Upskilling Your Eng Team: The Problem with the Modern Approach to Learning | Skiller Whale's Hywel Carver

0:00Often highly skilled people are really experts in what they're doing with very good intentions. But the standard model for learning that they essentially get pushed into is not one that gets great outcomes. And I think if you're an engineering leader looking around at this landscape, why would you think that there is great learning available that is going to change the shape of what your team can actually do? The typical model we go for is not invest in people's skills, but invest in new people who already have those skills. We look for the person who's already spent 10 years securing web apps, and we bring them into the company rather than take our existing people and give them the kind of skills that they need.

0:37At Dev Unrupted, we work to give engineering leaders actionable ways to improve their teams. That's why we're producing a three-part summer workshop series with Linear B. Each of the three workshops will explore the processes that elite software engineering organizations and executives use to deliver better business outcomes and reduce cycle time by 47 % on average in just 120 days. You'll learn how to assess your current performance and benchmark it against industry averages, streamline processes through automation, and improve business outcomes through resource allocation. Learn from the best and take your team to the next level.

1:11Visit our website to learn more and secure your spot today. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Conor Bronston. And today we're joined by Howell Carver, an experienced CTO and now founder and CEO at Skiller Whale. Howell, welcome to the show. Hi, Conor. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me. And you're joining us from London today. Is that right? I am. I'm in North London, where it is gray and dull. Well, I'm over in the Seattle area, so same deal here. So it's a pleasure to have you to talk to and kind of dive into some interesting info to brighten both of our days.

1:45You've identified a problem that I think everyone in the audience can relate to, that knowledge isn't as sticky as what we'd like it to be. I'm sure we've all felt this, and there's different statistics on the subject, but it's often noted that a person only remembers about 10 % of a book within two weeks of reading it. And that can make it kind of difficult to learn and retain new skills, especially when the subject is coding. So that's why we're going to chat today, right? About what it takes to actually learn a new skill, put it into practice, and how. If you're an engineering leader, you can build more skills in your existing team without having to hire more people.

2:18So let's jump right in. Howell, why is it so difficult to learn something new? And what's going on in the brain when that happens? So the reason it's difficult to learn something new is because the things have to be right in order to learn. And we are generally not very good at optimizing the sort of scenario around us for the best learning. So in your entry, you talked about both reading a book and development of skills, which I would say are actually quite separate things. Like reading a book is a good way of getting knowledge and information, which is necessary to get a skill, but it's not sufficient.

2:50If you want the skill, you have a baseline. Right, exactly. It doesn't get you able to do. It gets you able to maybe understand at best to do the thing, to actually have the skill and to be able to put it into practice, you need to be doing it. You need to have a go. You need to fail and get feedback on that skill. And if you think about, I mean, if you think about any kind of critical application where we care about skills a lot, that's pretty much exactly what happens. If you're training to be an airline pilot, they don't just have you read the manual and then sort of stick you in a plane. There's thousands of hours in flight simulators, which are constantly giving you feedback and letting you see the results of your actions and putting you in different scenarios and giving you the opportunity to kind of respond to those and improve your skills before they let you actually fly the plane.

3:39I think that that is generally emblematic of how we should approach all skill learning. We need the knowledge, but we also need to put it into practice and do the thing before we can expect to have the skill. And so this is why, to come back to your question, why it's difficult to learn something new. It's because often we conflate those things together and we think, well, I've read the book. I should be able to do the thing. And there's actually this gap in between, which is that trial and error and feedback process. And to your point, there's also the challenge around the baseline, actual learning in order to apply it, right?

4:15Where every human has different conditions around what makes the right situation for them to learn. How do you think about the differences that personality and personal differences play in how quickly someone picks up a new skill or the baseline learning to start putting on a skill and a practice. So this is super interesting because there is a commonly believed myth about people having a kind of a personal type. So some people believe that they are like a kinesthetic learner. Some people believe they're a visual learner. They need to see things in order to learn. And the research and all of the evidence points to the fact that there is no meaningful effect on learning outcomes.

4:55There's no discernible impact on how well you learn something if you learn according to the type that you think you are. You might enjoy it more. You might have that preference for that type, but you might not. It doesn't change how well you learn it. However, at a given time, there might be a situational thing where learning this particular thing, you need to see it visually. That's just what's going to be best for you. This other thing you need to hear, that's going to be best for you. It's very situational is the thing it's not it's not about you as an individual which all comes back to this idea that you want to give people that the opportunity to learn in different ways so i personally i'm a strong believer of having people be able to listen as well as read and and when necessary have like access to visuals to help uh kind of draw the draw out the map of what they're learning and bring things into place stronger than that though is the the kind of format of the learning itself.

