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I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be

I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy administration to little effect.

dyarosla 9y ago
What criteria determines who should get a position then? What salary should those positions command? Sounds pretty handwavy. Edit: responders to this comment seem to miss that the parent comment is suggesting Google hire new individuals and train them, not find talent in their workforce and do training there. Thats the unrealistic part- creating a secondary application process for individuals without the skills -- when they already reject a ridiculous number of people with many of the skills.
- drharby 9y ago
  Who determines who should get a training slot? What kind of subsistence shouls that training command? The commitment of capital to tanglible jobs that lead towards ojt is not handwavy at all. That said, i bet the tax breaks from the schooling is substantial
- blackguardx 9y ago
  On the job training was pretty standard in the tech industry in the past. I worked with a guy at an HP (oldest high-tech co. in CA) spinoff that was the head embedded software architect and worked his way up from the machine shop in the '70s. He started out manning a drill press and learned to program when they started using NC (numeric control) machine tools. Do you think Google lets anyone to work their way up from front desk admin or barista?
  - was_boring 9y ago
    This is basically how my mother was trained as a programmer. She got a job, was literally handed a stack of books and reference material and started figuring shit out. She changed careers before I can really remember her at that job, but I too am self-taught in this field (but I trained myself at home). The whole idea of companies not investing in their people is relatively new.
    - vanilla_nut 9y ago
      To be fair, employees are no longer particularly faithful to employers-- after all, it's considered completely normal to spend only 2-5 years at a job, then move to the next one. This definitely complicates the benefits of on-the-job training: why waste 3-12 months training somebody to basic competence when they might leave a few months after that? Some of this is obviously due to employees fighting back against stagnant wages/lack of promotions, but it makes me wonder: who started the faithlessness first, employers or employees?
      - bradleyjg 9y ago
        I don't know about started, it's been back and forth forever, but in recent history a big epochal change was the hostile takeover movement of the 80s. Many companies, including those that had had a reputation for loyalty to their employees, were bought out by corporate raiders who often took actions that lead to huge number of layoffs.
  - aikinai 9y ago
    Yes, actually Google does have programs to let people work their way up on the inside. Barista is a bit extreme and not really internal since they're vendors, but admins, help desk, etc. do have avenues to move into other roles.
    - blackguardx 9y ago
      That's good to hear. Carly Fiorina worked her way up from Admin to CEO. Though, that is a bad example because it didn't work work out too well for HP. I don't think being a barista is much different than my example, though. Maybe they should make them internal hires.
- alistairSH 9y ago
  I don't have solid answers, but that's exactly how my father-in-law got into the computer field back in the early 60s. He was working an administrative job at a bank, someone IDed him as having potential, and the bank put him through internal training in programming and computer science-y stuff. It worked out, he spent some time programming, and eventually moved into management.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"What criteria determines who should get a position then? A basic aptitude for the role or transferable skills maybe? >"What salary should those positions command?" Whatever the company wants to pay. Why does that matter at all? Employment is still an agreement between the two parties. >"Sounds pretty handwavy." Not at all, "on the job training" has a history stretching from Medieval Ages and the guild system, to the industrial revolution, powering the war-time workforce etc: https://msu.edu/~sleightd/trainhst.html https://msu.edu/~sleightd/trainhst.html
briholt 9y ago
Another major glaring problem that no one wants to admit is that lots of tech work requires (at the very least) college-level-IQ, which excludes the majority of the population. And the lower-IQ jobs are quickly being automated away.
- mlloyd 9y ago
  Maybe - or maybe it just requires a specific way of thinking about things i.e. Problem Solving and Time/Task Management? As well as the ability to learn the task of course.
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    What's the difference between "problem solving" and "IQ" ? They seem like almost the same thing.
    - madamelic 9y ago
      Problem-solving: the ability to deconstruct a problem into atomic pieces and construct solutions IQ: How fast you do it. tl;dr: Problem-solving is software, IQ is hardware
    - jaibot 9y ago
      "IQ" is a scalar semi-objectice well-defined metric that predicts some things about the much more complicated and less-well-defined concept of problem solving.
    - goialoq 9y ago
      "IQ" measures something called "G", which is pattern-recognition ability (coincidentally the cutting edge of today's ML neural nets). The scientific theory of IQ is that that if you are good at pattern recognition, then you will be good at a wide range of cognitive tasks.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  A college-level IQ these days means something low like 100 -- you're probably thinking of a more stringent standard.
jimmaswell 9y ago
