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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

#121

Post by kartickvad »

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…

I think this logic breaks down when you run out of people who already have the skills du jour.

If you can hire people who already have the specific skills you need, sure, let others pay for the cost of acquiring those skills. But, when you run out of those people, then the choice becomes paying to train them, or suffer the cost of leaving the work they'd do undone. If the value of the work they perform is more than the cost of training, it's logical to train them.

In this example, the market rate for someone already trained at a certain set of skills is $90k, and the cost of training is $20k. Nothing prevents a company from offering people who are smart and capable, but not trained at whatever the company happens to need today, $70k. But with a promise (in the employment agreement, not orally) to offer $90k one year from now.

Everyone benefits from this arrangement — the candidate, who now has a better job they otherwise would have (which is presumably why they're taking the offer in the first place). And the company, who's getting a capable employee without spending more on training.

So, the bottom line is that you can always structure your incentives in a way that makes the training worthwhile for all parties involved, without asking the employee to pay for it.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#122

Post by analog31 »

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…

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 the training has increased her market salary, then the simple solution is to raise her salary to meet the market.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#123

Post by thedufer »

vectorjohn wrote: post #108
notahacker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person currently earns $80k. Training costs $20k. Rival company will be willing to pay $90k salary after training to poach the developer, which means the current employer may end up forced to counter offer with $91k salary after paying for the training. 91k + $20k in training fees = $111k Competitor does not pay $111k because competitor does not pay for training. Which was the entire point of the exchanges above You…

Nobody is asking how to add numbers together. I just think you're missing the point. Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the training can just pay that and not risk their employees being poached. Additionally, it isn't free to poach employees, they will have training costs no matter what. In other words, after training you raise their salary.

> Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the training can just pay that and not risk their employees being poached.

Yes they can, if they want to go out of business.

If I spend $20k to train a new employee, I can afford to pay them their value to me - $20k (less than that if I want to make a profit, but this is the maximum that allows me to stay in business). Meanwhile, my competitor waits 4 weeks for me to do the training and offers their full value. Now I can either let them go, or match the offer - but either way I'm down $20k, while my competitor comes out even.

So you can imagine why I might not want to spend money on training.

Given your other points, this is only a problem is the cost of the portion of the training that is transferable is more than the extra cost of poaching (over that of hiring a fresh employee). As the job market becomes more liquid (decreasing that poaching cost), this becomes the case more and more.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#124

Post by kartickvad »

learc83 wrote: post #119
kartickvad wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qualit…

>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 t…

I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that.

In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#125

Post by anigbrowl »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #106
anigbrowl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, no…

Provided the transaction cost of shifting jobs (which can include feelings of loyalty) is lower than the cost of training, any employee has the incentive to jump ship. I.e., if transaction costs are $10k but training costs $20k, then a poacher can steal your trained employees by offering $15k more. I don't know why you think I'm disputing that transaction costs can cause markets to be inefficient - I agree completely…

Your basic contention that business can't train it's own work force.

Your original analysis neglected transaction costs entirely.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#126

Post by nitwit005 »

Companies are often eating the cost of training employees without admitting to it.

Pick some company at random, look around, and there will often be piles of people who have no official training or certifications to speak of, and no relevant degree, but who are perfectly competent at their jobs. Somehow, magic happened, and they were trained, despite no training money in the budget.

A lot of it is just done semi-officially. The boss points at some guy he trusts and tells him to fill them in, and lower productivity is accepted for some period.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#127

Post by Retra »

kartickvad wrote: post #117
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 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 qualit…

I did learn a lot of those things in college...

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#128

Post by learc83 »

kartickvad wrote: post #124
learc83 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

That's perfectly fine. What you're looking for is vocational training, not a liberal college education. Non professional college programs are explicitly not vocational training. If they were, they wouldn't require spending nearly half your time on general education requirements (assuming we're talking about the US here). I doubt art history, physics, or psychology has proven much direct use to you in your career.

>In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

Finite state machines and pushdown automata are an incredibly common pattern, and I can't see how you can work as a professional software developer without running into that pattern time and again. Have you never used regular expressions?

Automata (usually taught along with theory of computation) teaches you all kinds of useful real world knowledge, like why you can't parse HTML with regular expressions, and why you can't write a program to tell if another program will eventually halt.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#129

Post by bigger_cheese »

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…

Oh god yes I went through the same pain. Our university decided that every Engineering student had to take two CS courses during the first year. This applied regardless of whether you were studying Civil Engineering, Electrical, Mechanical etc. This was alongside all the other first year courses we were required to take such as Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statics, Dynamics and all that.

First Semester we took Intro to Programming and Algorithms (CS1100 or something like that). We learnt everything from Binary notation, logic gates through to floating points, I went from not knowing any programming language to having a fair idea about how topics like recursion worked our last project was to write some code to walk a tree using recursion. I also learnt how to use Unix and recieved my lifelong love of Emacs (which we used in our tutorials) from this course.

Second Semester we had to take Software Engineering (CS 1110 I think). It covered waterfall model, version control, specifications, unit tests and more estoteric stuff like loop invariants and formal correctness. Our major project was to write an essay about the Arriane V rocket explosion. I really enjoyed CS 1100 class but CS 1110 effectively succeeded in boring me to tears. It was somehow supposed to give us a taste of real world software design. All it really did was encourage myself and many others not to take CS electives in later years.

My major was Materials Engineering I took mostly physics electives in the last year of my degree, which is kind of ironic now because I work pretty heavily with programs - my day job involves writing computer simulations. I learned most of the skills I need on the job (including the C programming language, databases/SQL etc.) I probably would have benefited from more formal training but my experience of university CS was so miserable I actively avoided it.

Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

#130

Post by karmapolice »

kartickvad wrote: post #124
learc83 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

Then, do not go for a degree in Computer Science if that is all you want. I am sure there are cheaper and better ways to become a practician than going through college.

Becoming a software developer is just one of the possible career options after a CS degree.

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