5:47So all of the things I've talked about so far are what you call passive learning, where you are given access to some kind of material and you consume it, which might mean reading a book, watching a video. There's a layer above that, which is what's called active learning. In active learning, you are interacting with the materials themselves. So with a video, you might kind of be making bookmarks at specific points through the video. With a book, you might be highlighting passages. That's what's called active learning. The layer above that, which gets even better learning outcomes, is what's called constructive learning.

6:20And in constructive learning, that's the point where you're putting things into practice. So you're not just absorbing it passively. You're not just interacting with the materials actively. You are building something with the thing that you're learning immediately. And then the best form of learning, the one that caps all of the others, is what's called interactive learning, which is that when you're building something, but then you also have the opportunity to discuss it with other humans. That's the thing that gives us the kind of strongest effects of learning. I don't know the sort of neurobiology behind it, but I believe what happens is that we get, essentially, a lot of our learning is tied to emotion.

6:56So this is what's called the affective model of learning, that we remember things and we remember how to do things because of emotions that we experience, It's like our memories for those are hooked onto an emotional resonance. And if you think about your experience of like reading a book or sitting in a lecture or watching a video, for me, the most common emotion I would attach to that is boredom. Whereas the idea of building something is like a strongly satisfying feeling. And at least as an engineer, as a software developer, the idea of making something is exciting. The idea of making something and sharing it with other people and talking about how we made it is the most kind of emotionally resonant for me.

7:36It's the ones with the strongest emotions. And so I think that's why we see interactive learning as getting the best results. But I don't think that's kind of evidenced. That's really interesting because I can say for myself, I often need to feel that confidence of having read the book first. I enjoy reading. I enjoy reading about new skills or fantasy novels, I have to admit. I love the good, Lord of the Rings, something like that. But when I dive into a new subject, I want to kind of read and consume first before I put that into practice. And that's just more of a mental confidence thing. But I totally agree with you.

8:08And I think the research really shows what you're saying, which is to actually understand that skill and learn it, I have to do the hands-on building after the learning. And that part is the fulfilling part afterwards. But at least mentally, I have this staging thought where I feel like I need to do something one way first in order to feel as confident as I want to. but to your point earlier it sounds like that's more about my personal viewpoint on what's going to make me feel good about what how i'm approaching something versus necessarily what's going to be most effective so i actually think you need you need both and also on the fantasy novels i've just recently gone into brendan sanderson and like if you haven't yeah very much incredible i'm only a few books in but like wow what are you reading right now from him it is the third one in the, what's it called, the Stormlight Archive?

8:55Stormlight Archive? Oh, great. Once you get to Words of Radiance, let me know. That's the second one. I've just finished Words of Radiance. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of bombshells at the end. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I don't want to run this into a book podcast. I know I sidelined us here. When you start that second podcast, let me know. I will be there. You should check out Mistborn by him too. Another series. really good so yeah yeah my brother has recommended that to me i think they're also much shorter so yeah um so you you 100 need the passive learning first that's what i was going to say you need to understand what you're doing before you put it into practice so i i don't disagree with what you're saying at all like with because otherwise what you're doing is giving people you're setting people up to fail if you're saying go and solve this problem that you give people none of the kind of knowledge and information they need to do that they are going to fail that's the equivalent of putting the pilot in the flight simulation, not telling them what the controls do.

9:52It's not going to work for anyone and you are going to harm people's confidence. I would think of it more as about cycle time. So we think about cycle time in development as, you know, like between a thing being requested, scheduled to be worked on, and then we get it into prod. And that's like roughly our cycle time definition. With learning, I think the cycle time is about how long it is before we get the information of what we're doing, put it into practice of the skill, and then get feedback on that skill. If you think about the like, read a book, watch a video, typically what happens is people do that often in their spare time is how it's set up as part of their work.

