6 ms·

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

aduwah 7mo ago
Hard same over 20 years
bdangubic 7mo ago
This percentage is probably right on the money!
tasuki 7mo ago
> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!
- oblio 7mo ago
  If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...
  - tasuki 7mo ago
    Could easily be, yes. And they'd be right not to invest in OP's skills. (To explicitly state the obvious: I'm not saying OP's a bad person for doing this, just saying the employers were right not to invest in them...)
  - lsaferite 7mo ago
    Why would a company you are consulting for invest in training you up exactly? They are paying a consultant with the expectation that they are bringing the knowledge.
    - 21asdffdsa12 7mo ago
      Eh, consultants are brought in not for the knowledge or advice! Management already knows what todo and where to go- they just want somebody external sanctify the decision!
- dspillett 7mo ago
  I've worked for five companies, on the same products (well, variations there-of over time), for 25 years, due to take-overs (I nearly left ~10 years ago due to management numskullery, but a timely buy-out of the bit I worked for fixed my problems while the rest of the company died off). Hanging around for a while (a long while) doesn't necessarily mean dedication worth investing in, it could just be that I have a shocking lack of ambition :)
- ojbyrne 7mo ago
  Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.
  - shagie 7mo ago
    Consider the rate of job hopping that would be evident on that resume. I'm not sure how many companies would be willing to invest in sending a FTE who stays somewhere for likely less than a year to a conference or say "Ok, you an spend 20% of your time improving your skills." What is more likely with the 35 number is that these are multiple simultaneous contracts. When working as a contractor you're fixing that problem or that project. The company isn't going to have you around for longer than a month after it's been fixed and documented. There's no reason to spend company resources on training a person any more than there's reason for you to pay a plumber to be reading "learn to be an electrician in 10 days" while they're supposed to be working on fixing the sink or doing the plumbing for new construction.
  - kjksf 7mo ago
    It's all so vague. "lack of investment in their skill". You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff. You get hired to do a job for money. What "investment" do you expect company to do? Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent? If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like you pay college to teach you?
    - rafterydj 7mo ago
      This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your business goals. Asking what that number is completely misses the point.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
ndriscoll 7mo ago
What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures (at least if you're fulltime). Now at least at my company, we have unlimited use of codex, which you can ask for help explaining things to you. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable. I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.
- PurpleRamen 7mo ago
  > For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. Guided learning with instant feedback can be much more efficient than just consuming and tinkering on your own. Depends on the topic, the teacher and situation of course. The quality of available material is also all over the place, and not every topic has enough material, or anything at all.
  - ndriscoll 7mo ago
    For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone who's completed undergrad, minimum. Part of an undergrad degree is getting used to seeking out resources yourself and learning from them instead of having a teacher spoon-feed it. Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out." What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!
threetonesun 7mo ago
These two statements go hand in hand though. While I do believe companies could take the altruistic take of training people whether or not they stay, and some places do, they're certainly not going to make the effort for someone who has clear markers of being someone who will leave anyway.
- Supermancho 7mo ago
  That's not how these initiatives are executed, unless the shop is very small. In which case, there's no concrete training offered anyway. If it's large, they don't want to allocate a lot of budget rather than starting a new hiring round. I would say the lack of in-job developer training (or resourcing) is due to multiple factors that results in a consistency rather than specifically targeting individuals. It's not like I don't speak with ex-coworkers or run into them at times - eg one guy I taught Java to (at a position where java wasn't required except for a tiny tool), is the team lead at blizzard now. If I was made a pariah, I would hear about it over the years.
  - threetonesun 7mo ago
    I wasn't specifically calling you out, but more broadly companies know that the average tenure keeps getting lower, for reasons on both the employee and employer side. But even places I have seen career development done, it was generally reserved as a "perk" for employees who at least had a few years in.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
PurpleRamen 7mo ago
Care to explain a bit more? With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.
- pc86 7mo ago
  I mean the comment says "contract" right there; you can easily be on a contract with multiple companies simultaneously. When I was freelancing full-time ca. 2010-2013 or so I often had 5-6 active contracts running simultaneously. I probably worked for 15-20 different companies total in that 3-4 year span.
  - PurpleRamen 7mo ago
    Yes, likely, but make even less sense, as you can't except support for education as a freelancer. I mean a freelancers whole purpose is to sell skill and be gone when the job is finished. You are from the beginning just an expendable tool they don't want to polish outside the scope of the job.
- Supermancho 7mo ago
  > I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. There is a mismatch between how you would expect industry to work and what my last 30 years has taught me. > With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I have been at 4 companies for around 2 years or more. The rest of the positions were either contract or startup or contract-to-hire. The vast majority of engineers seem to settle in and suffer at terrible companies, rather than make moves to better jobs. They also tend to settle at whatever they are assigned and grow their skillsets by their employer's needs, rather than on their own. Over the last 2 decades, if you stayed somewhere for over 2 years, you better have added concrete skills to your resume and have increased your compensation by over 10%. If that's not on track, look for another job, imo. Contract-to-hire has been very popular. ie JPMC, credit, medical, adtech, games, big retail, subcontractor shops, to startups (4 of which were acquired). All initiatives to progress the careers of developers is applied more or less company wide because the line between contract-to-hire and fulltime is considered an engineering issue if there is more than hub. If you are a sole contributor, on some satellite project or still considered in training, you might not participate due to scheduling that had already been arranged, but the idea that contractors are excluded is more a possibility than a certainty. Most of the initiatives are little more than maybe someone talking with you every quarter, anyway. > Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point. It's strange that people are assuming engineers are treated special because of a resume that nobody looks at after an offer is made - having conducted hundreds of interviews. This must be a very rare thing some people may do.
kjksf 7mo ago
What is your expectation, exactly? In US you go to college for 4-5 years and pay $50k per year. Or more. You pay to learn. A lot of money, a lot of time. Then you get a job, where the idea is that you get paid for doing work and you expect the employer to do what? You seem to expect that not only you won't be doing the things you're being paid to do but the employer will pay for your education on company's time. How many weeks per year of time off do you expect to get from a company? You'll either say a reasonable number, like 1 or 2, which is insignificant to the time you supposedly spent learnings (5 years). You just spend 250 weeks supposedly learning but 1 or 2 weeks a year is supposed to make a difference? Or you'll say unreasonable number (anything above 2 weeks) because employment is not free education.

