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The investment could produce a net gain, even in the immediate, and there would still be a problem. Leaking value into the competitive environment in which you'

The investment could produce a net gain, even in the immediate, and there would still be a problem. Leaking value into the competitive environment in which you're trying to survive will kill you. As alluded to by the GP, training as compensation produces employees that are worth more to competitors. Once trained, an employee experiences a loss in pay equal to the cost of their training. This Effectively subsidizes their departure.

mindslight 11y ago
> Leaking value into the competitive environment in which you're trying to survive will kill you Taken to the extreme, sure. But every voluntary interaction necessarily "leaks value", being non-zero-sum. This word "training" keeps getting used, and I think it's at the heart of this disagreement - viewing learning as a discrete top-down event as opposed to a continuous process. GP's example is akin to an employer paying for a bachelor's degree. My comment is easiest thought of in terms of company-specific processes. For any specific 'skill', the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Software is a bit of a rare case where most tools are highly complex, but are also freely (as-in-beer) accessible. Tool choice is heavily driven by fashion, yet fashion being foreign to our worldview we're blind to this. Is $software_package a fundamental that every college graduate should know, or basically equivalent to an in-house framework? Who knows...