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> 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 becaus

> 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. This made sense back then because most of the tools, languages and techniques were either proprietary or niche. IBM wouldn't hire an ATT employee as FB hires a Google employee today, and back then people saw jobs as "until retirement", with a very different culture. If you invested a lot of money training someone, you could expect them to stick around for a while and "pay back" your investment. Today that isn't worth it. You could hire someone out of high school, spend a lot of resources training them just to have them poached by another company right after they are "ready". That time is gone.

bradleyjg 9y ago
It's true that it doesn't make as much sense from a business perspective as it once did to have a deep training pipeline. If I were suggesting that Google switch over to such a model for all their hiring that would be all there was to say on the matter. But here Google is looking to donate $1 billion as a charitable contribution to address a specific social problem. I'm suggesting an alternative way of "spending" that money. From that standpoint the fact that such a training program is sub-optimal in a bottom line sort of way isn't as important -- indeed it is kind of the point. The difference between the optimal business focused process and such a hiring and training program would be in lieu of the donation that Google is planning on making. It's my contention that this way of spending money would yield more benefits than the current plan. I could well be wrong, but just criticizing the idea from a business efficiency angle misses the point.

2 ms·

> 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 becaus

by ucaetano 9y ago

bradleyjg 9y ago
It's true that it doesn't make as much sense from a business perspective as it once did to have a deep training pipeline. If I were suggesting that Google switch over to such a model for all their hiring that would be all there was to say on the matter. But here Google is looking to donate $1 billion as a charitable contribution to address a specific social problem. I'm suggesting an alternative way of "spending" that money. From that standpoint the fact that such a training program is sub-optimal in a bottom line sort of way isn't as important -- indeed it is kind of the point. The difference between the optimal business focused process and such a hiring and training program would be in lieu of the donation that Google is planning on making. It's my contention that this way of spending money would yield more benefits than the current plan. I could well be wrong, but just criticizing the idea from a business efficiency angle misses the point.