I thought tech internships were more about recruiting than about training.
Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
21–30 of 149 posts
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#22One possible solution is cognitive screening - the use of tests such as the Wonderlic, SAT/ACT, or Wechsler to find prospective employees who can learn quickly and have good critical thinking skills (and thus would benefit the most from on-site training for technical tasks. training obviously costs money), but unfortunately something called 'disparate impact' makes this difficult to implement, so employers instead have to let colleges do the screening, turning an advanced degree into a very overpriced, time consuming 'IQ test'. Some people are more concerned about hurt feelings than providing equal opportunities. The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't politically correct, we must do away with the test, so the result is more student loan debt, a worse labor market, and more credentialism.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#23The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a productive level.
It's a tough situation. It's hard to identify people who have no background in computer science, but still have tons of potential if given the opportunity.
Coding bootcamps exist to bridge that gap - in a sense, you can think of them as recruitment agencies and not as learning institutions. The goal isn't to replace a 4 year degree with 3 months of intense learning. That's simply not possible. The goal is to find smart, motivated people who can learn quickly, give them a skill which will let them hit the ground running, and present them to companies.
Companies benefit because they get a low cost hire who has the potential to grow tremendously if given the right environment. Employees benefit because they can typically enter the workforce at a higher salary than they could command from self-study alone. Win-win all around.
The key takeaway is that for-profit code schools are not schools. Code schools are primarily recruitment agencies designed to find high quality, non traditional talent. In that regard, I think the best ones are an absolute success.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#24> The trick is to relabel it as education, then complain that your prospective employees aren’t getting the right kind. Well, I guess if already-educated workers are the norm in your industry, companies are going to change their hiring practices accordingly. It's okay not to like it, but arguing against it on the basis that 'it didn't used to be like this' just makes you look entitled and whiny. > Bemoaning the unpre…
> ...if already-educated workers are the norm... That's the point -- there's a difference between education and training. It is only an issue because so much of the education looks very similar to the desired training. It is not the purpose of an education to produce new employees, but to provide a broad basis for experiencing and making sense of the world. It just so happens that you also learn transferrable skills…
> That's the point -- there's a difference between education and training.
Excellent point. Two problems:
(1) Over the past ~2.5 generations, the narrative about education has been informed by the conventional wisdom of {grades -> university -> job -> pension}. Hence, education is now only nominally about producing 'citizens of the republic' (so to speak), and de facto about producing well-trained workers. Disambiguating these goals is important, but hampered by...
(2) The perverse incentives created by cheap government money encourage malinvestment (i.e. an English degree [I say this with love — my wife is an English major]), and the consequent propensity of industry to not only see it as a jobs program, but also as a government policy problem.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#25The Uber robotics talent raid of CMU took piratization to a logical extreme, http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube... "They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalls a person who was there during the departures"…
I think this is a better example of dysfunction in academia than retaining/training a workforce. In particular, previous articles suggest that most folks saw their salaries doubled, with six-figure incentive checks to lure them away. From what I hear, it's not so much that the new salary is unusually high for industry researchers and engineers, but that the old salaries were unusually low (except in academia).
CMU could probably have gotten better return if they hadn't made it a point to underpay them so much compared to their market value.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#26One possible solution is cognitive screening - the use of tests such as the Wonderlic, SAT/ACT, or Wechsler to find prospective employees who can learn quickly and have good critical thinking skills (and thus would benefit the most from on-site training for technical tasks. training obviously costs money), but unfortunately something called 'disparate impact' makes this difficult to implement, so employers instead ha…
> The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't politically correct, we must do away with the test
Untrue. The logic is if there is a disparate impact against a legally-protected class, such that the test would be a convenient cover for illegal discrimination, and you allow discrimination using the test without demonstration of relevance, it becomes an easy, obvious, and effective tool for those looking for cover for discrimination on an illegal basis; to avoid that, the logic goes, you simply require those who wish to use the test as a basis for discrimination in that case to actually be able demonstrate that the test is meaningful to the job and that it is applied as a discrimination factor in a manner consistent with the way that it is meaningful to the job.
If they've actually done the kind of analysis that would let them know that the test really is useful, this is trivial; it does, however, prevent adopting a test with discriminatory effect against a protected class merely based on intuition or conventional wisdom.
The type of analysis involved may be costly, but then, if it really is something that those wishing to apply have high confidence would be valuable for their business, that type of analysis would be worthwhile to pay for. The reason it is difficult is because none of the people who like to talk about how useful these things would be when talk is cheap wants to put their money where the mouth is on the issue.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet it was the norm only a few decades ago. What's new is the emphasis on speed and flexibility. If you're starting a new initiative, it's better to hire skilled people now than to start a training program and get them 2 years from now. And if the new initiative fails, laying off people you've trained is throwing away the money you spent on their training.
It's not just starting and stopping projects faster, it's also social norms about changing jobs. We have a much more liquid job market and this provides a lot more opportunities for folks to arb opportunities. This is overall a good thing, but there are side effects.
How much of the liquidy is caused by changing social norms among workers and workers taking advantage of better work opportunities and how much is caused by an unstable job market(with unions losing power) caused by CEOs? Mass layoffs were not always a "thing." They are traumatic to those who get layed off and those who witness layoffs of their friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors without getting layed off themselves.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#28The Uber robotics talent raid of CMU took piratization to a logical extreme, http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube... "They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalls a person who was there during the departures"…
CMU was doing development for Cadillac[1], underpaying their employees while charging more to the customer, General Motors. That backfired on CMU.
[1] http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2014/fall/from-0-70-...
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#29For the most part, bonding agreements ("you can't leave for X years without repaying us for your training") are considered exploitative and usually not legally enforceable. As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force - if a business invests $20k in training and $80k in salary, there is nothing stopping another employer from offering $90k in salary after training is complete. If an investment can't…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs How would training followed by a bonding period be considered differently than other mechanisms inducing employees to stay? Could these other mechanisms also be legally questionable? E.g. some San Francisco Bay Area technology companies offer large (~$20k) signing bonuses to new uni graduate hires that the employee must return if she leaves within her first year at the…
Yeah, I heard about companies who pay for college - as long as you stay one year after your last class. If not you have to pay them back. Actually, just pay back just the tuition you spent in the last year.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#30One possible solution is cognitive screening - the use of tests such as the Wonderlic, SAT/ACT, or Wechsler to find prospective employees who can learn quickly and have good critical thinking skills (and thus would benefit the most from on-site training for technical tasks. training obviously costs money), but unfortunately something called 'disparate impact' makes this difficult to implement, so employers instead ha…
> The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't politically correct, we must do away with the test Untrue. The logic is if there is a disparate impact against a legally-protected class, such that the test would be a convenient cover for illegal discrimination, and you allow discrimination using the test without demonstration of relevance, it becomes an easy, obvious, and effective tool for those looking for…
Trying disprove disparate impact can be time-consuming and expensive, especially with the litigation, and that's why only large companies and municipalities can use these tests. One problem according to business surveys is the skills mismatch, which is that employers can't find enough qualified employees to fill open spots. Maybe the labor market would be better if these tests were made more readily available so employers can find talent that would benefit the most from on-site training, but most businesses don't have the resources to disprove disparate impact should a lawsuit arise, nor the compiled data to show there isn't discriminatory hiring . Even if the plaintiff's case is without merit, it still costs the employer time and money to disprove the case. And it's not like the defendant can recover from a frivolous lawsuit.