I'm thankful I found a company like that after graduating. Seemingly the only such specimen in America today. It's a giant international consultancy company that seemingly has a questionable reputation online but it was all I could get that paid anything remotely respectable and they even do paid training. It's seems to be one of a rapidly dwindling handful of paths for new grads who are graduating and finding out the online hype like "it's easy to get a job in CS if you do [some combination of good side projects, internships, good gpa, etc]" is an outright falsehood at this point in time - it's very hard unless an opportunity approaches you like what eventually happened to me amd it turned out all that applying and trying was a waste of time. In my case I had no choice but to do a draining unpaid internship in college, their return offer was only $15/hr, nowhere I applied to for months (likely hundreds of applications) would take me even though I did all those things in the list and continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit, except one offer for 30k. 15/hr and 30k are abysmal insults to the amount of time money and effort put into programming since middle school, getting a BS CS degree, volunteering on big online projects since high school, etc. I'm not in the middle of nowhere either, this was NY/NJ. These experiences signal to me that the tech field is hightly oversaturated for new grads and it's a matter of time before people realize the bubble popped. Someone in my position should not be getting offered what amount to poverty wages taking into account student loans, the high price of car insurance for a driver of my age range, etc. Programs like what google is doing are just going to make this problem even worse as companies feel further emboldened to require increasingly more experience out of junior programmers and offer them salaries further approaching minimum wage.
- heroprotagonist 9y ago
  > continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit From curiosity, and certainly not to offend.. you _did_ place your resume elsewhere as well, right?
  - jimmaswell 9y ago
    I meant resume critique/improvement threads. I put the resume on sites like Monster as well as sending it to specific postings, usually customized for that posting.
Denzel 9y ago
I suggested exactly that 2 months ago [1]; the idea was not popular here. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003048
rifung 9y ago
> I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training I work for Google and I find there's already a very large amount of on the job training required due to all the powerful but complicated internal tools. My manager has told me that I should not feel pressured to contribute at all for my first 6 months and I should feel free to just focus on learning as much as I can. I've been here for almost a year now and feel like I still know nothing so the training is still certainly not done. I didn't mean to jump to the defense of my employer as I'm obviously biased but do think we are far from perfect (although I am very happy here :). I just wonder what the right balance is. It seems like if people can't program at all then it's not really on the job training because they wouldn't be working right? At least my own experience has been that I came in with some college experience but no college degree and not really knowing anything besides the bare minimum to contribute (being able to program, having some grasp of CS fundamentals) and have learned a ton on the job and still have much much more to learn. I think there is an expectation (and pressure!) for all SWEs to hit the senior level, L5, so in a way everyone who is hired under that level is doing on the job training no? Sorry for the long post!
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. I'm not saying they are morally obligated to do so. At the end of the day they are a for profit company and they don't have to do anything at all about this problem. And, sure, the donations they are making instead are probably better than nothing. But as I mentioned, and as top19 mentions on what is as of this writing the top post on this article, the track record for these job retraining programs going back decades isn't very good. What I'm saying is that if Google were to go to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Detroit, hire some bright unemployed people, pay them a decent but by no means exorbitant salary while it taught them how to code and then, as you point out, how to be a productive engineer at Google, at the end of the process those people would likely have very marketable skills to either continue moving up the ladder at Google or elsewhere. Of course this would cost Google something -- not only in the salaries while people were learning and not contributing but also in the salaries of people that were training and mentoring them. But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. -- Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job.
grigjd3 9y ago
These companies do on-the-job training. The problem is that a college degree in computer science or software engineering doesn't actually prepare you to work at these companies. It makes you effectively literate, so that you are feasibly trainable.
BjoernKW 9y ago
Usually I'd agree that on-the-job training is more beneficial than untethered training programs. However, just today I listened to the most recent Freakonomics Radio episode, which was about how Germany managed to become the economic powerhouse it is today. Most economists that were asked agreed that an essential ingredient of Germany's economic success is its unique concept of vocational training, which combines on-the-job training with school education and general - as opposed to employer-specific - job training. Perhaps a system that's essentially a combination of both on-the-job training and more formal training programs would be conducive in this case as well.
- soperj 9y ago
  Yeah, it's also helpful that German tertiary education is free.
ptero 9y ago
I doubt that hiring average talent and training it is best for Google business. They believe that it is better to try hiring only the very best, and do it even if employees do not match a specific position they ostensibly interviewed for (e.g., train for skills or find new positions, but after a very high entry bar). I think retraining programs primarily help sharp, energetic folks who somehow got into a bad state (useless major, bad school, rough childhood, etc.); maybe even social connections and stability are more important than the skills they end up getting. However, those programs are IMO worthless for folks who lost a stable job and hope that Yet Another Certification Class will put them into a pipeline for a similar one. I am not sure how to help the second type.
- grtrans 9y ago
  Google hasn’t hired “the very best” for at least five to seven years now; there are plenty “average talent” employees who do their job adequately. Mind you they do hire some of the best, but the idea that google engineers are “the best” is a myth.
  - ptero 9y ago
    I never said google engineers are "the best". I said that this is what Google tries to do. IMO it did this pretty well 10 years ago, but as a company gets big this gets much harder. I heard though they are still trying to do this, even being aware of the lower success ratio.

