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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

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

cousin_it wrote: post #83
dragonwriter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 explai…

> 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.

If you can demonstrate this is the case for the specific jobs where you want to apply it, you will then have no problem, even if it has a disproportionate negative impact on a protected class.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#92

Post by evanpw »

paulpauper wrote: post #22

One 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…

Actually, there seems to not really be any legal issue with IQ testing job candidates (in the US), and plenty of companies do some kind of cognitive testing: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts....

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#93

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #41
cgearhart wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has as much to do with a corporate shift away from pensions and other considerations for long-term employees. For my entire professional career I've been warned that there is no one else looking out for me but me. There will be no pension when I retire, and no social security, I'm told. So I have to maximize what I earn and what I save now in order to survive later. Is it any wonder then that my generation…

The shift away from pensions is caused mainly by laws (e.g. ERISA) requiring companies to properly account for them. Defined benefit pensions are both extremely expensive and very risky, but companies were allowed to hide these losses and risks off the balance sheets in the past. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/15/sorry-folks...

The shift to 401K is more about the financial industry rigging the system so that they have more of other people's money to play with. Need a bigger slush fund? Lobby Congress to make pensions unfeasible through carefully constructed legislation and wait 10 years for the payoff to start rolling in.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#94

Post by mindslight »

verbin217 wrote: post #64
mindslight wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument rests on an assumption that an employee produces nothing of value while learning. If they are performing useful work while learning, then the salary paid to them isn't being wasted. How true this is depends on the field and subject matter, but surely any entity will tend to see their own specifics as basic things anyone should already know even though the field is actually much larger.

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 th…

> 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...

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#95

Post by vectorjohn »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #38
thirdtruck wrote: post #34

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. And nothing stops the first business from raising the employee's pay to $91k. Why should they expect to keep paying the same salary to someone they've made more valuable? They already amortized the costs of training over the value added by the employee in the…

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…

You misunderstood the premise. The first company pays $91k after training. So it's not $111k, it's $100k during training, then $91k after that. More competitively, it would just always be $100k and the second company would have no advantage. In fact, the first company has the advantage because it will be easier to initially find the people that need training.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#96

Post by vectorjohn »

notahacker wrote: post #62
bicknergseng wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Their market value probably isn't $111k, hence their existing employer being unwilling to match competitors' salary offering for a trained member of staff and pick up the tab for the training.

If their market value isn't $111k, why would the competitor pay that?

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#97

Post by learc83 »

sanderjd wrote: post #86
learc83 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Good point. Many of the area's you mentioned do have a lot of formal underpinnings, and there are large bodies of research to look to for guidance.

Computer architecture is big E Engineering, done by Computer Engineers for example. The networks class I took was also one of the most math heavy, and most of the book was supported by proofs. In addition, we spent the first half of databases working with only relational algebra.

If you look through a textbook on any of the subjects you mentioned, and compare it to say a book on design patterns, the distinction between math/engineering and craft is pretty clear.

>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.

We went over the history in depth in my program--from Turing to Konrad Zuse to Backus. I also found it immensely useful.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#98

Post by thirdtruck »

vectorjohn wrote: post #96
notahacker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their market value probably isn't $111k, hence their existing employer being unwilling to match competitors' salary offering for a trained member of staff and pick up the tab for the training.

If their market value isn't $111k, why would the competitor pay that?

Exactly. Sometimes the market "decides" that you're going to have to stop under-paying your employees.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#99

Post by learc83 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #89
learc83 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Models are used to get a better of understanding of a complex system, or to test a complex system when you can't test the real thing. A design pattern could be used to this way but they aren't. They are used as a design methodology that you are encouraged to follow.

They also aren't based on any formal theory. They are based only on the experience of the people who create them. They are almost the definition of a craft (as opposed to engineering).

In an actual Engineering discipline you would need evidence to prove that your model fits reality as opposed to just trusting the experience of a few guys who wrote a book.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#100

Post by thirdtruck »

vectorjohn wrote: post #95
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…

You misunderstood the premise. The first company pays $91k after training. So it's not $111k, it's $100k during training, then $91k after that. More competitively, it would just always be $100k and the second company would have no advantage. In fact, the first company has the advantage because it will be easier to initially find the people that need training.

On top of that: The second company presumably still has domain-specific training of its own to perform, and will have to un-train the hire in other ways. Makes more sense to just pick up someone new.
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