9 ms·

Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.

jimbob45 5y ago
You say that and I’ve seen several companies in practice echo what you’re saying. However, I fail to understand why they don’t simply make better use of contracts and probationary periods to solve that specific problem.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
  Contacts in what sense? Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.
  - xcambar 5y ago
    I think GP meant "reference check"
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      I meant “contract” but you’ve brought up another good idea.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    *contracts In the sense of offering signing bonuses for term lengths that get repo’d if the contract length is broken.
- danjac 5y ago
  The problem of a probationary period is that it pushes all the risk to the employee. While I agree interviewing has gotten ridiculous with all the leetcoding and ten rounds of interviews and FAANG cargo-culting and whatnot, one small advantage - assuming I'm not desperate for a paycheck - is that it gives me, as a prospective employee, time to consider and withdraw my application if I see too many red flags or I just prefer the devil I know. A short interview process with a probation period on the other hand is a big roll of the dice. Maybe I'm not able to ramp up on time, or make a silly mistake due to unfamiliarity with the codebase or underlying business logic. Maybe I don't get on with the team or manager. Maybe I'm going to be dumped into a doomed death march project on day 1. I could find myself unemployed a month later with an embarrassing gap in the resume. Perhaps on the other hand a better interview process (not longer, just have properly trained people and constantly improve the process with feedback) would save us all that pain.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    In a world where short, high-risk interviews dominated, you could just go roll the dice again. It would be a negative signal (why is @foo interviewing after only 60 days?), but nowhere near as bad as “why is @foo still interviewing after 6 months in this job market?!”.
godelski 5y ago
Then give them a reason to stay (note: it's also not all about money)
- austhrow743 5y ago
  Whatever you offer, including non-monetary, someone else can offer and then also spend their training budget on higher comp.
  - godelski 5y ago
    Is this supposed to be a rebuttal? I don't see a problem here.
    - austhrow743 5y ago
      Yes. Spending money and then not recouping is a losing strategy.
      - brewdad 5y ago
        So the answer is to not spend the money at all? How much are you costing your company by putting candidates through 8 hours of interviews only to reject them. Rinse. Repeat. All the while, productivity suffers as the remaining team falls further behind due to short-staffing and being pulled away from their real jobs to interview.
        ABCLAW 5y ago
        Professions mandate training minimums per year in order to maintain credentialled status. They're low, sure, but they at least create a need for ongoing professional education.
      - wyldfire 5y ago
        Every process has pros and cons, you have to weigh the net benefits.
      - 5y ago
coffeefirst 5y ago
I have no idea why people think this. I've trained all sorts of people on all sorts of new things and it was always worth it. Sometimes they leave. By that time they've used what they've learned and passed some of it on to the next person.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  Incredible that you're the first person I've seen mention a second-order effect in this conversation. I don't know what it is but I feel like people have forgotten just like basic truths about how humans work. Maybe it's because managerialism has infected everything.
ashtonkem 5y ago
People change jobs at the drop of a hat for reasons that are well within companies' control. It's not like people want all that stress and hassle, they do it because they're incentivized to do so.
- jcims 5y ago
  Sometimes. Other times they are just sampling what's out there to see what suits them the best, or playing the comp boost game until even their best face forward isn't able to garner a higher offer.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    The former happens, I’m not convinced that it’s a common occurrence. Changing jobs is genuinely stressful, I don’t think people do it lightly. The latter is usually something the company could fix, but won’t. Even still, it’s obvious that comp alone isn’t enough to retain employees. Even FAANG companies, which pay extremely well, have pretty low retention numbers. Facebook does best here, at an average job length of only 2.02 years. If comp was enough, people would stay there longer. This implies that people are changing jobs for reasons aside from “this other company will pay more”.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      It’s not just about absolute comp. If google will pay you more, then maybe you leave facebook. That’s not because google pays more than facebook, just that it’s easier to get a “promotion” by taking a hire role elsewhere than it is to get an actual promotion. It doesn’t mean you don’t pay market wages, but it does mean you don’t pay that person their market wage.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        That’s exactly something companies have under their control. If people are leaving because it is seen as the sure route to a promotion, then perhaps providing clear advancement opportunities internal would reduce this phenomenon and help keep your high performing talent.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
That works when you're employing a bunch of Wordpress monkeys who do nothing all day but mess with CSS and install plugins. Not so much when you've got a mature SAAS product, parts of the system are tricky to work with, and stakeholders are breathing down your neck to implement new features so you don't have time to cross-train your teams. Losing people who are experts within the domain of the software they're maintaining because you refuse to invest in them is going to cost you thousands of dollars... the only question is whether that's tens or hundreds times that amount... and in some cases it can cause you to lose your entire business.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  I’m friends with a few “Wordpress monkeys,” as well as some people who “do nothing but mess with css all day.” That was extremely condescending and dismissive
anchpop 5y ago
Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics. Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.) Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incentivized to invest in their house, e.g. preventative maintenance, because if the expected value is positive then they will recoup that value when they sell the house. If you’re renting you don’t have this with respect to where you live - water damage or no, not really the renter’s problem. Investment efficiency is maximized by private property, where you know that no one will take your property without your consent. Allocative efficiency means things go to whoever is willing/able to pay the most for them. Renting does have this property - if both of us want to rent a house, and I’m willing to pay more, in most cases I’ll end up getting the house. This is why gentrification can cause displacement - when wealthier people come into a city and are able to outbid the current renters, they win and the current renters lose. Allocative efficiency is maximized by auctions and things like them, where the good goes to whoever is willing to pay the most. Bringing it back to your comment, job training isn’t worth it because our careers as programmers are dominated by allocative efficiency, not investment efficiency. If you can train a programmer create $50,000/year more value in general (i.e. it’s not training that would only be useful to your company), they can now get paid about that much more from any of your competitors, and you will have to pay them about that much more to stop them from leaving. So you gain nothing from giving them general-skills training. Another way of solving this problem is with sectoral bargaining. If you have a sector-wide union, they can make all companies start training simultaneously, or assume some of the costs themselves. It’s a win-win for the industry and for the programmers, but it doesn’t happen nearly as much as it could because of that coordination problem.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  So, in this hypothetical, the sector-wide union is preventing individuals who learn to create an additional $50K/yr in value from realizing the increase in pay which would otherwise accrue to them?
  - 5y ago

