So here's the part that seems sketchy to me: You've asked your employee, John, to do unpaid overtime work on the weekend.
The reason it's "work" is because learning Angular is not something John would like to do in his free time, hence why he hasn't done it already (and continues to not do it),...
100% this! I'd add to this that the CTO needs to be made aware that a team member is being trained and so the team is operating at reduced capacity because of this.
Actually, I have no problem in mentoring him and allowing him subsequent time to learn. But the main problem is my CTO who has committed to the highest authority people about the delivery of project and whenever I try to tell CTO about this situation then he always replies that these excuses doesn't matter to me. Learning HTML and CSS is a matter of not more than 2-3 hours. I, myself, is looking to switch the job due to these unfavorable circumstances.
Learning a language is not just a few hours. I would not consider any proficient until several months. Here you have at least 3 new languages to lean HTML, CSS and Javascript and Angular could count as a fourth.
@DG4 tell your CTO that people learn at different rates. Do so nicely ;) . If he still doesn't get that, I guess your problems are a lot bigger than this new team member...
@DG4 Your CTO should understand, at the very least, that a project done half-assed by people who don't know what they're doing is not going to work long-term. Explain it to him in those terms: He can have it done on schedule, but it will be buggy as heck and look awful (but work), or he can give you the resources (both time and skill) you need and have it done right. If he doesn't understand that, then I'd suggest jumping ship because your company isn't going anywhere. As they say, "do it right, or do it twice".
@Mark, and going from backend Java to a frontend web framework isn't just a matter of learning new languages. It's a whole different way of thinking with whole different set of concerns. Writing background algorithms is way different from working in the presentation layer client-side. It's like taking a basketball player and giving him a few hours to be good at baseball.
@DG4 I'm not sure I agree that learning HTML and CSS takes 2-3 hours. Learning something about them, sure. But being effective at them? Not for most devs. Especially if you've never touched either before. I'd allow weeks, not hours. This might be part of the problem. There seem to be mismatched expectations at various levels here. It's not fair to you or the new dev. That said, you seem to be working for someone who expects you to get things done no matter what effect that has on the team. If you can, leaving might be worth it. Burnout, which can result, is no one's friend.
Fresh out of college and only knowing java, I would say it will take at least 2-3 years to learn Angular. You'll have to unlearn just about everything and to do that you'll have to understand that almost everything you've learned in college is wrong.
@Bent True. Honestly the CTO has messed up here. It's not fair to OP to put them in a leadership role with just 1.5 years of experience. You generally aren't ready for that (barring extenuating circumstances) until probably at least 5 years, but more likely 7+ years. It sounds like CTO may be the problem here and is setting OP and those on OP's team up for failure. OP if you do move on (may not be a bad idea), I'd recommend taking a few more years as an individual contributor before doing team leadership. That experience is your training (you don't usually get direct mgmt training).
The reason I say this is that through experience you watch other leaders lead, you learn about politics and how individual contributors, teams, managers, and organizations work, you learn about deadlines and time estimation. You learn about risk management (mostly through mistakes), and more, and all of these things are critical to successfully leading any team. And no one is (generally) ever going to teach you how to be a manager. And even if they try, you really have to learn most of these things through experience (especially mistakes).
@DG4 Going from "university Java" to front-end work using a framework like Angular is far from 2-3 hours. I literally did this (but with Rails development), and it took me over 2 years (10-20 hrs/week) to fully grasp, and there are still things that I need to figure out. Even simple web development concepts like HTML form submission and dealing with the request on the server is literally a 100% paradigm shift from OO Java. So I think you are vastly underestimating just how much work John actually needs to do.
@DG4 - Note that whoever put this person on your team is the one who created this situation. This is on them. You don't take a Java dev (not even an experienced one) and dump them on an Angular project without expecting weeks of training before they're productive, what with needing to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript (I'm guessing, since Angular), perhaps dependency injection, the whole browser mindset, ... I hope it wasn't your CTO who did that, since whoever it is seems to have confused "Java" and "JavaScript" (and missed that there's a lot more to this than just the lang anyway). :-)
@DG4 - But all that said, this answer is spot-on. Telling "John" to do the missing ramp-up in their own time and on their own was a mistake. You're a new team leader, making mistakes is to be expected. Your CTO should understand that, too.
I'd add to clarify with John whether he feels learning frontend stuff is something he feels okay with or whether it would be more mutually agreeable to look for a backend job in the company that suits him better, if not directly then at least long term. It might be, that he is open and willing to learn frontend development in principle during work hours, but maybe that's not his thing at all and he's just hanging on until he finds a more fitting job. As a manager, carving a career path for your team member inside the company is also part of the job.
@DG4 Btw. for your future management career the important lesson from this should be that part of a manager's job is to shield your team from pressure from above. If your bosses demand unreasonable things, you do your best to achieve them within a reasonable framing, i.e. telling them their shit cannot be done in the time they ask for, giving your team space to develop instead of trying to squeeze something out of them that cannot be done. Otherwise sooner or later you don't have a team left that can deliver anything. Even if there is a storm outside, you need to make sure it's calm inside.
The reason it's "work" is because learning Angular is not something John would like to do in his free time, hence why he hasn't done it already (and continues to not do it), and it provides no value to John personally except inasmuch as it provides value to the company. - maybe a bit provoking, but not getting fired for being a bad fit (from a skill perspective) isn't enough of a personal reward? It is a tough topic, but upskill education can't just happen during office hours only.
@Namoshek I don't think this is as difficult a topic as you make it out to be. That logic can be applied to, literally, any situation where someone might get fired for something—totally independent of how reasonable, appropriate, or legal the firing is.
Regarding the "unpaid work", I had a similar thing happen to me over Christmas. I actually brought this up with our country's workplace ombudsmen to make sure this was something they can do, and in my country, yes they can. So it depends on location, but if your asked to learn something new in your own time, yes. Sometimes that will ultimately be your responsibility to complete.
@Namoshek The same could be said of literally anything else you do at work. For example, if your boss asks you to implement a feature on your own time, and you fail to do it, then perhaps you're a "bad fit".
@Gnemlock There's nothing legally wrong with what OP did. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to do. There are plenty of things which are not illegal but are still not good ideas.
@Ertai87 I disagree. There is a clear difference between working - which is what you are payed for - and learning. And I'm not talking about things like "learning from mistakes", but about individual knowledge and skills. Personal qualification is not necessarily the problem of the employer.
Sure, it might be if your employer decides to use completely new frameworks and stuff, but this question sounds more like someone lacks the absolute basics for the job. If they knew them, they wouldn't have such a hard time learning new stuff (even at work).
Discussion on answer by Ertai87: How …
Discussion on answer by Ertai87: How …