How to convince boss that learning new technology or brushing up during downtime pays off?

Question

I have posted about many challenges at my workplace, and the issue of how to manage downtime is one that we've been struggling with, and I speak on behalf of my colleagues as well.

What exactly do we mean by downtime? First of all, our boss is one who does not write expectations for any projects. They briefly tell us the new idea and then to implement it, and leaves it up to us to divide up the work. They are also busy working on other things, so they visit our work area every so often. Since there are no written expectations, we often do not know what to do next if we complete our tasks earlier than expected.

When we approach our boss and ask what to do next, they tell us to be more proactive in making decisions on adding features to the project or enhancing it for better visuals and/or user experience. And more often than not, taking this "proactive" course lead to wasted effort because it ended up not matching what our boss really wanted, which wasn't even verbally communicated to us, let alone, written.

So we decided to instead learn newer technologies or explore unfamiliar concepts of the technologies we already use. During those downtimes we devoted in keeping up in our field, our boss suddenly walked into our work area and reprimanded us for "wasting time learning technologies and concepts we don't need."

Again, there are no written expectations, and "taking the pilot's seat" in a project often ended up being wrong. We just got better at sneaking in some learning time so we wouldn't get caught. What was the result through all those years? We learned Git, newer frameworks for both front-end and back-end, better programming practices, user experience, and more, and yes, 100% of our efforts became official practices and implementations for our subsequent projects, and yes, we became more effective and efficient overall.

Now, we do have evidences that our learning time spent actually paid off, but telling our boss things along the lines of "had we not spent some time at work to learn, we wouldn't be able to pull off the project this well and this quickly" may sound quite confrontational. We know that in our industry, we must learn to keep up, and the projects just get more demanding. Still to this day, our boss emphasizes that we should spend no time at work learning because it "takes away time from development and improving our current products." But we must, and we continue so, unfortunately covertly.

And let us remind our readers again - this is downtime, and we would complete all known tasks first before we take some time to learn something.

So, how do we convince our boss that learning new things during downtime is the way to go, if they don't buy all the empirical evidences that our learned knowledge became official practices and information? What other suggestions may you have for managing this situation?

Answer 1

You have a manager that does not understand knowledge-based industries, and apparently no trust for your knowledge of your craft. This cannot change unless they themselves starts honing their own skills as a manager. My first question when I started reading your post was: "Have you shown them that your proactive learning was useful?". Then you went on to describe how you have indeed been able to show this and it did not change their opinion, neither did it make them trust your judgement. This means you have proof that you cannot convince them im their current state of mind.

Ideally your closest manager should be on your side. You should be able to have a conversation about this and they should be able to trust you. Reading between the lines it does not seem like your manager is that kind of person.

So there is no arena where you can raise this subject, your manager is only focused on the short term money and does not want you to develop your skills. This is a sweatshop. If you are not fine with that, you should go above their head and talk to the person above them. If it turns out this will always be a sweatshop you have to polish your resume and start applying for other jobs, or perhaps suggest that you work as a consultant so you can control your own time.

For me, this is such a red flag that I would have my first interviews booked by tomorrow, and a meeting with my manager's boss on schedule. If the situation does not change you risk stress and eventually burn-out after banging your head against a wall for months or years.

Answer 2

Rephrase it a little.

Your boss doesn't like research for it's own sake. Fine. Don't describe it as such. Instead, for every new technology you're learning, figure out some practical, useful thing to do with it to support the product. Then, when you're teaching yourself how to use the new thing, it's not purely for the purpose of knowing how to use the new thing, it's a necessary requirement to implementing this new piece of functionality for the product.

Your boss is already telling you to be more proactive in making decisions about features. Make this into a "making decisions about features" thing, and you should be fine.

Answer 3

If I were you, I would not waste my time trying to convince this boss of anything. It's a game you can't win. The style of project "management" you describe is wasteful and completely unpredictable. If you really feel a need to improve things, suggest that everyone, including the boss, take a course in Agile Software Development.

That is the right thing to do, but I doubt anything will come of that. There seems to be no self-reflection or interest in career development. You had to sneak in learning git??? That is completely nuts! That's almost a basic requirement for a developer today. Were you even using source control before that?

In spite of all the negatives, it does sound like you have somehow progressed as a developer, and have covertly learned new things. That's great, but you probably don't get enough time for this to stay current in the industry. Ultimately, that will be harmful to your career. But it also sounds like you have been there a while and aren't interested in leaving. In my opinion, this is foolish.

Answer 4

You seem really focused on learning technical concepts, improving your technical skills, and staying up to date on new innovations in your knowledge space. That's good. You've got initiative to continually improve your technical skills. It is too bad that your boss isn't able to support that growth, but it seems like the focus you have on technical skills is causing you and your team to ignore the opportunity to improve in areas that may be more meaningful.

While it's always great to learn a new framework, the choice of framework won't matter if your requirements aren't clear.

While it's productive to spend your downtime improving your skills, it could be even more productive to spend "downtime" improving your relationship with your boss.

You mention that your covert learning has made you more efficient, but if you don't clearly understand your goals, efficiency doesn't matter.

Do you see the pattern? There's a difference between learning or improving in general, versus learning or improving things that matter - that is, identifying the root cause of problems, and focusing improvement activities around fixing them.

I don't mean to come off as suggesting that the things you're learning aren't important, because they are - but based on the way you've described the situation, it sounds like you're missing bigger opportunities to improve in areas that are actually important in terms of delivering quality work and actually meeting your boss's expectations.

Simply put, if you're able to improve the areas you're complaining about (work management, scoping, estimating, requirements gathering, goal setting) you may find that your situation improves to the point that your boss becomes more receptive to the things you're trying to do covertly.