Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force • Hacker News Board

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#81

Post by wwweston » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

It's true that business should pay to train its own work force, but I'm not convinced it can.

Businesses that would like to but that operate in a sector where a competitor can successfully externalize that cost will be at a competitive disadvantage.

And businesses that subscribe to managerialism -- the idea that it's primarily management/leadership skills that differentiate a business, rather than domain knowledge -- may not know how to train employees at all, as it takes someone with domain knowledge to know how that can be done...

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#82

Post by jdmichal » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

meatysnapper wrote: post #69

walterbell wrote: post #5

The 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"…

Football coaches are often the highest paid employees at big schools. If I was a world class researcher, I'd be pissed as hell about that. That said, Uber pretty much showed that they are unable to be trusted (if anybody trusts them at all still).

It's quantifiable to the administration how much money a winning sports team can bring to the school. What is the average return on a world-class researcher?

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#83

Post by cousin_it » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #40

cousin_it wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why employers must prove the relevance of IQ tests but not work sample tests, given that the former are better predictors of job success (Hunter & Schmidt 1998).

> I'm not sure why employers must prove the relevance of IQ tests but not work sample tests If challenged in court, and if the work sample test is shown to have a disparate impact such that its use would be illegal discrimination if it were not tailored to the job, they do have to show this for work sample tests. Your premise is simply false. (OTOH, the disparate impact of IQ tests is more readily established by a pl…

Let's imagine that tomorrow I come up with a magical super-reliable method of interviewing, which works better for most jobs than existing specific methods. Then I'm fucked! My method will certainly have disparate impact (because it has nonzero correlation with IQ), be not very tailored to any particular job (because it's magical), and there will be numerous available studies (making it easier to sue me as you explain). So tell me, what incentive do I have to invent such a method?

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#84

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

__z wrote: post #27

yummyfajitas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 them…

Yeah, I'd say that employee loyalty's dropoff kind of trails the dropoff in employer loyalty. Like when companies started using backdoors to raid pension funds and pay out executive bonuses with them that was not the result of some newfound job-hopping tendency in retired workers.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#85

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

switch007 wrote: post #42

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 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. Extremely common in the UK :(

They're common in the US too; they just aren't enforceable. However, I assume a lot of people aren't aware of that or else just feel grateful enough to an employer that offered them training of some significant value that they stick around for a few years.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#86

Post by sanderjd » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #78

samirmenon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mostly agree, but for me, the line gets blurry around the applied areas that have a lot of depth: computer architecture, operating systems, networking protocols, compilers, and databases. In all of those, I learned a lot about theory, practice, and engineering trade-offs, all of which was worthwhile. I didn't study it myself, but I would imagine distributed systems is (or should be) a similarly rich subject. I also learned a ton from studying the history of computing, which I wish would be more of a focus for those entering the industry.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#87

Post by learc83 » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #80

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 ga…

> 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...

I think you probably would have learned those lessons after a few months on the job. You probably wouldn't have picked up the knowledge to build your own OS on the job, however.

>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.

Did you learn about billing clients, and effectively advertising your services in your CS degree? What about equity versus salary tradeoffs?

At least 50% of working in technology is soft skills, why doesn't a CS degree spend 50% of the time teaching you those? The answer is that a CS degree isn't supposed to be vocational training.

Vocational training, including learning to talk to clients, should be done on the job, during an internship/apprenticeship, or in a specialized vocational training program. By including it in a college degree, employers have successfully pushed employee training costs onto workers and society (as the article argues).

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#88

Post by Futurebot » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

bicknergseng wrote: post #43

yummyfajitas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the total cost to the first business for this employee is $111k. The cost to the second business (who provides no training) is $92k to beat the first company's offer. It's a losing proposition to provide training - you get the same labor at a higher cost. In contrast, if you simply pay $100k to trained employees, and employees can pay for training out of pocket, you preserve the cost structure (big caveat: I'm i…

> if you simply pay $100k to trained employees Assuming 1) you can find trained employees, and 2) they are willing to work for $100k. If the value of the trained employee is $111k, then why would they work for $100k except for ignorance of their value? This is my big problem with STEM shortage parrots and with labor as a market in general: ideal candidates are rare, and, in general, willingness to spend more or train…

Exactly right. That opportunity cost seems perpetually ignored. Also, when we talk about "value in the market of an employee's skillset", we're obviously talking about how much total compensation they'll receive. What ALSO seems to get ignored is the fact that the people you're hiring (particularly in software!) are or should be generating a multiple of that salary, so worrying about "90k" vs "110k" is laughable when they may be generating value of 500k-1M, even after you factor in health care and all the other benefits. Does anybody actually believe that those few tens of thousands of dollars (should) make or break anything? We're not talking about the cost of eggs or something here; we're talking about software, a huge force and value multiplier.

The (IMO very weak) counterargument here is "well, budgets are set to blah blah blah" - but in that case, you're allowing a difference of a few dozen thousand dollars dictate whether or not you get someone, which can be the difference between shipping, getting out a new version, or whatever and not doing so. If your budgeting is that inflexible, maybe your organization has other problems it should address first.

When it comes to software, cost-based pricing should not be anywhere near the discussion. Software developers and their output should judged on value. It's crazy that anyone is still in this mindset after nearly two decades of software eating the world. We may be getting paid a lot relative to the median, but it's still just a fraction of the value it creates - otherwise, why would anyone bother? Hire a dev for 135k for example (includes benefits), and have them only generate 150k worth of value? Come on.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#89

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:33 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #76

genericuser wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Design patterns are models, something very much within the wheelhouse of engineering. Engineering doesn't always deal with absolute facts as in science. When an underlying system is too complex to fully describe, simplified modeling can be appropriate.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#90

Post by vectorjohn » Mon, Jun 22, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

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…

What incentive would an employee have to leave company A just because company B also offers the same "nice" salary and work environment. The advantage of offering the training in the first place is you GET the employees to come to you, then as long as they're compensated they will have no reason to leave after training is complete. It's a win-win for the employee and employer.

You for some reason seem to hold the idea that after training, some other company can just come in and offer more money. Why?