10:29And then they might get the opportunity to put that into practice maybe a week later, two weeks later, maybe a day later, at which point they're far away from the learning environment. Anytime you've already lost a chunk of that learning, you've already lost a chunk. You don't have anyone to go to for help unless unless you count Stack Overflow, but I don't really believe in learning by copy and paste. And so I don't think you're going to learn from that. You might have worked out, you might now know the right terms to Google for, and therefore you find a better Stack Overflow answer. I don't know that I think you're learning a skill by finding that Stack Overflow answer.

11:03I think really effective learning makes that feedback happen almost instantaneously. So it's like not kind of even, you think about if you go on a course, if you go on a training course, often what they'll do is they'll give you like six or seven hours of material and then there's a kind of two hour long session at the end where you put it into practice i think you can do better than that i think you can in the course of an hour tell people a small bit of the the passive information the first couple of paragraphs from the chapter of the book if you like and then give people a problem to solve and put it into practice and have them do that thing and then you give them the next level of kind of complexity well we didn't tell you this before but there's this other kind of layer to what you're learning that we've not talked about.

11:43Here's how that works. Now go and solve this problem with it. And so you're reducing that cycle time of learning from like the sort of the go read a book model, which is like maybe a week, maybe two weeks long, to the course model, which is maybe like six hours long, to the live coaching model, which is maybe five minutes long. So you still get that opportunity to read, understand, ask questions. And then you immediately get the opportunity to solve a problem with it, at which point you're ready to learn the next layer of complexity of the thing that you're trying to learn. That definitely resonates with me because that coaching piece of having immediate feedback, getting to put the skill in a practice and then go, oh, here's how I tweak it.

12:23I mean, that's certainly been my best experiences with learning. My question is, does this apply equally across all disciplines? For example, would a manager who's trying to learn new communication skills forget those skills at the same rate as an engineer might forget a new programming language they don't practice? Or is there a differentiation between what people colloquially call like hard and soft skills? That's interesting. So I don't know about the fall off of the kind of retention of the skill. My own experience has always been that with skills are like riding a bike and that riding a bike is a skill.

12:58And it's the kind of thing where if you don't do it for a while, I don't know when I last ride a bike actually, but I reckon I'd get back on a bike and I'd remember how to ride sure i also haven't written any i don't know c++ for a good few years but i think like give me a day of writing in c++ and i recognize be not far off the level i was when i when i stopped and i think it's the same with with soft skills i'm trying to think of so i have this like lifelong mission to rebrand them as power skills because i think they're soft undersells them so i'm going to call them power skills and i think i can't think of power skills that i don't really use anymore.

13:34But my feeling is that it would be the same kind of thing of returning to the skill and slowly getting back into it and being roughly where I was before. Yeah, I think I agree. The example I'm thinking of maybe would be something like selling or fundraising, where it's something that maybe you'd only do every couple of years if you're a startup leader, or maybe you don't do after you stop being a founder and you go work in another role. But coming back to it, you'd still retain a lot of that skill. Like, okay, how do I approach this? How do I pitch? And I mean, to be fair, you're probably doing selling day to day, even if you're not selling to customers, maybe you're pitching other internal teams to support initiatives.

14:12So maybe part of that is these power skills you are using often in your day to day because they just relate to human interaction. Yeah, I think that's true. Actually, I think that's a fair point. Like I am amazed at how much overlap there is in managing and leading teams and companies and like being in a band the number of kind of hr problems that come up in like a small space of time you're in a totally and you're just like okay i've got i've got to know now i was in a band before the pandemic and then i i moved away from central and then it became unsustainable so traveling for practices all right well but yeah the people in that band they know who they are.

14:54They know I'm talking about them. Okay. Okay. All right. So before the call, you had mentioned that you have children and I know you have some thoughts around the applications of how children learn to understanding the way adults learn. What have your children taught you about what it means to learn a new skill and how intuitive or what kind of process they use? Yeah. And what amazes me is that it is exactly the same. It's not something I bring up often because I think it feels condescending like I think most adults don't want to hear that the way that they would learn to write software is very similar to the way that children learn but I think it really is I have that so I have a one and three-quarter year old and daughter and a nearly five-year-old son and they are both they're both talking now which is wonderful like there is there is nothing I love more than hearing them talk actually it's great but you you really see the way they pick up both vocabulary which is a form of knowledge and information and skills, which is the kind of how-to of stuff.

