Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

As a lib arts graduate, I might be biased, but I believe that it's still the best education for the type of decision-making that's most useful in real-world business decisions: ambiguous and incomplete information from a variety of sources with competing interests.

That being said, if you're not in a leadership position that kind of decision making isn't what you're doing: you're most likely just optimizing on your own little anthill, so a "profit-centered" education like the article is against might make sense for the worker bees.

Another thing that I think is usually missing from the "train your workers" debate is how much variance there is in productivity, and how actual productivity is usually unknowable unless you have 2-3 months of project data for a given worker (these are assumptions). So hire unskilled contract workers, fire 80% of them, and then train the remaining 20%. They won't have the credentials to work elsewhere, and you've been able to identify the true all-stars using data on their actual work product.

Companies in the second category are going to be in the market for lemons. Company A has inside knowledge of how each employee is performing and can easily match a price increase for employees that are worth it while letting go of those that aren't. Company A is paying a bit more to purchase an option on skilled employees, Company B is hoping that they don't just get lemons.

Of course companies will offload training costs on taxpayers or individuals whenever possible. It's the in the "nature" of capitalism to maximize profits and mimimize costs. It used to the government and the state that provided balance but now it's implicitly, if not explicitly, accepted that business has "won" and calls the shots. The state's roll now is to further the interests of business.

This is great if you're an employer but what are the consequences of shifting from a capitalist economy to a capitalist society? There is more to a successful society than increasingly desperate and ruthless competition for a shrinking pool of jobs. How many people want to spend their entire working life in a cage match for survival hoping that they are one of the lucky few who make to the billionaire's club? If government isn't going to represent the people what's the point of having one?

The standard retort from market fundamentalists (and it is a faith) is to reframe the debate as capitalism vs. socialism, or argue that the market is as natural as breathing and we have to let it do what it must. The first one is straw man argument; not many people are arguing in favor of a Marxist paradise. And the market as a system of nature is simply delusional. A market economy is fine, most people agree on that. The problem is when the market model invades every last aspect of society and opposition is neither mon-existant or rendered impotent. The end result is a dictatorship of market fundamentalism. Kind of a capitalist version of the Soviet Union where the Communist Party is replaced by oligarchs and the lowly worker is replaced by the lowly worker version 2.0. IOW, post-industrial feudalism. Is that what "the people" want? Something tells the answer is "no, they absolutely do not."

I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value.

In college, I didn't learn version control, continuous integration (continuously submitting your work in small changelists or patches), unit testing, making sure you're building the right product before building it, delivering the simplest possible code and design that meets the requirements, code quality, working in teams, untangling dependencies and making as much progress as possible today without waiting for all your dependencies to be resolved, and so on.

I expect that all these skills will be very much relevant 20 years from now. So, don't confuse long-term value with "grounded in CS fundamentals". Programming isn't a hard science like physics.

>I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value.

I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value.

There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics, salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer Science program.

They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job.

>In college, I didn't learn version control...

I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to distributed version control like Git.

In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial.

I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork during a group project.