On Sunday 07 June 2009 09:24:20 am stanl...@gmail.com wrote: > Hey Wes and all -- > > I have thinking about the Wes training thread and would like to get your > feedback. Do you guys think training can continue to cost what it has > historically? The reason I ask is that I too have considered dropping down > a gear and doing training for a living. However, I get the feeling that > techies now expect training to cost exactly what their software cost - > *nothing!* Open source training if you will. Are you getting this > impression? When I mentioned online training in my follow-up to your > thread, I had no idea folks were going to say "yeah, and it should also be > free!" I'm seeing the tide switch and curious to get your take. I have > considered training & support the avenue to picking up some coin relative > to FOSS, and now I wonder if this too is expected to be free. > > P.S. You give em an inch and they want a mile > > Scott
This is where I have to put on my "business" hat and take off my engineer's hat for a minute. Personally, I can contribute to OSS simply because it makes economic sense for me. Being an independent (read, non-Fortune-100) developer, I can showcase my talents and make myself relevant in a scenario where karma and merit help you get ahead. Now, I don't directly get paid for contributing to Struts, but the karma and merit are the best form of advertising I've seen for the things I do. A few years ago I presented to a potential client a scenario where they could contract me, long-term, and I would help them to create a deliver a product that they had seen as pie-in-the-sky for a while. I couldn't quite make it work out. Last year, we re-visited the same scenario, but this time I came to the table with the same resume, but few line items added (the OSS projects I am now a contributor to). This closed the deal. I generally subscribe to the F/L OSS philosophy, but my kids have to eat too. Training, like a college education should be expensive, simply because there is more to it than classroom time. Materials should take a while to gather into a presentable format. Instructors should be experienced in the art of content delivery and the instructor should have some name recognition. These factors sort of brought me to the notion that I might be a good instructor. I have experience teaching, I taught at a community college for years. Add to that, I am one of the struts developers and you should have a compelling argument for choosing me as a trainer. Scott, you probably fall pretty close in line with my notion because you co-authored Struts 2 In Action and you have worked as a trainer in the past. What bugs me is that I searched online for struts training and found some things offered, but I had not heard of many of these companies. Not that I think these guys couldn't do a good job, but I think that people offering training should at least be a part of this community. I have one of those photographic memories :) so I would recognize names of people and companies if they were regular posters here or at d...@struts.a.o. I sort of feel like IT training is becoming like local dance and martial arts studios. Someone sees that there is a potential market and decides to exploit it by charging the market price for delivering sub-par quality material. I have been to training from both sides, one training where I ended up answering questions from the crowd (as a participant... yep, it was that bad). And I also attended a Sybase training once from one of the Sybase engineers. The Sybase training was worth every penny and then some. At the time, it was a training paid for by the company who employed me, but had I known the quality, I would have paid out of my own pocket since the material was relevant to what I was doing. (this was a 5-day training with the typical $5k price tag) Personally, I think companies would approve training if they knew that they would be getting their money's worth. But, I also think that right now would be about as hard as it could get because budgets are so tight. I am not necessarily convinced that a low-price online training will work for me because I would have to procure the necessary equipment and software to create something presentable. I could just whip something together, but I personally am one of those guys that if I do something, I do it all-the-way or not at all. I feel like there are a few risks with the glue-together low-price modules of online training. 1. I think someone mentioned that taking a $35 training would lead to more than a few relationships that start out like this, "hey, I paid for your [$35] beginner struts training, now you owe me and I need you to help me write a MacOS clone in Struts" I always feel like every relationship should be professional, so if I prefer to set the bar a little higher. It's not that money = professional, but having been in this industry a while, I'm sure many of you know that the best people to work for and with are the people who have a clue about the nature of our work. Anyone that would have said "clue" would be someone that knows that IT training costs what it costs. 2. Struts is a niche market. There are too many options for smaller quick projects. I would feel that the low-cost online training might work better for ASP, PHP or Rails. Most of the Struts projects I have seen are not get-it-out-quick and the developers are not ramped up quickly on Struts. Struts takes a certain amount of time to learn. Developers that haven't worked on a larger team on a mature project don't seem to appreciate Model 2 and the value of being able to utilize POJOs at the various layers. I think a lot of you may have encountered that person or candidate on your team that might have put something like struts on their resume because they took a training and when tasked with a real task they fail miserably because they don't know quite what they claim. I wouldn't want myself associated with the training that fed that mentality. In a classroom, you can answer the questions and as a good instructor, pick up on someone's lack of fundamental understanding and work on that. To be honest Scott, I'm not convinced that being a trainer would work for me. Mostly because of my geographical location. I think I could do on-site trainings, but it's hard to market that sort of thing. It's a bit of a Catch-22, I don't know that companies would bring me in for the on-site training unless they could see testimonials of other trainings I had done. But, it's hard for me to get a classroom training going in Ohio. -Wes -- Wes Wannemacher Author - Struts 2 In Practice Includes coverage of Struts 2.1, Spring, JPA, JQuery, Sitemesh and more http://www.manning.com/wannemacher --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@struts.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@struts.apache.org