15:54So vocabulary, my son will hear us talking about something, you know, three weeks ago. He will bring up the word now, today, having not heard it for ages. And that's because knowledge you can learn passively. You can learn knowledge just by absorption. And one of the best ways to learn knowledge is what's called, oh, I'm going to forget the way, it's like phased recall, but one of those words is slightly wrong. but essentially you get you basically get tested on the same thing again and again and then uh increasing intervals of time between each test unless you get it wrong in which case the interval gets smaller really efficient way to learn knowledge and that is essentially how school works for my son is they he's learning to to read and they will essentially do that kind of like regular drill of the different sounds in words and then they they just absorb that passively the skill is in the doing and so the the skill of actually being able to read is then putting those phonics into practice those sounds that he's learned so that when he reads a word he is like associating what he sees with the word and you see how quickly they they go around that feedback loop like a child is incredibly fast it's a machine optimized for learning and going around this leap of i tried something i failed someone told me the right thing to do and now I'm getting better.

17:14And you see that in walking. There is a strong feedback loop and they fall over and get hurt while walking around. You see that in speech when they get corrected or when they've misunderstood a word and a grown-up says, this is actually what that thing means, or you meant to say this. You can see sometimes in real time, my son will start a sentence and then will correct himself partway through. And so you can see, I don't think he's kind of consciously doing that, but some sort of mechanism inside his brain is putting that feedback loop into action. So yeah, to me, the parallels feel really clear, but I worry that it sounds like infantilizing to people to be told that they learn in the same way as children.

18:00But I think they do. I think we all do. And I would say children have some advantages too around feedback loops, to your point, where as an adult with small children, you're probably very aware of, oh, this piece of vocabulary is wrong. They have a coach who's there who's helping them a lot. And so they get those tight feedback loops that really help them learn aggressively. And you also see less masking behavior usually of like, oh, I'm not confident a skill on me, avoid it. Because they don't, I'm going to say they don't know better, but they're just kind of going into it. They're building up skills.

18:31And I think once you hit a certain, I don't know about a certain age, But as you kind of transform through society, you have to have different behaviors to try to show confidence and skills, whereas children are often just trying to approach and say, hey, I'm just trying to learn. I don't have any of that exterior stuff to worry about. Right. And I think that's one of the things that we are generally good at creating for children is that environment where failure is safe and encouraged. And not every environment is like that for adults. In some companies, it's very clear that it's okay to fail.

19:08It's okay to try things and for them to not work. And in other companies, if you try things and they don't work, then you will have no chance of advancement. You'll have no chance of promotion or even get fired. How do you think engineering leaders should create that kind of environment for their teams where it's okay to fail and learn? So I think that is really about working culture and the things that you value in your company culture. There's this theory of what's called the fifth discipline, the learning organization, an organization that is really well adapted for learning. And part of that is that learning has to happen on all kinds of levels, right?

19:50The best companies are ones that are actively learning and understanding more about the customers they're selling to, but also about the ways that they need to build their product. And that comes right back down to the actions of individual software developers, that they need to be getting feedback on what they're doing and learning from it and improving, which I imagine is something that's very relevant to what Linear B does, right? Absolutely. Do you see, or it sounds like you see problems with how new skills are often taught today and the environmental approach for a lot of teams in how they enable skill.

20:27so i i think i would twist that slightly on its head i think people don't try and learn have their team learn skills because they their experience uh has led them to believe that it is not possible to effectively learn skills on the job which honestly for the sort of standard ways of learning i think is true if if you look at the kind of learning landscape i think there's a very big bucket of learning, which I would call e-learning. It's the kind of online access to libraries of videos and content that you can access, which is really well optimized for people to go and understand new things, research things, broaden their horizons, investigate things they're interested in or passionate about that aren't really related to their work.

21:14You're probably not going to get a new skill that way unless you have the time to put it into practice in your spare time or maybe your work gives you like 20 % time to spend a day a week trying that thing out. But you're not going to get an actionable skill from that content. And then there's another kind of broad part of the market, which is classroom-based learning. So this is the kind of, let's go on a course for a few days. We're all going to be in the same room with... Or a whole team's going to take a scrum course or something. right exactly so we're we're all going to get we've got our kind of prince to certified uh person at the front trainer at the front of the room they're going to take us through a course of like five days of scrum training which is not again not well optimized for people to actually learn new skills from it's well optimized to give you access to an expert to get understanding to potentially try things out but again those models are really great for the trainer honestly That's such an amazing model to be a trainer in because you can bring everyone together.