You say that and I’ve seen several companies in practice echo what you’re saying. However, I fail to understand why they don’t simply make better use of contracts and probationary periods to solve that specific problem.

kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
Contacts in what sense? Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.
- xcambar 5y ago
  I think GP meant "reference check"
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    I meant “contract” but you’ve brought up another good idea.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  *contracts In the sense of offering signing bonuses for term lengths that get repo’d if the contract length is broken.
danjac 5y ago
The problem of a probationary period is that it pushes all the risk to the employee. While I agree interviewing has gotten ridiculous with all the leetcoding and ten rounds of interviews and FAANG cargo-culting and whatnot, one small advantage - assuming I'm not desperate for a paycheck - is that it gives me, as a prospective employee, time to consider and withdraw my application if I see too many red flags or I just prefer the devil I know. A short interview process with a probation period on the other hand is a big roll of the dice. Maybe I'm not able to ramp up on time, or make a silly mistake due to unfamiliarity with the codebase or underlying business logic. Maybe I don't get on with the team or manager. Maybe I'm going to be dumped into a doomed death march project on day 1. I could find myself unemployed a month later with an embarrassing gap in the resume. Perhaps on the other hand a better interview process (not longer, just have properly trained people and constantly improve the process with feedback) would save us all that pain.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  In a world where short, high-risk interviews dominated, you could just go roll the dice again. It would be a negative signal (why is @foo interviewing after only 60 days?), but nowhere near as bad as “why is @foo still interviewing after 6 months in this job market?!”.

