Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

Also on hiring, I find the following passage wrongheaded and insulting:

The average employee received thirty-one hours of training over the year, which works out to more than thirty minutes each week. Why not front-load the investment and spend the majority of time and money on attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires? If you are better able to select the right people up front, then you can spend less time on training bad hires and dealing with the consequences.

So, only bad hires need training, and by extension anyone who needs training is a bad hire? That's preposterous. Training is a good thing, and 31 hours is right about where it should be. It is the minimum required in most states to maintain a PE license[1] and many real engineering companies expect their engineers to take ~20 hours of job-related (as opposed to compliance-related) training every year. That increasing numbers of companies are pulling funding for this kind of training is terrible, not something to be applauded and encouraged.

[1] http://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/educa...

I think with a certain definition of training the argument works, but it's not clear if this is actually the definition they had in mind.

If you have the choice between hiring two people for an engineering position, one of whom can write code and one who can't, you'll probably want to pick the one who can rather than training up the one who can't. If your hiring efforts are lackluster, perhaps you can only attract the latter category of people, so you spend a lot on training people to simply do the jobs they're hired for. It's a bit like the Silicon Valley "senior engineers are impossible to find" argument right now. Nobody wants to take the burden of training a junior engineer into a senior engineer if they can hire someone who's already made their mistakes somewhere else. (Not a mindset I particularly agree with, since it implies a failure-intolerant atmosphere, but you get the gist.)

On the flip side, once someone is in a position that they are qualified to do, training for growth and development is a must-have -- 31 hours seems low to me. I definitely spent more than that in learning/development programs at Google, and I don't think that culturally they have an anti-training mindset, but I could be being too generous -- the quote on the site certainly reads exactly like your interpretation.

I don't believe that's what they're saying. They're saying that if you're better at selecting people, you won't have as many bad hires (really?). You then will be giving the training to people who will be better helping your company.

I'm almost certain the way you've read it is correct.

They specifically said "front load the investment". That says to me, "move money from training to hiring and reduce the total of both". Combine that with the Google SWE's comment that Google hires for "skills not experience" and that tells me Google sees non-compliance-related training as a net negative.

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