The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.
Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.
>The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it
Yes, and since the financial crisis their share of profits as GDP has never been higher yet they still refuse to invest in training themselves. Instead they demand that the immigration floodgates be opened.
They don't want to do it because they just don't see employees as people any more. They're resources, to be tapped until they run dry, at which point, they are discarded.
This is a marked cultural corporate change from the 50s-70s when the 'job for life' was still a thing, people got defined benefit pensions and CEOs would choose to make long term investments rather than engage in share repurchase shell games that boost next quarter's share price.
>Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.
This used to be much less of a problem when companies actually demonstrated loyalty to their employees. A natural side effect of lobbying hard to make it trivial to fire people and doing layoffs as a matter of course is that your employees won't be loyal. Tough shit.
> Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.
Yes, once you train a person you need to pay them more. You might feel like they owe you, but unless there is a real understanding between the two of you that you are investing in them and expect to pay them less for some period of time to recoup the cost (eg in the form of a contract you both signed stipulating a minimum term after training, with claw back provisions), this is what you should expect.
Depending on how much it costs you (besides their salary) to train them, it can still be cheaper to hire and train than getting someone experienced, since everyone needs some time before they're really effective and you're paying them at a lower rate while you train them.
There is something to be said for small startups just not being able to support that kind of load, but I feel like once you hit about 20 engineers it's just people being lazy and not wanting to do things any differently, rather than any true constraints.
The fetishization of the 10x developer leads us to ignore the fact that lots of the work developers are tasked with doing is really quite repetitive, intellectually unchallenging and uninspired.
The fact that something is repetitive and intellectually unchallenging doesn't mean it is mechanical and doesn't require human involvement and/or judgement.
> Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.
I think this depends a lot on how you do the training. Sure, if you think of training as something very separate from the work, then doing lots of it could be expensive. But the last team I put together was very collaborative, with pair programming being the norm. In that environment, a lot of training comes essentially for free.
In a rapidly growing startup, I think building your processes with a strong bias toward staff development is the best way to scale. No matter how much experience a new person has, they still have very low knowledge of the product, the audience, local process choices, and the local code base. So startups always need to be educating their staff. Adding some technical education on top of that doesn't seem hard.
Personally, I've never quit a place where I'm still learning a lot. But I've hired plenty of people because they felt like they were stagnating in their current jobs.
>...quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.
This shows up a lot, and it's worth debunking. Salary is not the only reason that people take a job, and it's not the only reason that people switch jobs. There can be huge costs (for all parties) to casually switching jobs, and most employees stay put longer than the training period. Additionally, there are standard contract terms that enforce retention periods in exchange for certain types of training (e.g., advanced degrees, etc.). Finally, "salary for engineers" and "training for engineers" are not the only headings in the ledger for running a company - and the value of a company is not a zero sum game; a well-trained technical workforce is more valuable than the alternative, but it has lately been more cost effective and lower risk to transfer that responsibility to (prospective) employees.
>The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.
"Training" is far too broad a term for this to be accurate. Training can mean anything from training someone how to use git to training a non-programmer to be a data scientist. We can't expect a company to spend multiple years on the latter, but even the smallest, leanest startup can afford the former.
Salaries are, in part, a way of reimbursing people for their educations. Sure, large companies can (or, more accurately, need to) train people. But, look at, say, my startup. I'm the only engineer. How am I supposed to find the time to train someone who can barely program? Things would get done significantly quicker if I just did everything myself.
> The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.
How so? Nearly every tech company has extensive internship programs, which are undoubtably an investment in their future workforce.
Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.
>How so? Nearly every tech company has extensive internship programs, which are undoubtably an investment in their future workforce.
Or just cheap labor.
>Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.
I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are. That's why several of them engaged in a wage fixing cartel.
No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor. For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).
For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term. They take more time for supervision than it would have taken for a senior developer to just accomplish their project.
If you assume that interns are actually cheap labor, I have to assume you've never run an internship program.
> I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are.
So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term, training actually makes the shortage more acute (as you have to move senior engineers into training programs).
The far more sensible solution is to just bid higher until you can get the senior developers which are actually out there. Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.
Of course, they would always like to pay less for developers (just like I'd like to be paid more and would like to pay lower taxes). Fortunately, unless you have a magic training program which compresses 10 years of experience into 4 weeks, salaries are likely to stay high for quite some time.
>No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor.
You're kidding, right?
>For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).
Relative to tech salaries after graduation that's cheap. In industries without such high salaries interns often don't get paid at all. That's super cheap.
>For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term.
So are many dirt cheap outsourced developers. That doesn't change the why they are hired.
>So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term,
For a long term investment pay off.
>Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.
A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.
I've literally never seen a company make a net profit on interns. Talk to people running intern programs: it's explicitly seen as a hiring funnel for full-time, not as an end of itself.
> A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.
The lawsuit came after the cartel had already stopped functioning. Facebook refused to play ball and started recruiting aggressively from the other companies (particularly Google), directly undermining the wage-fixing.
You should work at a law firm sometime. Interns are very, very profitable for them, because they work insane hours and do everything they are told without question.
The tech industry isn't that different. The only reason kids get a not-horrible salary interning at Google and jack shit at Marie Claire is because of the prevailing industry salaries.
(which is something the tech titans are trying to "fix")
Entitled to what? These firms seem to feel they are entitled to relaxed immigration policy as well, and that wages collusion should be BAU if they don't get their way - yet it's entitled to think that a company should train an employee to do the job they want them to do?
Keep in mind that we're not talking about teaching people computer science in the abstract, or turning non-technical people into engineers. People applying for programming jobs should be able to demonstrate some level of general competence of course. But if your HR department has a laundry list of keywords it is pattern-matching CVs against, with the result that many eminently-qualified candidates are dismissed without so much as a phone call or even a Codility screen or whatever, then you either need to take another look at in-house training or quit the constant bleating about a shallow talent pool.
"The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training."
This is a sad excuse. Companies should be paying for training of specific skill sets to the company, but not for knowledge and skills you should already have to get the job.
This would be like asking a hospital to pay for medical school to get a qualified doctor. It's absurd.
The hospitals do have to pay for medical school. If they didn't, nobody would go through it.
Here's a cleaner example: suppose getting an M.D. required a filing fee of $800,000. You don't think that would show up in what hospitals paid doctors?
This isn't entirely what happens. For most doctors at their first jobs the hospitals will write out most, if not all, of their medical school loans depending on how much there are. They use this as signing bonuses and to tempt doctors to their hospital.
Then it's a moot point. Software developers are some of the highest paid professionals. This pays for the cost of any education already (college, etc).
The OP is implying that an employer should not only pay a salary, but pay for an employee to get trained.
The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.