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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

The usual response to "If you can't pay more, train them!" is that, once trained, they will leave to some competitor who can pay more.

I wonder, couldn't the training be offered as a perk, quantified in some way such that if the worker leaves before X months (or years) some % of that quantity must be given back?

For sure, some European companies offer a relocation package (e.g. they cover the costs of moving all your belongings, furniture, etc. to your destination) but if you leave before 1 or 2 years, you have to give back at least 50% of that cost.

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In a prior life as a technical trainer we used to offer the following wisdom: either train your employees and accept the risk that they may leave, or don't train your employees and accept the risk that they may stay.

It tech, fantastic employees leave for reasons synonymous with "unsatisfactory training":

- boredom

- lack of challenge

- no opportunity for growth

- repetitive work

- bad technology

And, yes, engineers not concerned about those situations are not innovative and probably not the people you want to hire.

The fact is that "good training" is expected as part of a tech career and therefore is important to tech workers. To the point that they will job hop every three years to make sure it happens.

I am almost 40, and over my career have had exactly one job that I stayed at for longer than 2 years. I stayed at that job for 5 because they provided yearly evaluations and good raises, paid educational reimbursement and actively promoted from within. All of the other jobs where you started was where you essentially stayed. If you got a raise generally it was essentially C.O.L.

If you pay people well, make them believe that there is a future for you at the company and that hard work is noticed and rewarded, people will stay longer. For the most part, companies don't and that's the reason a large number of technology workers have become mercenaries when in comes to employment. We go in, do a job and are constantly looking for the next step up. I would love to find a long term job, but at my age, it needs to be somewhere that I believe I will be valued and rewarded for sticking around.

On a side note, there have been many times a recruiter has called me, and offered an insulting wage for a position that requires 5+ years of experience. The companies offering these low wages are the ones saying we cant find anyone to hire and complaining about the youth of today's work ethic.

I'm somewhat north of 40. I stayed longest at the company I started, riding it up, and unfortunately, down. I was the proverbial last one out, and yes, I did turn off the lights.

>On a side note, there have been many times a recruiter has called me, and offered an insulting wage for a position that requires 5+ years of experience. The companies offering these low wages are the ones saying we cant find anyone to hire and complaining about the youth of today's work ethic.

This. I have recruiters call me up frequently after doing a basic scan on linkedin, looking for HPC people, or other specific things I've done. They send me emails telling me how wonderful things are on the other side, and how they are seeking people with lots-o-experience (™). Then they talk compensation rates that don't match the other aspects.

Or the ones wanting me to contract to hire. Sure, but if you can't afford the salaried rate, you really can't afford the contract rate, which prices in my risk in accepting this.

I don't see how they're synonymous, that's explained better by the idea that they don't want to do the actual work.

If you're working on your internal crud enterprise app, no amount of training's going to magically change what needs to be done, or the almost certain fact that it's better to stick with the existing tech it's built on.

I think may of us go freelance/job hop because ultimately we get bored of a code base and the basic challenges, the fundamental requirements of an app simply don't change much.

Most devs, in my experience, are team players. They'll get the grunt work done. But if you ask them to do grunt work for even five years, you're making a big ask.

You might need to pay more to price in the pay cut they'll need to switch gears or the year off they'll need to retrain themselves on related open source side projects.

That being said, there are lots of engineers who get comfortable and shy. You can fill up all your desk chairs in your office eventually. You just won't have a well trained workforce, which is bad for everyone involved.

This, again, reads like a bunch of people who don't want to do their actual job.

What exactly does 'retraining on related open source projects' even mean?

It either works, or it doesn't. Unless you're working in the schizo world of JavaScript, tech, in reality, doesn't change a massive amount in the space of 5 years.

I know. My tenure at my last few jobs was 2 years, 1 year, and now I just hit my one year anniversary at my current employer and am bored out of my skull (they stuck me on legacy maintenance). So, I'll be moving on soon.

I'm 38, I really do want to settle into someplace and stop hopping around, but I'm also not willing to allow myself to stagnate and become unemployable after you decide to "green" your workforce 5-10 years down the line.

Provide me with growth opportunities, challenging problems, creative freedom, reasonable pay increases, and I'll stick around. But alas, I haven't found a company willing/able to do that yet.

That is a very good point. I daresay that the engineer who is continually seeking excitement via jobhopping is not as common as the steadfast engineer, possibly with family obligations, who just doesn't want to be laid off at 52 with no knowledge of what has happened in the development world in the last 10 years.

Don't train and people will have to leave, because they would stagnate otherwise. Train and they will want to stay, because it is huge perk.

True wisdom right here!

    > [...] once trained, they will leave to some competitor who can pay more.

That comes up a lot, but it's not true. That employer ALSO has the ability to hire someone that was trained elsewhere and pay a premium-- it goes both ways. Moreover, it is not the case that "once trained" the employee can easily find work elsewhere. Employers who are willing to pay a premium for skill want _experience_ and not just a training certificate (especially an in-house one of possibly dubious value). There's a lot more to do for the employee after they're trained and the best way to do it is to stay and practice the newly learned skills.

