When Training has No Educational Value
Today was the first of eight days of "training" for a package that the shop has purchased at great expense and very little long-term thought. This training is required because they require that you are a certified developer in order to get technical support from them. It makes sense... why answer a bunch of silly questions from users when you can force questions through developers that have gone through your "classes" and at least have a working knowledge of the product. That's the theory, at least.
The practice is something else. An entire day spent on SQL - or a derivative of it close enough to be considered SQL, and where it differs, they should have just changed the syntax to make it look like real SQL. Imagine that they changed the inequality operator from '!=' to '^=' - just to be different. Why? No idea. The guy teaching the class had no idea either. But there it is.
There are a few changes - no inner selects, you have to use temp tables, but that's not hard. But we spent hours there doing queries that we'd never do in practice without the schema right at our fingertips. It was educational for about the first hour, and after that, it was just moe of the same with a lot of waiting while we flipped through slides.
I realize this might not be this guy's main job, but he's representing the vendor to us, the customer, and when his response to a statement from use like "That's a bug, it should be fixed" is "That's the way it is, it's in the docs" he's missing what we in the biz call the Big Picture. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but come on! When your customers are telling you this is a bug, then you at least say, "Hey, I understand, and I've tried, but they aren't budging". And then when we say "Hey, an error message to that effect would be nice", you agree and talk to the product developers. You don't giggle at us, like you have so many times before and then say that's the way it is.
So for the first time in over a decade of class work, I got a headache from this class. That's bad. I can't believe I have seven more days of this. It's got to get better, or I've got to go through it quicker.