dyarosla 9y ago

What criteria determines who should get a position then? What salary should those positions command? Sounds pretty handwavy. Edit: responders to this comment seem to miss that the parent comment is suggesting Google hire new individuals and train them, not find talent in their workforce and do training there. Thats the unrealistic part- creating a secondary application process for individuals without the skills -- when they already reject a ridiculous number of people with many of the skills.

drharby 9y ago
Who determines who should get a training slot? What kind of subsistence shouls that training command? The commitment of capital to tanglible jobs that lead towards ojt is not handwavy at all. That said, i bet the tax breaks from the schooling is substantial
blackguardx 9y ago
On the job training was pretty standard in the tech industry in the past. I worked with a guy at an HP (oldest high-tech co. in CA) spinoff that was the head embedded software architect and worked his way up from the machine shop in the '70s. He started out manning a drill press and learned to program when they started using NC (numeric control) machine tools. Do you think Google lets anyone to work their way up from front desk admin or barista?
- was_boring 9y ago
  This is basically how my mother was trained as a programmer. She got a job, was literally handed a stack of books and reference material and started figuring shit out. She changed careers before I can really remember her at that job, but I too am self-taught in this field (but I trained myself at home). The whole idea of companies not investing in their people is relatively new.
  - vanilla_nut 9y ago
    To be fair, employees are no longer particularly faithful to employers-- after all, it's considered completely normal to spend only 2-5 years at a job, then move to the next one. This definitely complicates the benefits of on-the-job training: why waste 3-12 months training somebody to basic competence when they might leave a few months after that? Some of this is obviously due to employees fighting back against stagnant wages/lack of promotions, but it makes me wonder: who started the faithlessness first, employers or employees?
    - bradleyjg 9y ago
      I don't know about started, it's been back and forth forever, but in recent history a big epochal change was the hostile takeover movement of the 80s. Many companies, including those that had had a reputation for loyalty to their employees, were bought out by corporate raiders who often took actions that lead to huge number of layoffs.
- aikinai 9y ago
  Yes, actually Google does have programs to let people work their way up on the inside. Barista is a bit extreme and not really internal since they're vendors, but admins, help desk, etc. do have avenues to move into other roles.
  - blackguardx 9y ago
    That's good to hear. Carly Fiorina worked her way up from Admin to CEO. Though, that is a bad example because it didn't work work out too well for HP. I don't think being a barista is much different than my example, though. Maybe they should make them internal hires.
alistairSH 9y ago
I don't have solid answers, but that's exactly how my father-in-law got into the computer field back in the early 60s. He was working an administrative job at a bank, someone IDed him as having potential, and the bank put him through internal training in programming and computer science-y stuff. It worked out, he spent some time programming, and eventually moved into management.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"What criteria determines who should get a position then? A basic aptitude for the role or transferable skills maybe? >"What salary should those positions command?" Whatever the company wants to pay. Why does that matter at all? Employment is still an agreement between the two parties. >"Sounds pretty handwavy." Not at all, "on the job training" has a history stretching from Medieval Ages and the guild system, to the industrial revolution, powering the war-time workforce etc: https://msu.edu/~sleightd/trainhst.html https://msu.edu/~sleightd/trainhst.html

