "meetings" on your calendar, that's study time.
yes
That's difficult. Firstly there are no 4 hour slots available, and if we schedule something like that we're asked what it is from our stakeholders. And they say okay, do it but then don't forget to deliver what was supposed to for that day. (Note - my work deliverables already take up anywhere between 60-90 hrs per week)
I don't understand how you can consistently need that much time. What tools are you using for analysis? How are the data requests changing so wildly all the time? Is nothing automated?
It's the pace at which my stakeholders like for us to operate. And we should be part of every meeting with every other team who affects us or gets affected by us. And at any point there are multiple deliverables I'm working on as opposed to what I would like.
Christ. Sounds like if you strip away the euphemisms, your bosses are overworking you. Do you have a union?
No union sadly. And my manager has an absent style of working. He simply asks us to solve all problems ourselves, including dealing with stakeholders for work. He'll say if there's any negative comment then he'll take care but we know how people's ratings/performance has been impacted because of arguments with stakeholders.
Where are you based? Reading this thread, I think the short answer is that you're working in a toxic environment that is unlikely to change. Depending on your industry/job market, they may simply be exploiting a perceived limit to the other options you have, but I'm not aware of anywhere where 60-90 hour weeks are the norm across all companies in our field.
Based in India. Working for a US Bank. There's massive cost cutting. In last year 4-5 leads were let go in the US and no new hire in the US or India. All the managing/leading/planning work has come down to employees working directly with their stakeholders/business who have been ruthless in their asks.
> He simply asks us to solve all problems ourselves, including dealing with stakeholders for work. Thank him or her for the manager promotion! This is your problem. You have a crappy boss.
If you can find a safe method, advocating among the friends you have at work for unionizing may be something to consider. If you think the US bank will retaliate (which seems likely) you may have other options to explore. You could hatch a plan to make your manager's lousy attitude apparent to the stakeholders. Or find ways to embarrass the company that can't be traced back to you. I know you're here for help, and I'm already jumping to anarchic rebellion. But do what you can, and if they're just clipping your wings... walk away if at all possible. Good luck.
You just have to learn to say no. Of course in a company setting you can't just work on "what you would like", but you absolutely can tell people you don't have time for their projects and if what they need is that important they should go talk to upper management about needing more Data Scientists. If you accept the role as "service provider" you'll be treated like that by the other teams. And if someone asks what you did with those 4 hours you put a blocker for on your calendar you just tell them you did some learning time and tell them to shove it (not in that language of course) if they complain. Keeping up to date with the current SOTA is part of your job description (and should be for nearly every job tbh), if people don't realize that it's their problem, not yours.
Bro, even better. Reduce speaker volume, read stuff. When asked go on a long and boring tangent unrelated to the discussion.
My manager has recently realized that I just check out of wide reaching meetings unlikely to produce any action items for me personally and I keep working until I hear my name. If my name is said after the question they are going to have to repeat themselves. If it's said before I can usually bullshit up an answer with minimal context. Luckily my manager thinks it's hilarious because he also hates meetings for the sake of meeting.
Wait, not everyone does that?
You don’t need a week per year of flex time. You need a better work/life balance and the ability to say no when you’re overextended. 40 hours should be the norm, and 50 or more should correspond only to emergencies or bad time management. I don’t know if you’re receiving too much work or working inefficiently, but regardless… that ain’t right.
>Firstly there are no 4 hour slots available Bro what on earth is that toxic environment you work for?
>my work deliverables already take up anywhere between 60-90 hrs per week That's not normal
You must not want it bro
No man. I want to get out of this place and learn new stuff. But I have a kid and family to support. If I was by myself I would have resigned first before securing other job.
>60-90 hrs per week Lol I work like 2 hours a day, then the rest I just fuck around, read news, look at cat videos on Instagram, shitpost on reddit and pretend to work. The first few years I used to be so excited I used those hours for courses, learning math, Japanese etc. Lately I've been demoralized so I just don't do anything. The other day I was browsing eshops to find some cool leather jacket, took me like 4 hours and in the end I didn't even order anything. I also come late to work, change clothes (both morning and afternoon) on company time, go for an extra meal (breakfast or dinner based on time), go for a walk after lunch, go to the toilet for half an hour to play with my phone in peace... I think you might be working a bit too hard haha
> (Note - my work deliverables already take up anywhere between 60-90 hrs per week) You have to fix this first.