aduwah 7mo ago

Hard same over 20 years

bdangubic 7mo ago

This percentage is probably right on the money!

tasuki 7mo ago

> I've worked for 35ish companies It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills. I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

oblio 7mo ago
If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...
- tasuki 7mo ago
  Could easily be, yes. And they'd be right not to invest in OP's skills. (To explicitly state the obvious: I'm not saying OP's a bad person for doing this, just saying the employers were right not to invest in them...)
- lsaferite 7mo ago
  Why would a company you are consulting for invest in training you up exactly? They are paying a consultant with the expectation that they are bringing the knowledge.
  - 21asdffdsa12 7mo ago
    Eh, consultants are brought in not for the knowledge or advice! Management already knows what todo and where to go- they just want somebody external sanctify the decision!
dspillett 7mo ago
I've worked for five companies, on the same products (well, variations there-of over time), for 25 years, due to take-overs (I nearly left ~10 years ago due to management numskullery, but a timely buy-out of the bit I worked for fixed my problems while the rest of the company died off). Hanging around for a while (a long while) doesn't necessarily mean dedication worth investing in, it could just be that I have a shocking lack of ambition :)
ojbyrne 7mo ago
Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.
- shagie 7mo ago
  Consider the rate of job hopping that would be evident on that resume. I'm not sure how many companies would be willing to invest in sending a FTE who stays somewhere for likely less than a year to a conference or say "Ok, you an spend 20% of your time improving your skills." What is more likely with the 35 number is that these are multiple simultaneous contracts. When working as a contractor you're fixing that problem or that project. The company isn't going to have you around for longer than a month after it's been fixed and documented. There's no reason to spend company resources on training a person any more than there's reason for you to pay a plumber to be reading "learn to be an electrician in 10 days" while they're supposed to be working on fixing the sink or doing the plumbing for new construction.
- kjksf 7mo ago
  It's all so vague. "lack of investment in their skill". You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff. You get hired to do a job for money. What "investment" do you expect company to do? Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent? If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like you pay college to teach you?
  - rafterydj 7mo ago
    This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your business goals. Asking what that number is completely misses the point.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

ndriscoll 7mo ago

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures (at least if you're fulltime). Now at least at my company, we have unlimited use of codex, which you can ask for help explaining things to you. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable. I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.