briholt 9y ago

Another major glaring problem that no one wants to admit is that lots of tech work requires (at the very least) college-level-IQ, which excludes the majority of the population. And the lower-IQ jobs are quickly being automated away.

mlloyd 9y ago
Maybe - or maybe it just requires a specific way of thinking about things i.e. Problem Solving and Time/Task Management? As well as the ability to learn the task of course.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  What's the difference between "problem solving" and "IQ" ? They seem like almost the same thing.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    Problem-solving: the ability to deconstruct a problem into atomic pieces and construct solutions IQ: How fast you do it. tl;dr: Problem-solving is software, IQ is hardware
  - jaibot 9y ago
    "IQ" is a scalar semi-objectice well-defined metric that predicts some things about the much more complicated and less-well-defined concept of problem solving.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    "IQ" measures something called "G", which is pattern-recognition ability (coincidentally the cutting edge of today's ML neural nets). The scientific theory of IQ is that that if you are good at pattern recognition, then you will be good at a wide range of cognitive tasks.
SamReidHughes 9y ago
A college-level IQ these days means something low like 100 -- you're probably thinking of a more stringent standard.

jimmaswell 9y ago

I'm thankful I found a company like that after graduating. Seemingly the only such specimen in America today. It's a giant international consultancy company that seemingly has a questionable reputation online but it was all I could get that paid anything remotely respectable and they even do paid training. It's seems to be one of a rapidly dwindling handful of paths for new grads who are graduating and finding out the online hype like "it's easy to get a job in CS if you do [some combination of good side projects, internships, good gpa, etc]" is an outright falsehood at this point in time - it's very hard unless an opportunity approaches you like what eventually happened to me amd it turned out all that applying and trying was a waste of time. In my case I had no choice but to do a draining unpaid internship in college, their return offer was only $15/hr, nowhere I applied to for months (likely hundreds of applications) would take me even though I did all those things in the list and continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit, except one offer for 30k. 15/hr and 30k are abysmal insults to the amount of time money and effort put into programming since middle school, getting a BS CS degree, volunteering on big online projects since high school, etc. I'm not in the middle of nowhere either, this was NY/NJ. These experiences signal to me that the tech field is hightly oversaturated for new grads and it's a matter of time before people realize the bubble popped. Someone in my position should not be getting offered what amount to poverty wages taking into account student loans, the high price of car insurance for a driver of my age range, etc. Programs like what google is doing are just going to make this problem even worse as companies feel further emboldened to require increasingly more experience out of junior programmers and offer them salaries further approaching minimum wage.

heroprotagonist 9y ago
> continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit From curiosity, and certainly not to offend.. you _did_ place your resume elsewhere as well, right?
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  I meant resume critique/improvement threads. I put the resume on sites like Monster as well as sending it to specific postings, usually customized for that posting.