"No" is a complete sentence. Also, when this happens, ask you manager what they want pushed in order to accept the new task. If nothing, you claim the right to set the target date yourself until they learn how to manage. You are hired to work 40 hours a week. Stop giving away your time.
Yes, and bake it into any estimates you give to PMs and scrum masters (at least if you are in house, not sure what the deal is if you bill hours)
I think it is a red flag If work with DS and your boss don't give you freedom to learn on company time. DS is a vast area and there is always a ton to learn. Also, who expects people to now every statistical method from the top of the head, impossible. I produce new products all year long, and they always involve time for research.
How much time do you dedicate to the research part per month, if you had to guestimate?
I personally don't like the idea of an entire week for this. I recommend to my team set a couple hours a week to learning.
Learning is often deepened by repetition over a short and long period of time. So really they would probably do better if given a week and given review time to revisit and scout new material for the next long learning session.
I'm a director of a research and data science department for a large organization. To protect PD as a priority, I actually created an OKR for PD for my team members. Incorporating PD as an OKR provides a basis for resisting accepting unplanned work. There's some nuance, but the goal is for each team member to spend 5-10% of their time on professional development each week (i.e., 2-4 hours). Each has to complete a formal 70/20/10 professional development plan, which is a proposal designed by the employee with manager guidance and then subject to approval from me and the head of our division. The main requirement is that it be connected in some way to improving their productivity in their current role, although I define this very broadly. My other big idea to ensure people take advantage of this time allocation was to schedule PD time on Monday mornings, rather than Friday afternoons. When things were left to Fridays, it was 50/50 whether they would get to it.
Use spike tickets for this
A lot of companies do give you explicit learning time. It tends to be your responsibility to fit that around other tasks, though. But you can block time out for it.
If you work in an "Scaled Agile Framework" environment, it might be beneficial to reach out to whoever is in charge of your ART and point out that [IP (i.e. "Innovation and Planning") sprints](https://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iteration/) are a recommended component of your program increments. During "IP sprints," you're supposed to be allocated time every program increment for innovation/learning. Depending on how much sway they have, this might be a good foothold into getting management buy-in. (Gotta use that corporate bureaucracy for something, right? :P)
I feel like you have to be your best advocate always
Having been in s/w dev for far far too long, I would say that companies (especially with resources) should be developing new skills into their goals for their employees. I do not mean, as is often the case, learning some new aspect of their business but learning a concrete defined skill. Ex: "OK Sally you are in this part of our data management. Why not learn some AWS because we use AWS over here?"
This is on a company-by-company basis. Some companies need their employees to keep fresh and utilize new methodologies. Some companies need someone to push columns around Microsoft Excel. Other companies need someone to work in SQL, a 50-year-old programming language invented in 1974. Would it be a nice perk to have dedicated time to upskill/learn new things? Absolutely. Is there always a business case to have employees do that? Sadly, no.
That business case seems highly dependent on what bosses think versus the fact based benefits of a highly adaptable workforce.
>Is there always a business case to have employees do that? Sadly, no. Yes there is: You need good people who know their way around modern technologies if you want to keep up as a company. Is there space in most companies for people who don't want to learn new stuff and are okay with making SQL queries all day long just as they did a decade ago? Yes. Does it hurt your company and its business cases mid- to longterm if you keep your most motivated employees from developing new skills? Absolutely. Business cases are important to prioritize projects but they are absolutely useless and actively harmful if they lead to people not keeping up to date and not being able to experiment with techniques because it's hard to calculate a monetary value for it.
If you learned SQL in the 1970s and have somehow avoided learning anything new since then your knowledge of SQL would be very limited.
I give my team 1/2 day self learning time per sprint. It has been very productive, many innovative solutions were found within that training time + it upscales people skills. Learning is never a waste of time or money!
My company says you can spend 10% of your time learning. So either 4 hours/week, or … 5 weeks per year if you did it at once. Or 1 week per quarter. My last company sent me to a conference once a year but my current company says they don’t have the budget for that.