PurpleRamen 7mo ago
> For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. Guided learning with instant feedback can be much more efficient than just consuming and tinkering on your own. Depends on the topic, the teacher and situation of course. The quality of available material is also all over the place, and not every topic has enough material, or anything at all.
- ndriscoll 7mo ago
  For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone who's completed undergrad, minimum. Part of an undergrad degree is getting used to seeking out resources yourself and learning from them instead of having a teacher spoon-feed it. Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out." What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!

threetonesun 7mo ago

These two statements go hand in hand though. While I do believe companies could take the altruistic take of training people whether or not they stay, and some places do, they're certainly not going to make the effort for someone who has clear markers of being someone who will leave anyway.

Supermancho 7mo ago
That's not how these initiatives are executed, unless the shop is very small. In which case, there's no concrete training offered anyway. If it's large, they don't want to allocate a lot of budget rather than starting a new hiring round. I would say the lack of in-job developer training (or resourcing) is due to multiple factors that results in a consistency rather than specifically targeting individuals. It's not like I don't speak with ex-coworkers or run into them at times - eg one guy I taught Java to (at a position where java wasn't required except for a tiny tool), is the team lead at blizzard now. If I was made a pariah, I would hear about it over the years.
- threetonesun 7mo ago
  I wasn't specifically calling you out, but more broadly companies know that the average tenure keeps getting lower, for reasons on both the employee and employer side. But even places I have seen career development done, it was generally reserved as a "perk" for employees who at least had a few years in.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

PurpleRamen 7mo ago

Care to explain a bit more? With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.

pc86 7mo ago
I mean the comment says "contract" right there; you can easily be on a contract with multiple companies simultaneously. When I was freelancing full-time ca. 2010-2013 or so I often had 5-6 active contracts running simultaneously. I probably worked for 15-20 different companies total in that 3-4 year span.
- PurpleRamen 7mo ago
  Yes, likely, but make even less sense, as you can't except support for education as a freelancer. I mean a freelancers whole purpose is to sell skill and be gone when the job is finished. You are from the beginning just an expendable tool they don't want to polish outside the scope of the job.
Supermancho 7mo ago
> I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. There is a mismatch between how you would expect industry to work and what my last 30 years has taught me. > With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I have been at 4 companies for around 2 years or more. The rest of the positions were either contract or startup or contract-to-hire. The vast majority of engineers seem to settle in and suffer at terrible companies, rather than make moves to better jobs. They also tend to settle at whatever they are assigned and grow their skillsets by their employer's needs, rather than on their own. Over the last 2 decades, if you stayed somewhere for over 2 years, you better have added concrete skills to your resume and have increased your compensation by over 10%. If that's not on track, look for another job, imo. Contract-to-hire has been very popular. ie JPMC, credit, medical, adtech, games, big retail, subcontractor shops, to startups (4 of which were acquired). All initiatives to progress the careers of developers is applied more or less company wide because the line between contract-to-hire and fulltime is considered an engineering issue if there is more than hub. If you are a sole contributor, on some satellite project or still considered in training, you might not participate due to scheduling that had already been arranged, but the idea that contractors are excluded is more a possibility than a certainty. Most of the initiatives are little more than maybe someone talking with you every quarter, anyway. > Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point. It's strange that people are assuming engineers are treated special because of a resume that nobody looks at after an offer is made - having conducted hundreds of interviews. This must be a very rare thing some people may do.

kjksf 7mo ago

What is your expectation, exactly? In US you go to college for 4-5 years and pay $50k per year. Or more. You pay to learn. A lot of money, a lot of time. Then you get a job, where the idea is that you get paid for doing work and you expect the employer to do what? You seem to expect that not only you won't be doing the things you're being paid to do but the employer will pay for your education on company's time. How many weeks per year of time off do you expect to get from a company? You'll either say a reasonable number, like 1 or 2, which is insignificant to the time you supposedly spent learnings (5 years). You just spend 250 weeks supposedly learning but 1 or 2 weeks a year is supposed to make a difference? Or you'll say unreasonable number (anything above 2 weeks) because employment is not free education.