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Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

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Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#71

Post by yummyfajitas »

anigbrowl wrote: post #65
yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

For 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…

For a mathematician you sure like fallacious arguments. As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force Well, they could offer more pay after the training is completed, or focus on being a nice place to work such that employees would choose to stay put with a company that treated them well. Your argument rests on the implicit assumption that employees will leave the moment they receive a competitive of…

The other company without training could also be a nice place to work, and pay more as well. You are right that some employees might give "goodwill" to their employer. If such goodwill effects become sufficiently large, maybe employers will start offering training again. I guess you'll be encouraging employees to hold irrational feelings of loyalty towards their employers?

As for the costs to employees, that is indeed a potential concern. I encourage anyone considering investing money in education to consider the marketability of same.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#72

Post by genericuser »

learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

My software engineering class spent most of the semester going over design patterns which are in fact quite useful to learn in school. And then maybe 1/4 of the class on going over the various development methodologies. I agree that a class devoted entirely to methodology would be complete over kill. However I think there is room for getting some exposure to it in school. Ideally before taking higher level classes, where having knowledge of a existing ways to structure your group work will be beneficial.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#73

Post by learc83 »

bduerst wrote: post #66
learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

I guess it depends on the purpose of the education. If you're already getting the CS fundamentals, maybe it doesn't hurt to get up to speed on some of the industry fads at the moment, since most of the students could be looking for an industry job in two-three years.

Everything is a tradeoff if you spend time on industry fads, you're spending less time on CS fundamentals.

Industry fads aren't useful outside of industry, so learning them should be paid for by industry. As the article argues, 20 years ago they were. Now employers are trying to push the cost of vocational training onto workers and the public.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#74

Post by samirmenon »

learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

You could take that one step further. CS has, in it's modern incarnation, only been around for ~90 years. CS, as it is taught at the undergraduate level, has changed dramatically in recent years, and will continue into the future.

Math, on the other hand, has been around for thousands of years, is relatively stable, and unlikely to become obsolete in the way a scrum certification, or even a machine learning algorithm, will.

Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#75

Post by anigbrowl »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #71
anigbrowl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a mathematician you sure like fallacious arguments. As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force Well, they could offer more pay after the training is completed, or focus on being a nice place to work such that employees would choose to stay put with a company that treated them well. Your argument rests on the implicit assumption that employees will leave the moment they receive a competitive of…

The other company without training could also be a nice place to work, and pay more as well. You are right that some employees might give "goodwill" to their employer. If such goodwill effects become sufficiently large, maybe employers will start offering training again. I guess you'll be encouraging employees to hold irrational feelings of loyalty towards their employers? As for the costs to employees, that is indee…

I don't think it's at all irrational to have a feeling of loyalty one's employer if that employer actually supports one's economic interests to some degree. Even if one views people as pure utility maximizers, it doesn't follow that salary differential is the only measure of utility. There's a cost to quitting a job in terms of the simple disruption and effort to form new social relationships in the new workplace, not to mention the non-zero opportunity cost at the previous employer in terms of foregone promotions.

I'm all in favor of using economic analysis to work out how much a firm should invest in its labor force, but what you are doing (and do in almost every conversation about economics) is arguing that we should consider only those which affect your preferred metric. As someone else pointed out, you ignored things like the probability of increased productivity to the training employer during the training period and so forth.

I've actually worked freelance most of my life, and so I'm responsible for my own skills, pay both the employer and employee portions of payroll tax and so on, so the ideas you're advancing are far from being foreign concepts to me.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#76

Post by learc83 »

genericuser wrote: post #72
learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

My software engineering class spent most of the semester going over design patterns which are in fact quite useful to learn in school. And then maybe 1/4 of the class on going over the various development methodologies. I agree that a class devoted entirely to methodology would be complete over kill. However I think there is room for getting some exposure to it in school. Ideally before taking higher level classes, w…

The problem is design patterns are subjective, they are craft, not science or engineering.

There hasn't been enough work serious research done on "Software Engineering" to call Engineering with a straight face. You can't point a whole stack of serious research to say the design pattern A is objectively better in situation X because Y and Z.

What you can say is that design pattern A is currently in vogue so you should probably use it, while design pattern B has fallen out of favor in industry, so you should avoid it.

That is something that belongs in a vocational training program or an internship/apprenticeship not in a university Computer Science education.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#77

Post by jdmichal »

notahacker wrote: post #54
VLM wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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" Doesn't this assume a lifestyle from several generations ago where you get "the training" then you're set for the rest of your working life? I don't think the real world has worked like that since at least the 70s. If I took that $90K job I'd be OK while I'm t…

If I've got a specific skill or qualification that's increased my market value to $90k, I'm not really sure why I'd be reduced to applying for entry level jobs and requiring training again in two years time? And there's a huge spectrum of on the job training, from pointless classroom exercises to tick company compliance boxes to highly expensive professional qualifications that might pay for themselves in two years i…

> If I've got a specific skill or qualification that's increased my market value to $90k, I'm not really sure why I'd be reduced to applying for entry level jobs and requiring training again in two years time?

In other news, the huge demand for people who could efficiently work a loom has slacked greatly since the industrial revolution.

(A snarky way of saying, training and the benefits and value it confers is a function over time. Especially in the current world of web-based software development, two years can be a very large amount of time.)

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#78

Post by learc83 »

samirmenon wrote: post #74
learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

You could take that one step further. CS has, in it's modern incarnation, only been around for ~90 years. CS, as it is taught at the undergraduate level, has changed dramatically in recent years, and will continue into the future. Math, on the other hand, has been around for thousands of years, is relatively stable, and unlikely to become obsolete in the way a scrum certification, or even a machine learning algorithm…

>Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.

I agree with you completely. The parts of CS that are stable are the parts that are based on rigorous mathematical foundations. I think that teaching things like Object Oriented Programming strays too far from a rigorous foundation--away from math and even engineering into craft (which belongs in vocational training).

When I look back, the classes that I learned the most from were, Discrete Math, Automata, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Programming Language Concepts (which went into the academic side of programming language research more than what was currently in use in industry).

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#79

Post by sanderjd »

bduerst wrote: post #66
learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

I guess it depends on the purpose of the education. If you're already getting the CS fundamentals, maybe it doesn't hurt to get up to speed on some of the industry fads at the moment, since most of the students could be looking for an industry job in two-three years.

Well, the whole point of the article is that those students looking for industry jobs in two-three years should just be hired and trained in the fads of the moment, instead of wasting higher-ed time teaching trivial and likely irrelevant-by-then knowledge.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#80

Post by manyxcxi »

learc83 wrote: post #53

The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years out of date. Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph theory, and complexity analysi…

I also had a Software Engineering class (actually two them) that were focused on how to build software in real life. This was in '03 and we covered things like waterfall methodology, requirements gathering, functional specs, etc. If taught the exact same way today it would be woefully out of date but the time we spent on requirements gathering (where the teacher or TA) pretended to be a product owner and purposely gave really crappy answers and we had to extract useful information but by bit was one of the best pieces of prep I ever received.

All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS...

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