My point is you need smart enough people for your job and nothing more. You do an IQ test, a personality one and that's all. The rest can be learned.
In fairness, I do think that someone who is very comfortable with a language or framework will be able to do things much faster than someone who isn't. Considering how quickly people change jobs nowadays, I can also see how companies don't want to train people only so they will leave shortly after or even before they're useful.
Obviously this is just based on my own experience in the US.
The only conclusion I reached is that one should navigate in life in such a way that your well being should not depend on people that are less smart, less experienced, less curious than yourself.
Someone who knows the ins and outs of their language won't have to look up or learn new stuff as they go for example. This isn't even necessarily restricted to languages or frameworks, if you've done something similar to an assigned task, you would likely have already encountered certain pitfalls and know the best way to complete the task.
We've reverted to the mean in recent years unfortunately. No training, and lots of nickel and dime bullshit. Today, if I found the right role, it would just be a matter of finding the right number.
Personally I don't think companies should be paying for specific training because as a developer you can learn anything you need online.
On the other hand, my experience is that many/most companies are willing to hire a senior developer even if they don't have experience with the company's specific stack. They rightly assume that any developer can pick up a new stack quickly enough.
Anyway the interview process is so broken that they could actually improve it by just flipping a coin.
I'm not saying this is perfect, just that's why experience is sought after. We have an annoying problem of way too many job ads being for seniors and very few for entry level. People have to get their foot in the door to ever become senior.
FWIW I agree most companies should train.
But I also understand how a lot of business owners feel about it. It takes time to learn these things vs someone who has basically already done this project before in this stack before. A business in a hurry (most of them) would rather have someone who already knows how to do it.
Look at Stack Overflow Careers. Look how many more ads there are asking for senior devs.
As an aside, it's paradoxical that the industry simultaneously desires 10x seniors, while prizes youth (who they don't have to pay at senior salaries). So the true profile of a unicorn coder is basically a 10x dev with 10+ years of experience who is also a new grad that requires no training. Keeps down the cost, all around.
Even jobs that don't really need developers of that caliber will hire like they do. I need someone to yet another billing app? Let me just hire one rockstar genius and squeeze the life out of them instead of two regular developers because it's cheaper.
If that is the case, what you need is a contractor, not an employee, and you should hire accordingly.
Google wouldn't hire someone to manage their datacenter with no previous experience managing anything like it.
That's exactly what they do. The interviews test for basic skills — an understanding of TCP/IP, unix, programming ability and intelligence — and all the rest is on-the-job training.
Company culture matters. Even the most intelligent people that are willing to grow will fizzle if they are in an environment that isn't productive.
It takes years to figure out patterns (when to use and not use them), good coding practices, avoiding newbie mistakes like sql injection and xss and how to actually make a deadline (its not easy to finish a project when you also have to learn the language and other skills in addition to the task at hand).
As a business owner, I don't want someone learning the above on the job and on my dime.
There is a company in MI that tried this called Compuware back in the 90s. It was a complete and utter disaster.