Denzel 9y ago

I suggested exactly that 2 months ago [1]; the idea was not popular here. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003048

rifung 9y ago

> I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training I work for Google and I find there's already a very large amount of on the job training required due to all the powerful but complicated internal tools. My manager has told me that I should not feel pressured to contribute at all for my first 6 months and I should feel free to just focus on learning as much as I can. I've been here for almost a year now and feel like I still know nothing so the training is still certainly not done. I didn't mean to jump to the defense of my employer as I'm obviously biased but do think we are far from perfect (although I am very happy here :). I just wonder what the right balance is. It seems like if people can't program at all then it's not really on the job training because they wouldn't be working right? At least my own experience has been that I came in with some college experience but no college degree and not really knowing anything besides the bare minimum to contribute (being able to program, having some grasp of CS fundamentals) and have learned a ton on the job and still have much much more to learn. I think there is an expectation (and pressure!) for all SWEs to hit the senior level, L5, so in a way everyone who is hired under that level is doing on the job training no? Sorry for the long post!

bradleyjg 9y ago
At the dawn of the computer age ATT, IBM, and other companies taught people how to program from scratch. Early on because there were no college programs to do so and later on because programs didn't graduate nearly enough people. And no one was self taught because there were no home computers. I don't see why Google couldn't do that today. I'm not saying they are morally obligated to do so. At the end of the day they are a for profit company and they don't have to do anything at all about this problem. And, sure, the donations they are making instead are probably better than nothing. But as I mentioned, and as top19 mentions on what is as of this writing the top post on this article, the track record for these job retraining programs going back decades isn't very good. What I'm saying is that if Google were to go to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Detroit, hire some bright unemployed people, pay them a decent but by no means exorbitant salary while it taught them how to code and then, as you point out, how to be a productive engineer at Google, at the end of the process those people would likely have very marketable skills to either continue moving up the ladder at Google or elsewhere. Of course this would cost Google something -- not only in the salaries while people were learning and not contributing but also in the salaries of people that were training and mentoring them. But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective. -- Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job.

grigjd3 9y ago

These companies do on-the-job training. The problem is that a college degree in computer science or software engineering doesn't actually prepare you to work at these companies. It makes you effectively literate, so that you are feasibly trainable.

BjoernKW 9y ago

Usually I'd agree that on-the-job training is more beneficial than untethered training programs. However, just today I listened to the most recent Freakonomics Radio episode, which was about how Germany managed to become the economic powerhouse it is today. Most economists that were asked agreed that an essential ingredient of Germany's economic success is its unique concept of vocational training, which combines on-the-job training with school education and general - as opposed to employer-specific - job training. Perhaps a system that's essentially a combination of both on-the-job training and more formal training programs would be conducive in this case as well.

soperj 9y ago
Yeah, it's also helpful that German tertiary education is free.

ptero 9y ago

I doubt that hiring average talent and training it is best for Google business. They believe that it is better to try hiring only the very best, and do it even if employees do not match a specific position they ostensibly interviewed for (e.g., train for skills or find new positions, but after a very high entry bar). I think retraining programs primarily help sharp, energetic folks who somehow got into a bad state (useless major, bad school, rough childhood, etc.); maybe even social connections and stability are more important than the skills they end up getting. However, those programs are IMO worthless for folks who lost a stable job and hope that Yet Another Certification Class will put them into a pipeline for a similar one. I am not sure how to help the second type.

grtrans 9y ago
Google hasn’t hired “the very best” for at least five to seven years now; there are plenty “average talent” employees who do their job adequately. Mind you they do hire some of the best, but the idea that google engineers are “the best” is a myth.
- ptero 9y ago
  I never said google engineers are "the best". I said that this is what Google tries to do. IMO it did this pretty well 10 years ago, but as a company gets big this gets much harder. I heard though they are still trying to do this, even being aware of the lower success ratio.