So here is a question that has befuddled myself as well as some other people in the training business for some time and I would like to get some "Community" feedback.  We have noticed that Administrative Seminars/Training attendance is 2 to 3 (Not scientific numbers) times that of Developer Seminars/Training.

Now we don't think it's a population anomaly as in my straw polls most organizations have more developers that they do administrators.  Which just makes the question that much more confounding.

So if you are an Administrator / Developer why DO you attend or DO NOT attend seminars / training.

Let us know.

Thanks.


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1. Marcie03/12/2008 12:01:56 PM

I have been an Administrator on Notes, then Domino, since 1993. I can tell you in the beginning, it would have been great to have training on the Admin side (no such luck). The server side was much flukier then. But, now as an Admin, things are much more stable and less dependent on the Basics knowledge. Now it seems, from an Admin side, that knowing the Development side would be beneficial for the Administrator. There are so many things that happen on the Server that are dependent on knowing Development side of the application. In my case, I work for a company that we do not have any Notes Developers. So, I and my co-Administrator are it. We support almost 6,000 users and are growing everyday. We manage 16 Domino Servers, in 2 Domains, a BlackBerry Server, and a Sametime Server. So, as I would never turn down Administrator training, I would accept Development training in a heartbeat.:-

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2. Clay Goforth02/25/2008 03:00:16 PM

I have a different take on this. IT has placed coding time requirements on the developers. Management requires a developer to crank out ___ lines of code per day/week for the projects. So developers can’t afford the time to attend seminars and training.

Administrators have time requirements, but its more like due dates. The administrator project time requirements are flexible to allow for server issues, crashes, …. So Management does not have the same focus on productive time.

Getting a developer engaged in learning requires Management’s understanding of the value of the education. The class can’t be examples of useless code or something they can pull off the Internet. It needs to be code they can reuse, provides them with new knowledge that will make them more productive, and it needs to be cool coding for the developer.

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3. Paul T. Calhoun02/25/2008 12:52:45 PM

Well these are some of the same thoughts I had as well, but it is nice to hear other folks validate some of those thoughts.

These leads to a new question that I will start in another post.

Thanks for the feedback.

Paul T. Calhoun

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4. Brandt Fundak02/25/2008 09:35:51 AM

As a developer who is trying to convince his company to send him to Admin classes, I think I have to agree with Ben and Jess. There's a certain mindset one needs to have when programming, and if you can handle creating logical constructs, even though the syntax may change accorss languages, you are going to be able to figure out your if...then...else constructs and your for and do type loops, even if they don't have those names.

Everything I have learned about Domino admin, I've learned through trial and error and from shadowing/annoying our admin. I know how to do the basic stuff--creating users, writing policies, managing ACLs, checking logs, etc. But I have never set up a Domino infrastructure and I feel that by going to formalized training, I can learn the "right" way to do some of these things.

When I first started developing for Notes back in 2000, I was able to jump right in and try to build things using the Notes IDE. They weren't always pretty, but you could get them to work. I did take classes at the time to give me focus, but learning things like building custom classes and doing java programming wasn't covered in the course work at the time (and having taken the LotusScript certification test, they still aren't dealing with those in the classes it seems) so you end up having to go to other people who are in a position to help you learn.

So I think I'd have to agree with Ben and Jess--programming for Domino has many shades of gray that you just don't see with Admin.

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5. Jess Stratton02/25/2008 08:41:09 AM

I think it has to do with skills. Developing is an "abstract" skill - an algorithm is an algorithm before you even get INTO syntax. Best practices, memory management, stacks/sorting/arrays, those are transferable no matter what language you code in. Once you get a language, it's just a matter of figuring out the proper syntax to declare your variable.

With Administration, it's concrete, not abstract. You either secure your server, or you don't. You either know what fields to set, or it is wrong.

That would be my guess, at least.

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6. Ben Poole02/23/2008 02:52:29 PM
Homepage: http://benpoole.com

To my mind, administrative training has a real immediate "worth": you learn how to set up clustering, administer servers, sort out mailfiles, and so on and so forth.

I've taken two developer-oriented courses for Notes in my career (anyone remember AD1 and AD2?) and both were pretty dire: full of bad practice, nasty examples, and no real value. For developers, especially Notes / Domino developers, there's no substitute for real on the job experience, because there are so many ways to cut the code, and everyone needs to find the approach that works for them.

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