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Points to a general problem (in the US at least) of a complete failure of any sense of on the job training, or internal advancement. Companies complain when th

Points to a general problem (in the US at least) of a complete failure of any sense of on the job training, or internal advancement. Companies complain when they can't find purple squirrels, even where they could find someone with great general skills in the profession and train them, in about the same amount of time it takes to onboard someone with precisely the skills you want.

meddlepal 9y ago
How do you ensure they stick around? Training has a high cost that isn't worth it if the people jump ship 2 or 3 years later as is the norm in this industry.
- gaius 9y ago
  Perhaps if you invest in people, they wouldn't do that? I mean people job hop because that is the only way to advance, but what if there was another way? Job hunting, interviewing etc are a royal pain in the backside. If there was a way to have a career without all that everyone would be happier, employers included
- jaggederest 9y ago
  I dunno, nobody I know is actually looking to job hop. If you treat people decently, give them raises, train them, why would they have any incentive to leave? Hiring somebody new costs 15-25% of the raw salary cost for the year. Pay people 10% more instead, no incentive to leave.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Plus however long it takes to ramp them up, could be 6 months on a reasonably complex codebase. And the time of other engineers both in the hiring process and bringing the new engineer up to speed. I’d say the cost of replacing an engineer could be as much as their entire first year’s comp.
- gordaco 9y ago
  Well, it's a reason as good as any other to start paying good salaries AND good raises, instead of just the former. And don't skim on the benefits. As a general rule, treat your employees fairly (which includes updating their salaries up to market value, as often as needed) and, lo and behold, they will stay. There is a lot of talk about changing jobs because of a lack of challenge, wanting to try new technologies, etc., but 99% of the time, it's about money (and benefits). Admittedly, this idea might not be very well received by most companies.
- bb88 9y ago
  People jumping ship 2 or 3 years later is a result of the market correcting itself. There was a point in time when people stayed for 20 years in a company. Why? You could switch, but the pay would be the same.
  - gaius 9y ago
    There is a cultural factor too, many companies seem to have an aversion to promoting from within. It's usually far easier to get promoted by interviewing elsewhere for a higher position than it is to deal with the internal politics of moving up within the same org. But it could be a clear expectation: complete this training, get this experience, move up a rung.
solatic 9y ago
It's not just a matter of training. Let's say you get a job offer from a company which the worst case of NIH syndrome you've ever seen, and all their code is written in a programming language that the company created and the only code in the world written in this language is at this company. Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable, and not have invested years and years into a stack that's completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. So if the company is of such a literally enormous size and permanent standing to be able to make you a believable offer of lifetime employment / tenure for learning their untransferable skills, like a military or other government body, then maybe. For a defense contractor which could go belly up after some upper-management scandal? No way. For anybody else in the private sector? No way. Either way, it's still problematic because your hiring mechnanics now revolve around unfirable employees, and the easiest way to demotivate employees is by putting them in an environment where mediocrity is accepted because the perpetrators of the mediocrity can't be fired. Ada's problem is that it was only a defense-sector language, for reasons specified by others in the thread e.g. compiler cost. Ultimately, targeting tooling to only a specific industry is dooming it to failure; the tooling must stay relevant to many companies and industries both so that people will see it as a career-advancing skill and so that the labor market remains fluid.
- gaius 9y ago
  Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable A counter-example would be Goldman Sachs, with their own language (Slang) and their own database (SecDB), former Goldmanites have no trouble finding work after.
  - solatic 9y ago
    An interesting point which I will concede. But I doubt the exception disproves the rule for the general case. For what it's worth, GS was founded in 1869, which makes it older than most of the behemoth systems companies like IBM (1911) or AT&T (1880). Big banks like GS may not be as invincible post-2008 as they used to appear to be, but if there are institutions which you could say "this institution is not going to evaporate in the next few decades which will make up my career", GS would not be a bad bet. Which brings an interesting question, how many former Goldmanites a) worked primarily in Slang (given that not all Goldmanite engineers work on SecDB) b) were laid off or otherwise left GS without having a job lined up and c) then found work? If you can prove that you can work on a different stack and get a job with no frictional unemployment, is a much different picture compared to engineers who stay out of work (the parallel question being, why is Slang so much more de-facto employable than COBOL or other languages which for one reason or another are now unpopular or unused in the wider industry?).

