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I'm not sure this is exclusive to the software/engineering industries. My impression in general is that people "back in the day" were much more content to stay

I'm not sure this is exclusive to the software/engineering industries. My impression in general is that people "back in the day" were much more content to stay with a single employer for their whole life–or at least long periods of time–than they are today. If that's the case, training new employees from the ground up made much more sense a few decades ago from an ROI standpoint. I haven't got any statistics to back it up, though, it's just a general impression.

sgift 14y ago
My impression is that this is a problem of the companies own doing: In many cases they are unwilling to hold employees (because young employees are "better", so just fire them when they get "too old") and unwilling to give employees their fair share of the profits i.e. pay raises are almost always lower if you stay at a company than if you change. This two parts lead to people changing companies far more often than "back in the day" and now companies say "We cannot train people! Then our competition will just take them when they are trained!" - Yeah, because companies don't value their employees enough. And now we've come full circle.
russell 14y ago
I was there "back in the day". There were lots of people who stayed with a company for decades as well as lots who jumped ship after a couple of years when their employers couldnt keep up with the salary escalation. One or the big differences was that there were many more layers of management. Engineers were reasonably well paid, but the salary range was fairly compressed. In general the highest paid engineer could not make more than his manager. When a man got a family and needed more money, he was promoted to a manager. There was the HP Way where nobody was fired and engineers were taken care of. While there were startups, there was not the froth of new ventures that there is today. Finding a job was very much word of mouth, newspaper classifieds, and head hunters, not the easy searching of Craigslist of today.

sgift 14y ago

My impression is that this is a problem of the companies own doing: In many cases they are unwilling to hold employees (because young employees are "better", so just fire them when they get "too old") and unwilling to give employees their fair share of the profits i.e. pay raises are almost always lower if you stay at a company than if you change. This two parts lead to people changing companies far more often than "back in the day" and now companies say "We cannot train people! Then our competition will just take them when they are trained!" - Yeah, because companies don't value their employees enough. And now we've come full circle.

russell 14y ago

I was there "back in the day". There were lots of people who stayed with a company for decades as well as lots who jumped ship after a couple of years when their employers couldnt keep up with the salary escalation. One or the big differences was that there were many more layers of management. Engineers were reasonably well paid, but the salary range was fairly compressed. In general the highest paid engineer could not make more than his manager. When a man got a family and needed more money, he was promoted to a manager. There was the HP Way where nobody was fired and engineers were taken care of. While there were startups, there was not the froth of new ventures that there is today. Finding a job was very much word of mouth, newspaper classifieds, and head hunters, not the easy searching of Craigslist of today.