    > [...] couldn't the training be offered 
    > [...] such as if the worker leaves before
    > X months (or years) some % of that quantity
    > must be given back?

There are places that do that. It's a bit draconian and you usually hear about it Asian countries. Much more practical to just eat the cost of an occasional early quitter-- not like it's going to sink the company.

It happened where I did some work - the wiley employees said 'fine, but then you also cannot retrench us in the same period.'

The policy was quietly dropped.

Well, this is what one of my close friends agreed to with a tech related company in London. He had some other issues which made him come back, and yes he had to pay that money back to the company. So this is actually happening right here in Europe... at least with a sample population of 1.

Oh, I am sure it happens, but these "... must pay us back for training if ..." contract clauses are a serious turn-off to candidates with choices.

When all the big players on the market do the same then you only have an illusion of choice. I've seen this clause everywhere I interviewed in Europe(both Eastern and Western). I don't like it but I got used to it since nobody will hire you without it.

It's not just Asia, I've seen this clasue everywhere I applied in Europe, no employer would hire you if you don't agree to reimburse the training expenses if you left before 2 years. The only way "out" was to get fired.

>The usual response to "If you can't pay more, train them!" is that, once trained, they will leave to some competitor who can pay more.

Then settle with a poorly trained workforce.

A company in this situation either needs new talent or needs to train its current workforce to match the level of their desired new talent. There's no free lunch here.

I'd argue it almost costs more money to NOT train your workforce, since you're settling for a less efficient process for the same amount of money that will only get worse when attrition (naturally) happens and you refuse to hire at a market rate.

>I wonder, couldn't the training be offered as a perk, quantified in some way such that if the worker leaves before X months (or years) some % of that quantity must be given back?

This happens fairly often, especially when it comes to things like the company paying for an outside degree or similar.

Claw backs are fairly common for relocation and major training like paying for degree programs. I don’t know how successful companies are in collecting.

> I wonder, couldn't the training be offered as a perk, quantified in some way such that if the worker leaves before X months (or years) some % of that quantity must be given back?

That's how a previous employer of mine did it.

They wanted to expand the scope of my work to include some stuff I didn't know, so they spent about $10,000 to send me to a couple training courses and made me sign a contract that said I had to pay some or all of the training/travel costs back if I left the company for any reason within 12 months. They also gave me about a 10% raise at the time as well.

I ended up leaving about 18 months later when someone else offered me nearly 50% more. I'm still friends with a few people that work at the previous company. It's been two years and they still haven't found an adequate replacement for me. Apparently, their offers have been at a salary even lower than what I started at over there, yet still include the larger scope.

My fiance works for a major ISP in the US. She started in sales while we were living in NY, but I got a really good offer for a gamedev position in CA and we both moved across country. She transferred her position to be a dispatcher for techs, which came with a significant pay cut (no commission, similar hourly rate).

They have a well defined training/progression system where you study IT materials they provide, take a few in-person courses, and pass some tests in order to get a new title, more responsibilities, and a raise.

She's one of the fastest people to progress from 1 to 2 (~4 months), her manager is scheduling the in-person courses for 3 ahead of time.

There's an office closer to where we live that does support for business class customers, they're looking at maybe bending the rules on how long you have to wait between internal transfers since she'd probably be more valuable there and it would be closer to home.

If you take the path of hiring employees that you train, you should work with them and give them raises as they're trained to get them closer to market rate. A lot of them will want to stay. At least for long enough to recoup the cost of training them. Also consider how many of those people don't have the right qualifications on paper but could pick up the necessary skills quickly. They'd be underpaid for a while, offsetting the cost of the people who need more training or are slower to learn.

Tangentially related, my job gave me relocation for both of us. If I leave my job before a full year, I'll owe all of it back. It makes sense for relocation since that's generally money the company gives you up front (that counts as a bonus, and is taxed as such). The only way I can see this applied to training would be if the employer covered the cost of taking courses at a local college or something like that. If you have your own in-house training staff, I'd count it more as a benefit of the job than a conditional bonus.

This is how the many trucking companies work. They'll train you for a CDL but require you drive for them for a period (a year?) or pay for the cost of training.

My employer paid for part of my graduate school tuition. They structured it as a deferred loan, and then forgave the principal after I stayed for two years.

I don't think this matters in big software nearly as much as in other fields. Every new hire needs to be trained up - even the most experienced are going to require at least a few months before they are useful to the company.

I know at least one community college that will pay for your advanced degree but require a two year contract. If you break it you have to pay them the cost of your education.

If the instructor and the institution gain nothing from the process, then you are mostly right.

For myself, things always have gone better when there’s a little bit of turnover. The training gets better. The obtuse decisions get removed. The sharp corners sanded down.

With no turnover, people tend to memorize the system and eventually nothing material ever changes. I find it soul sucking and so I give a slightly negative score to highly stable teams now, whereas I used to count it as a pro (wow people like working here!).

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