meddlepal 9y ago

How do you ensure they stick around? Training has a high cost that isn't worth it if the people jump ship 2 or 3 years later as is the norm in this industry.

gaius 9y ago
Perhaps if you invest in people, they wouldn't do that? I mean people job hop because that is the only way to advance, but what if there was another way? Job hunting, interviewing etc are a royal pain in the backside. If there was a way to have a career without all that everyone would be happier, employers included
jaggederest 9y ago
I dunno, nobody I know is actually looking to job hop. If you treat people decently, give them raises, train them, why would they have any incentive to leave? Hiring somebody new costs 15-25% of the raw salary cost for the year. Pay people 10% more instead, no incentive to leave.
- gaius 9y ago
  Plus however long it takes to ramp them up, could be 6 months on a reasonably complex codebase. And the time of other engineers both in the hiring process and bringing the new engineer up to speed. I’d say the cost of replacing an engineer could be as much as their entire first year’s comp.
gordaco 9y ago
Well, it's a reason as good as any other to start paying good salaries AND good raises, instead of just the former. And don't skim on the benefits. As a general rule, treat your employees fairly (which includes updating their salaries up to market value, as often as needed) and, lo and behold, they will stay. There is a lot of talk about changing jobs because of a lack of challenge, wanting to try new technologies, etc., but 99% of the time, it's about money (and benefits). Admittedly, this idea might not be very well received by most companies.
bb88 9y ago
People jumping ship 2 or 3 years later is a result of the market correcting itself. There was a point in time when people stayed for 20 years in a company. Why? You could switch, but the pay would be the same.
- gaius 9y ago
  There is a cultural factor too, many companies seem to have an aversion to promoting from within. It's usually far easier to get promoted by interviewing elsewhere for a higher position than it is to deal with the internal politics of moving up within the same org. But it could be a clear expectation: complete this training, get this experience, move up a rung.

solatic 9y ago

It's not just a matter of training. Let's say you get a job offer from a company which the worst case of NIH syndrome you've ever seen, and all their code is written in a programming language that the company created and the only code in the world written in this language is at this company. Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable, and not have invested years and years into a stack that's completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. So if the company is of such a literally enormous size and permanent standing to be able to make you a believable offer of lifetime employment / tenure for learning their untransferable skills, like a military or other government body, then maybe. For a defense contractor which could go belly up after some upper-management scandal? No way. For anybody else in the private sector? No way. Either way, it's still problematic because your hiring mechnanics now revolve around unfirable employees, and the easiest way to demotivate employees is by putting them in an environment where mediocrity is accepted because the perpetrators of the mediocrity can't be fired. Ada's problem is that it was only a defense-sector language, for reasons specified by others in the thread e.g. compiler cost. Ultimately, targeting tooling to only a specific industry is dooming it to failure; the tooling must stay relevant to many companies and industries both so that people will see it as a career-advancing skill and so that the labor market remains fluid.

gaius 9y ago
Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable A counter-example would be Goldman Sachs, with their own language (Slang) and their own database (SecDB), former Goldmanites have no trouble finding work after.
- solatic 9y ago
  An interesting point which I will concede. But I doubt the exception disproves the rule for the general case. For what it's worth, GS was founded in 1869, which makes it older than most of the behemoth systems companies like IBM (1911) or AT&T (1880). Big banks like GS may not be as invincible post-2008 as they used to appear to be, but if there are institutions which you could say "this institution is not going to evaporate in the next few decades which will make up my career", GS would not be a bad bet. Which brings an interesting question, how many former Goldmanites a) worked primarily in Slang (given that not all Goldmanite engineers work on SecDB) b) were laid off or otherwise left GS without having a job lined up and c) then found work? If you can prove that you can work on a different stack and get a job with no frictional unemployment, is a much different picture compared to engineers who stay out of work (the parallel question being, why is Slang so much more de-facto employable than COBOL or other languages which for one reason or another are now unpopular or unused in the wider industry?).