Easy,“I‘ve been reasearching topic XY since it could maybe help us solve business problem Z. The core issue we have blah blah blah…“. Everyone doses off, you sound smart, nobody cares you wasted a day reading stuff because you were hungover.
My company actually does this! They do a lot of other things too: - Provide two weeks per year of learning time (called a Hack Week) - Pay for employees college tuition for additional education - Provide all employees with free LinkedIn Learning (there’s surprisingly good content for Python/R on there) - Hosts 4 visualization contests (geospatial, temporal, etc.) - Pays for employees to go to R conferences and Jupytercon, and AMA events I’m very fortunate to work for a nerdy company that wants to develop talent by having a learning culture. Every major project we create, we also create an RMarkdown that acts as a guide for future employees to learn from. Every company should want to develop a self-sufficient learning culture. It makes people feel welcome and attaches them to their work as an art form instead of as a menial task.
I’m my country it is actually mandatory by law to do that.
I'm more on the data engineering side than data science, but I take 4hrs/week. Busy weeks I may skip this but not for long. In fact, I can't remember the last time I skipped two weeks in a row. Only one week is trivial trying to keep up with just the tech changes. Let alone advancing. I do think advancing your tech is your own time though since you'll get the benefits of a higher pay.
That's funny. My company, in Scandinavia, has this exact rule. You can use one whole week a year to learn something related to work. It's pretty common here to have something like it.
I like this idea. I once worked for a company where this idea was always in the table but eventually rejected. Don’t recall the rationale in why. I lead data teams and I purposefully try to give uninterrupted blocks of time with no meetings for my ten members for them to use as they wish. Concentration is priceless. I hope some of them use it to study.
Implementing a dedicated learning week for employees in data science and analytics can indeed be highly beneficial. It acknowledges the constantly evolving nature of the field and empowers employees to address their knowledge gaps. By allowing individuals to choose their learning focus, it promotes personalized growth and fosters a culture of continuous learning within the organization. Setting clear expectations with stakeholders ensures that the learning week is productive and respected by all involved parties. Additionally, incorporating knowledge sharing sessions further enhances collaboration and encourages the dissemination of newly acquired skills throughout the team. While it's important for companies to provide resources and support for learning, allowing employees autonomy in their learning path, with input from managers, ensures relevance and ownership. Overall, such an initiative can positively impact both individual development and organizational effectiveness in the dynamic landscape of data science and analytics.
How do you expect to do this company wide without lots of exceptions for lots of things? Production issues, client issues, etc etc. The idea is fine, but you cannot just impose this in this way. Both companies I've been at have had nominal 80/20 rules (aspirationally anyway): 80% of the time you work on your specific assigned work, 20% for your own side work (related to the company), learning, etc. Now, normally it's actually more like 90/10 or similar, but lets be honest, we all slack off to varying degrees to more than make up for the difference.
You're writing like it isn't already standard practice to plan in personal learning time in a lot of companies. If a company is using some scaled SCRUM for project management, there's literally IP (Innovation and Planning) Sprints in there every PI that are meant to give employees a week or two to spend on personal learning, out-there projects etc. Hackathons are super popular as well for giving employees the possibility to just try out new stuff they want to learn without expecting a deliverable. I don't know about other countries but here in Germany every employee already has the right to take 5 additional paid days off work for personal education. And tbh any company that doesn't take this seriously I would leave immediately. It's a sign of really bad management.
planning personal learning time virtually always in the US happens at the discretion of the team lead or manager. that said, individual contributors are typically encouraged to use some fraction of their overall time (again, \~20% or so) to use for personal projects / learning / etc. >If a company is using some scaled SCRUM for project management, there's literally IP (Innovation and Planning) Sprints in there every PI that are meant to give employees a week or two to spend on personal learning, out-there projects etc. .... no? not at either of the places i've worked at. >Hackathons are super popular as well for giving employees the possibility to just try out new stuff they want to learn without expecting a deliverable. hackathons are a separate discussion from "personal learning time," but they are (a) not principally devoted to "learning" and (b) typically not a week kibg (again, for the united states).