22:18You're often charging by the head, although that's definitely going to be true in every case. And so to get everyone in a room, you've got to book the space as a bit of admin, but the margins as a trainer are amazing. Great business model, not necessarily great for students. Not great, yeah. I don't think it gets the best learning outcomes. And that's because by necessity, that model requires you to be generic. I can't specialize to each person in the room because there are so many of them. If you're a trainer standing at the front of that room, I don't want to take away from those trainers. I think they are often highly skilled people or really experts in what they're doing with very good intentions.

22:52But the standard model for learning that they essentially get pushed into is not one that gets great outcomes. And I think if you're an engineering leader looking around at this landscape, why would you think that there is great learning available that is going to change the shape of what your team can actually do. There's learning available that's going to give your team the opportunity to explore their interests and their kind of coding as a hobby side of their lives. And there's learning, which I think is great for compliance personally, like that kind of classroom training. If I have a tick box exercise that says everyone needs to be trained in GDPR or HIPAA or ISO 27, or maybe that's a bad example, but some kind of security compliance, say that kind of course is perfect for that.

23:39I can just pay my fee, get everyone certified at the end that they completed the course. And then I have proven that we are now, we kind of tick the box on our compliance regime that says we have to provide that training. But it's not necessarily developing great skills. It isn't. So I think you can do the course for the kind of security compliance, but then you also need to get the skills in the team, which is an orthogonal task. If you want to actually have a secure web application. Leave the course behind, like come to the course when you need the compliance tick box. If you want your web app to be secure, invest in people's skills or invest in people.

24:18The typical model we go for is not invest in people's skills, but invest in new people who already have those skills. We look for the person who's already spent 10 years securing web apps and we bring them into the company rather than take our existing people and give them the kind of security skills that they need. Do you see that as the right approach? It's not a cost-effective approach, but again, in a world where you don't have great effective learning, it probably is the right approach. It's probably the best way to do that. Otherwise, and this was one of the impetuses for me starting Skillowail, otherwise the way that you solve that problem is if you're not going to hire, you have to take it on.

24:57You have to be the one who sits with your team and coaches them and upskills them in the stuff that you know, or you have to rely on your network to come and, I don't know, either find freelancers or consultants or agencies who can come in and do a kind of fix-up job for you that you can then try and maintain over time. In a world without learning that solves that problem with your existing people, you need outside help. So let's use a thought exercise to kind of frame how you would approach the building a skill set across a team if i approached you and asked you to help my team learn something let's say learning react native as an example where would you start excellent question so i i talked a bit about the um different models of learning i see out in the world at skill well we developed a new one for exactly this reason because honestly i was i just wanted a way of getting my existing people to have the skills that I needed to see in the team.

25:58And live team coaching is the way that we do that, which is not the same as e-learning. It's not the same as the kind of training course approach. The idea is firstly, we want to make sure that you're not going to spend any time on learning that isn't relevant to the company's strategy. So I think learning should be targeted to individual skill gaps, but get the team level outcome that's required. So if you want to learn, if you want your team to learn React Native, I would start by working out which areas of React Native matter to you. And I would also start by working out the individual skill gaps of each person in your team.

26:33So maybe you're already... So a customized approach per person on the team. Yes. And per company, right? That's the other thing. There's existing organizations that will customize per person that will say, we've looked at your skill set and you are in the intermediate group. So you go into bucket number two, and then there's a bucket either side of you. And we're going to take each of those buckets through the same. Each person in the beginner group goes through this generic course. Each of the intermediate goes through that generic course, which is a little bit of an optimization for the company, but it means some tedium for the learners.

27:05And I think boredom is the opposite of learning, right? And I think that in order to learn effectively, you want to be very, very granular. So I don't want to know, do you know TypeScript? do you know React, but you don't know React Native, great, we'll start on React Native day one. I want to know, well, which bits of React do you know and don't you know? Which bits of React Native do you know and not know? You understand that the fundamental model, the idea of having two threads, your native thread and your JavaScript thread, and you understand the way the bridge works between two different bits of code running at the same time, but you don't really understand the idea of a text component, which is a really core part of React Native, great we're going to start there with you the person next to you is completely different and so that's how I would target individual skill gaps for that team level outcome I would then have you solve problems that are specific to the current area that we're working on so that example of the the text component I would start by giving you an app to work on I would tell you some stuff about the text component tell you some of the properties it has the ways you can style the text and then I'd have you go and solve those, solve a problem in the app.