4 ms·

I kinda disagree. It is a long story. I will skip a lot and make it as brief as I can. I used to own my own company. It has long since been sold and I am retir

by KGIII 9y ago

I kinda disagree. It is a long story. I will skip a lot and make it as brief as I can. I used to own my own company. It has long since been sold and I am retired. We modeled traffic and I helped bring traffic modeling to the computer age. This was way back in the dark ages of the early 1990s, when you actually had to work to find people who could write good code. You also had to pay them a goodly amount of money. One of the things I offered was to help with continued education. For example, we had one lady who was a secretary and she wanted to learn to code. So, we sent her to school part time, on our dime, and she eventually found a home in QA. When we began to provision services in other areas, besides vehicular modeling for municipalities, I sent people to get the training they felt they needed. I'd even go with them, if I had time and it would benefit me. I love Defcon, and have gone even after retiring. We'd get a local university to do some research and then poach the folks who stood out - and help them complete their education. Quite a few acted on this and I have to say we benefited greatly from this. I don't have exact numbers but it was well over a third. So, in my experience, they want the education. In my experience, they can be educated. Maybe try offering to pay for it, if you're in a position to make that choice? Cover their total costs - including ensuring they can afford the time. In my case, there weren't exactly a whole lot of traffic engineers. We had to make them, and we did.

uiri 9y ago
I think that your company had to send its employees off to formal education in a classroom (or similar) setting is indicative of the problem highlighted by the person you are replying to. Your employees would not have been anywhere near as successful with some combination of textbook, lectures on video (e.g. on VHS), and a study group made up of other employees. Lifelong learning means being able to acquire new knowledge and skills outside of the traditional educational setting. Often, a University will claim that its students are not there to learn specific subjects but to learn how to learn. A lot of that learning is studying and solving problems outside of lecture time. These are the skills which are lacking because of a cultural perception that learning happens in a class.
- dv_dt 9y ago
  I think the resources of the employee are more the constraint than the manner of education - especially on the low end of the salary scale, both money but also available and/or ofsettable time. Without support of the employer, especially hourly employees would have a much more difficult time re-training.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    In our case, they were still given adequate salary. "I want to learn to..." "What do you need from me in order to...?" I've covered everything from salary to child care. By the way, the costs for salary and benefits were a fairly small percentage of overhead. A decent print room can be more expensive than even the highest paid employee.
    - dv_dt 9y ago
      That is wonderful, but I feel that employers with the wisdom to implement policies like yours have been shrinking in number. I think this is something of the consequence of making every person individually carry their own financial weight, resulting in bad public and private policies in a number of areas. But it's the pressure on businesses to extract maximized profit in their 'core competitve area' too... it leads naturally to the thought that employees should pay their own time and money for their own training. I think every suffers a little loss of efficiency in that way.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        I have no control but I am pretty positive that doing this sort of stuff resulted in great profits and value for the company. We had a trivial amount of turnover. I opened in 1991, but really started hiring in 1995. I sold for a decent nine digit sum in 2007. In that amount of time, I can recall fewer people leaving than I have fingers and toes. In the end, we had a bit over 225 people and offices in three States. I am lacking a control group, and I haven't the ethics to make one, but I'm convinced this was what enabled us to do what we did, as well as we did it. I'm not very articulate, so I hope that helps. It bothers me to hear that people don't have their company invest in them. It wasn't me who made it all work, it was them who enabled me to go much further.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
> In my case, there weren't exactly a whole lot of traffic engineers. We had to make them, and we did. i think that's the model in a nutshell. all companies should be doing this. no companies should be bellyaching about a shortage of qualified workers.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Want to hear something scary? Lead traffic engineers make less, according to the web, than I used to start them at. Programmers, on average, also make less than I used to start them at. In 1998, depending on experience, I'd bring them in at about $120k, plus bonuses and benefits. Suffice to say, I see serious issues. One of the best things about training is that you get the exact skills you need. I had no moral issues with pushing research to a local university and then poaching them. It's a damned shame, I think, that businesses often refuse to invest in their people. I hired people because they were able to do things that I could not. If I could have done them, I'd have not had to hire them. Frankly, I'd like them to be able to do their best. That means ensuring they have the tools they need. One of those tools is an education.
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    Honestly, it sounds like you were a good businessman with a decent moral compass.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Thank you. Though, there is a profit motive. Happy employees do good work. Educated employees helped keep me in front of the competition that was coming online. We'd eventually expand to offering pedestrian traffic modeling. We'd sell appliances that enabled them to keep their data in-house, as well. Curiously enough, I'd expected to remain in academia. My dissertation (my Ph.D. is in Applied Mathematics) was based on traffic throughput, optimization and prediction, which led to a contract being offered. I was able to be in the right place, at the right time, and able to take advantage of it. The rest is, shall we say, history. I ended up in the field largely because the data was free and DEC was able to throw compute resources at me. It is largely luck, even though I put lots of work into it. Ah well... I don't have words of wisdom. It was largely due to just timing and being able to take the risks. Even selling was largely luck. The economy crashed and the government wanted to build/expand highways as 'shovel ready jobs.'

