Yesterday while I was reading Julia Lerman's Blog, I was reminded of a situation I have to deal with at work. In order to get the full feel of the issue (which most likely is common across a lot of corporate US), I'll start with a little background.
Background
I am a hobbyist programmer (check out the thread between Rory, Scoble, Knowing .Net and Tech Guru's Blog). I don't have a CS degree. I actually I have a double major in International Business and Spanish, didn't take one programming class in college. I started programming for fun in the 3rd grade with a VIC 20, and moved up from there to Commodore 64, Apple IIe, IBM PC2...I'm not sure why I didn't study computers in college (sort of wish I did now), but anyways I digress... After graduating college (about 7 years ago ...I think) I had no idea of what I wanted to do, but since I had a knack for programming I moved from an admin assistant job to the IT department after I had built a policy generator (worked for an insurance company) that took issuing a policy from a 6 hour manual (typewriter) process to a 5 minute Microsoft Office solution. After moving to the IT department I started learning everything I could about the technologies we used and eventually started getting closer to the "bleeding edge". Fast forward about 3 years, .Net was the first beta that I actually installed, but have been working with more betas since then (now I am looking forward to getting the Widbey bits so I can play with it). A couple of years ago I started a developers club at work, something to give me a chance to get to know the other programmers and talk about technology. It seems there are several other programmers that really like technology and programming, but... their motivation is not the same. It seems that some people don't do any development outside of the office! After coming to this realization, I have slowed down my interior technology pushing.
Current Situation
Since I have been working with .Net for more than 3 years now (only about 9 months at work), I now feel I need to help my co-workers up to speed on .Net. Julia Lerman's Blog reminded me that Microsoft has got to be dealing with this too (on much larger scale of course). Julie mentioned that it isn't the leading edge people going to the DevDays conference, which may be true, but the people attending still must have a good attitude towards wanting to learn it. As far as I know only Greg and myself are going to it in Boston from my company. Of course we have to use a personal day and pay the $75 out of our pocket, but we both understand that we are the ones responsible for our careers (that was one of the blog discussions going around at the PDC time) and have no problem with it. What do we do about the people who will only learn it when they have to? If they don't already know how to use it, it is easier for a Manager (especially in an IT dept) to have them use the old technology that they are comfortable with, instead of taking the productivity hit of having them learn it for a new project (since the developer didn't invest their own time into learning it). Since we are an IT department we do do a lot of system integration and don't write a lot of stuff from the ground up.
My current idea
I am thinking about putting together some papers and examples (sort of small classes) for the developers club that covers the most used classes in the .Net BCL.
Anyone out there dealing with the same thing?