godelski 5y ago

Then give them a reason to stay (note: it's also not all about money)

austhrow743 5y ago
Whatever you offer, including non-monetary, someone else can offer and then also spend their training budget on higher comp.
- godelski 5y ago
  Is this supposed to be a rebuttal? I don't see a problem here.
  - austhrow743 5y ago
    Yes. Spending money and then not recouping is a losing strategy.
    - brewdad 5y ago
      So the answer is to not spend the money at all? How much are you costing your company by putting candidates through 8 hours of interviews only to reject them. Rinse. Repeat. All the while, productivity suffers as the remaining team falls further behind due to short-staffing and being pulled away from their real jobs to interview.
      - ABCLAW 5y ago
        Professions mandate training minimums per year in order to maintain credentialled status. They're low, sure, but they at least create a need for ongoing professional education.
    - wyldfire 5y ago
      Every process has pros and cons, you have to weigh the net benefits.
    - 5y ago

coffeefirst 5y ago

I have no idea why people think this. I've trained all sorts of people on all sorts of new things and it was always worth it. Sometimes they leave. By that time they've used what they've learned and passed some of it on to the next person.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
Incredible that you're the first person I've seen mention a second-order effect in this conversation. I don't know what it is but I feel like people have forgotten just like basic truths about how humans work. Maybe it's because managerialism has infected everything.

ashtonkem 5y ago

People change jobs at the drop of a hat for reasons that are well within companies' control. It's not like people want all that stress and hassle, they do it because they're incentivized to do so.

jcims 5y ago
Sometimes. Other times they are just sampling what's out there to see what suits them the best, or playing the comp boost game until even their best face forward isn't able to garner a higher offer.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  The former happens, I’m not convinced that it’s a common occurrence. Changing jobs is genuinely stressful, I don’t think people do it lightly. The latter is usually something the company could fix, but won’t. Even still, it’s obvious that comp alone isn’t enough to retain employees. Even FAANG companies, which pay extremely well, have pretty low retention numbers. Facebook does best here, at an average job length of only 2.02 years. If comp was enough, people would stay there longer. This implies that people are changing jobs for reasons aside from “this other company will pay more”.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    It’s not just about absolute comp. If google will pay you more, then maybe you leave facebook. That’s not because google pays more than facebook, just that it’s easier to get a “promotion” by taking a hire role elsewhere than it is to get an actual promotion. It doesn’t mean you don’t pay market wages, but it does mean you don’t pay that person their market wage.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      That’s exactly something companies have under their control. If people are leaving because it is seen as the sure route to a promotion, then perhaps providing clear advancement opportunities internal would reduce this phenomenon and help keep your high performing talent.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

That works when you're employing a bunch of Wordpress monkeys who do nothing all day but mess with CSS and install plugins. Not so much when you've got a mature SAAS product, parts of the system are tricky to work with, and stakeholders are breathing down your neck to implement new features so you don't have time to cross-train your teams. Losing people who are experts within the domain of the software they're maintaining because you refuse to invest in them is going to cost you thousands of dollars... the only question is whether that's tens or hundreds times that amount... and in some cases it can cause you to lose your entire business.

gentleman11 5y ago
I’m friends with a few “Wordpress monkeys,” as well as some people who “do nothing but mess with css all day.” That was extremely condescending and dismissive

anchpop 5y ago

Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics. Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.) Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incentivized to invest in their house, e.g. preventative maintenance, because if the expected value is positive then they will recoup that value when they sell the house. If you’re renting you don’t have this with respect to where you live - water damage or no, not really the renter’s problem. Investment efficiency is maximized by private property, where you know that no one will take your property without your consent. Allocative efficiency means things go to whoever is willing/able to pay the most for them. Renting does have this property - if both of us want to rent a house, and I’m willing to pay more, in most cases I’ll end up getting the house. This is why gentrification can cause displacement - when wealthier people come into a city and are able to outbid the current renters, they win and the current renters lose. Allocative efficiency is maximized by auctions and things like them, where the good goes to whoever is willing to pay the most. Bringing it back to your comment, job training isn’t worth it because our careers as programmers are dominated by allocative efficiency, not investment efficiency. If you can train a programmer create $50,000/year more value in general (i.e. it’s not training that would only be useful to your company), they can now get paid about that much more from any of your competitors, and you will have to pay them about that much more to stop them from leaving. So you gain nothing from giving them general-skills training. Another way of solving this problem is with sectoral bargaining. If you have a sector-wide union, they can make all companies start training simultaneously, or assume some of the costs themselves. It’s a win-win for the industry and for the programmers, but it doesn’t happen nearly as much as it could because of that coordination problem.

sokoloff 5y ago
So, in this hypothetical, the sector-wide union is preventing individuals who learn to create an additional $50K/yr in value from realizing the increase in pay which would otherwise accrue to them?
- 5y ago