by KGIII 9y ago

uiri 9y ago

I think that your company had to send its employees off to formal education in a classroom (or similar) setting is indicative of the problem highlighted by the person you are replying to. Your employees would not have been anywhere near as successful with some combination of textbook, lectures on video (e.g. on VHS), and a study group made up of other employees. Lifelong learning means being able to acquire new knowledge and skills outside of the traditional educational setting. Often, a University will claim that its students are not there to learn specific subjects but to learn how to learn. A lot of that learning is studying and solving problems outside of lecture time. These are the skills which are lacking because of a cultural perception that learning happens in a class.

dv_dt 9y ago
I think the resources of the employee are more the constraint than the manner of education - especially on the low end of the salary scale, both money but also available and/or ofsettable time. Without support of the employer, especially hourly employees would have a much more difficult time re-training.
- KGIII 9y ago
  In our case, they were still given adequate salary. "I want to learn to..." "What do you need from me in order to...?" I've covered everything from salary to child care. By the way, the costs for salary and benefits were a fairly small percentage of overhead. A decent print room can be more expensive than even the highest paid employee.
  - dv_dt 9y ago
    That is wonderful, but I feel that employers with the wisdom to implement policies like yours have been shrinking in number. I think this is something of the consequence of making every person individually carry their own financial weight, resulting in bad public and private policies in a number of areas. But it's the pressure on businesses to extract maximized profit in their 'core competitve area' too... it leads naturally to the thought that employees should pay their own time and money for their own training. I think every suffers a little loss of efficiency in that way.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      I have no control but I am pretty positive that doing this sort of stuff resulted in great profits and value for the company. We had a trivial amount of turnover. I opened in 1991, but really started hiring in 1995. I sold for a decent nine digit sum in 2007. In that amount of time, I can recall fewer people leaving than I have fingers and toes. In the end, we had a bit over 225 people and offices in three States. I am lacking a control group, and I haven't the ethics to make one, but I'm convinced this was what enabled us to do what we did, as well as we did it. I'm not very articulate, so I hope that helps. It bothers me to hear that people don't have their company invest in them. It wasn't me who made it all work, it was them who enabled me to go much further.

HillaryBriss 9y ago

> In my case, there weren't exactly a whole lot of traffic engineers. We had to make them, and we did. i think that's the model in a nutshell. all companies should be doing this. no companies should be bellyaching about a shortage of qualified workers.

KGIII 9y ago
Want to hear something scary? Lead traffic engineers make less, according to the web, than I used to start them at. Programmers, on average, also make less than I used to start them at. In 1998, depending on experience, I'd bring them in at about $120k, plus bonuses and benefits. Suffice to say, I see serious issues. One of the best things about training is that you get the exact skills you need. I had no moral issues with pushing research to a local university and then poaching them. It's a damned shame, I think, that businesses often refuse to invest in their people. I hired people because they were able to do things that I could not. If I could have done them, I'd have not had to hire them. Frankly, I'd like them to be able to do their best. That means ensuring they have the tools they need. One of those tools is an education.
- mywittyname 9y ago
  Honestly, it sounds like you were a good businessman with a decent moral compass.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Thank you. Though, there is a profit motive. Happy employees do good work. Educated employees helped keep me in front of the competition that was coming online. We'd eventually expand to offering pedestrian traffic modeling. We'd sell appliances that enabled them to keep their data in-house, as well. Curiously enough, I'd expected to remain in academia. My dissertation (my Ph.D. is in Applied Mathematics) was based on traffic throughput, optimization and prediction, which led to a contract being offered. I was able to be in the right place, at the right time, and able to take advantage of it. The rest is, shall we say, history. I ended up in the field largely because the data was free and DEC was able to throw compute resources at me. It is largely luck, even though I put lots of work into it. Ah well... I don't have words of wisdom. It was largely due to just timing and being able to take the risks. Even selling was largely luck. The economy crashed and the government wanted to build/expand highways as 'shovel ready jobs.'