I miss training

(this is a rant post)

I've been thinking a lot about pedagogy lately. A coworker tapped me to step into lead the incident handling review committee for our org and I'm trying to come it at it from a first-principles approach which is so far summing to "we should be part of the continuing education of our developers," except insofar as I can tell, there is no structured "continuing education" present at my org.

I'm on my fourth job as a professional software engineer (after college, anyway). My first was a privately held software product company that was making the pivot from yearly incremental paid releases to SaaS after having discovered a moneyhose knowledge share product in the 90s. In hindsight they had the most structured continuing education processes out of all of my jobs, between quarterly career checkins, hosted book clubs, periodic code hygiene reviews of arbitrary code. We did craploads of pair programming and constantly questioned if our processes made sense, I'd have energetic discussions about how to structure our settings management with whiteboard diagrams with my mentor. It was an amazing environment to cut my teeth as an engineer, especially as a transition out of university.

Every other role has had effectively no training and has hurled me directly into the deep end. ("Training" here is meant to specifically relate to developing or honing new skills directly related to my job function, not the yearly anti-liability videos.) I'm not sure how I'm supposed to intentionally grow my skills as a software engineer, or how I'm expected to develop certain competencies. I've wanted to pivot out of product engineering and into infra or platform or SRE for a while, but there doesn't seem to be an effective way to make that pivot without hopping to a different team, and I usually don't have the skillset those teams are looking for. It feels like rock and a hard place in some ways.

I do feel like I'm finally getting a handle on how corporate environments work, with all the unspoken assumptions and limitations at each level, all of the implied context that isn't said when my boss's boss's boss is lecturing the org about why we need to prioritize stability (but of course can't sacrifice delivery speed or scope or hire more people). I'm definitely learning things, but the most reliable knowledge comes from me complaining about something to my peers and them telling me how they're handling a problem: there's functionally no mentorship, no fostered "upskilling," just catch-as-catch-can in an otherwise cutthroat environment.

How the hell am I supposed to convey sane incident handling practices in this environment?

Ostensibly it's an issue for leadership to solve, I guess, I'm just realizing how frustrated I am to not feel like I have reliable markers of having learned something. My metamour just got back from a dive trip (!) where he explored a sunken shipwreck (!!) and got tangled in his lines at one point (!!!) and was starting to get a bit spooked when his cave diving training kicked in (!!!!) and he figured out how to get free without causing any trouble. In telling the story it was clear to see how excited he was to put something from training into practice, and I realized how envious I am of that feeling.

I also feel like there's pressure to make everything shorter, easier to digest, compressed and succinct. On one hand, that's a pretty natural challenge to any human writing ("if I'd had more time I would have written a shorter letter....") but it's starting to feel like everyone is extremely opinionated and increasingly not willing to actually read anything you put up to try to change their minds. A coworker proposed to me that our incident review documents should really be a single page, across identified causes, what went well / could improve in our response, and action items. Granted, I read Admiral Cloudberg for fun, so clearly I may enjoy dense incident investigation literature more than the next guy... but c'mon! one page?

I've felt like written communication skills have been in dearly short supply in the corporate environment since I entered the workforce (tm) and that problem is only being exacerbated by LLMs. What you used to be able to assume was a work product of some level of human thinking is instead likely to be fancy autocomplete's best guess at what a reasonable investigation doc might look like... which sidesteps the most important part of the process, trying to get a human with relevant domain knowledge to introspect the human decisions that played out in the incident!

I think I already know why there's no trainings anymore, and it's because it would just devolve into an opinion fight amongst the people senior enough to give the training, or you'd simultaneously have to keep your topics to fifteen minute segments and 500 words so your audience's attention doesn't wander while also managing to address the infinitely many questions or reasons to doubt your take they might come up with.

Is that too cynical? Am I missing something? Am I still just realizing the differences between an academic environment and a corporate one after nigh on a decade in the latter?