The distinction here is between a hunter-gatherer mentality and an agricultural one. Are you picking and choosing or are you farming? Currently we grow engine

The distinction here is between a hunter-gatherer mentality and an agricultural one. Are you picking and choosing or are you farming? Currently we grow engineering skill in (often) high cost institutions with limited capacity such as traditional universities. Moocs and bootcamps are alternatives which try to address the scalability, cost, and time commitment barriers of traditional education. The question is should there continue to be a strong dichotomy between organizations who consume the output of these growth channels and the growth organizations, or should software development companies create programs of structured education and growth that have a low barrier to entry? As others have mentioned startups who can hunt/find/pick people with relevant, high quality skills have the advantage of not paying the time and organizational cost of training. Personally I think that large organizations should be taking more hands-on approaches that take all, or nearly all comers, and then provide training for the kinds of skills they need. If you look at military funding for medical educations (for example) you'll see that the organization can be very generous in terms of time and training cost as long as a candidate ends up with the skillset they need. You might not go in wanting to be a urologist, but you can end up highly skilled and very well paid if you're willing to meet the needs of the organization.