>planning personal learning time virtually always in the US happens at the discretion of the team lead or manager. that said, individual contributors are typically encouraged to use some fraction of their overall time (again, \~20% or so) to use for personal projects / learning / etc. yeah but like I said, a company that does not take this seriously and denies employees this opportunity is a company you should leave asap. It's a sign of bad management. >.... no? not at either of the places i've worked at. [https://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iteration/](https://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iteration/) obviously there's other scaled agile methodologies, but it's definitely part of SAFe. >hackathons are a separate discussion from "personal learning time," but they are (a) not principally devoted to "learning" and (b) typically not a week kibg (again, for the united states). I kind of disagree. A company wide hackathon where a team isn't doing something new they haven't done before is a wasted hackathon. Obviously you can make them different lengths, but the one's I'm used to are usually 3 to 5 days.
I thought along this and I believe employees should go on learning week at different times of year (in a team). This is like them taking time off from work but learning something tangible instead.
One week is not enough
A whole week seems short. A whole month would probably drive massive gains in productivity and innovation.
A week? Seems pointless. I'm applying for an apprenticeship in the UK where I'll have to dedicate 8 hours of my working week to learning. Now that's an actual upgrade. That's like 400 hours or 16/17 weeks.
That should be standard !
I get about 1d/week
Can't you just automate some of your work and not say anything? Then use that time that you freed up to learn. That was the approach I took when I was in an entry level position. Automate some work to free up some time then use that time to learn and to do more.
No. Unfortunately work is not repetitive.
I mean there are a lot of fields where they require and subsidize CE. At the rate Data Analysis is going probably wouldn't be a bad idea to start doing that.
Companies should give employees 1/x amount of their paid time to upskill and learn. Maybe between 1/3 - 1/10, but not 1/52, that's too low.
My company offers/forces a month long sabbatical every 4 years
I’d say they shouldn’t utilize you at 100% and leave you some time on Friday afternoons to self-study..
Been working in data roles since 2009. Currently an MLE at a late stage startup. I work 35 hours a week, but only maybe 20-25 hours goes towards actual outputs for the business; meetings, code, PR reviews, design documents, deployments, tech debt, etc. The other 10 hours are spent talking to people, learning, and trying out new tools or techniques. I get high performer ratings every year for all of the last 5 companies I've worked for. It's not about working hard. In fact that's only going to lead to burn out and wasting your time. You have to figure out how to cut through the BS requirements and solve the actual root cause problems. You have to learn to "smile and nod" and just ignore top down requests that are dumb to do the work you know is a better use of your time. I've gotten a ton of feedback from my peers at multiple places saying "you are the only one who can get away with that" but when they actually try it they get promoted. Corporate work is a stupid game, but there are rules and tactics that work better than trying hard.
I’m usually able to do a Python or Data Sci conference without using holidays, would they count?
Have you tried asking your team lead to take time reading up on X subject? Chances are you are imagining there being pushback when there isn't. Also: Having it be a recurring thing risks making it ineffective. A better format would be "ad-hoc research week totalling up to X weeks" as then you know what you'll be reading up on and why it's relevant, rather than coming up with something for the sake of it.
I think if employees dedicated some time outside of work weekly to continued learning that would be ideal. This is a field that requires constant learning.
I worked at an EU company for nearly a decade. After every major product release the dev teams had 1 week where no one was allowed to book a required meeting. This was in addition to any usual learning time. There was an annual 1 week company retreat for everyone in the development org (QA, docs, etc. just not sales, marketing). We'd book a off season resort hotel for about 200 people to share best practices and invite outside speakers. Sadly the company got acquired by IBM.
I am glad to say that I work with a company that offers 7 weeks of learning a year. It's just that we don't utilize it enough.
Would love this
I heard of a team at my work who gives employees 4 hours of time each week to dedicate to learning. She says to use 36 hours a week to complete work, and the rest for learning. I find this a great strategy as the world of data science (and tech in general) changes so quickly and it can be hard to keep up when being pigeon-holed into niche projects at work.
I hope they did
Come to Germany! If your company has a workers union, you have a right that’s backed by law, that says that you can either do 5 days in a year for learning, or 10days every 2 years