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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

The skills he mentions in the article should be taught on the job, not in college. The other problem I noticed, especially when it comes to fresh undergrads, is some companies want people who already have some exact skillset yet don't want to do any training of their own.

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This is one of the things big engineering firms in other areas do better, I think (though they do some things worse). A company like Boeing doesn't expect you to come out of college having exactly the skills needed to design a 787 or run a wind-tunnel test. Partly this is out of necessity, because they use a lot of in-house software packages, equipment, and proprietary methods that your university couldn't teach you even if they wanted to. So they focus more on whether college graduates have a solid grounding in engineering principles, rather than whether they know how to work exactly the stuff Boeing is going to want them to do.

Similar story at petrochemical firms; my dad is a process engineer mainly for PTA- and polyethylene-manufacturing units, and they surely don't expect most incoming hires to know how the PTA synthesis process works, or even necessarily to know what PTA is (it's a chemical used to make polyester). They just expect a general chemical-engineering background; they don't want to have to teach the entirety of what engineering means, what process modeling is and how you might use it, what debottlenecking is, etc., but they don't expect incoming knowledge to be very specific.

Working for one of the big defense contractors at the moment, they definitely prefer to hire fresh grads. They will burn 6 months of you being completely unproductive on their dime to train you in the blink of an eye. Thats $50k to them before you even did anything. Plus they have a process for everything and have experienced guys holding your hand and checking your work.

They also figure once you start out there with good pay you will become out of touch with the market rate, and they raise you extremely slowly compared to the market, so that by the time you have been there 5 years you are a bargain to them. Most people just don't keep enough connections outside the company and are incapable of moving on.

So they look at the total cost over 5, 10 years+ and hiring a bunch of new grades and training (even paying for grad school) is cheaper for them.

Startups don't have that luxury. 6 months from now, we might be out of funding. And if we care about what happens 5 years from now, we're super rich. So lets hire better people first. And they don't have the luxury of a fixed process and senior engineers to check everyones work.

I would also be willing to bet that the skills being learned during this training period are far less portable than most coding skills. If your startup teaches you how to crank out a crud RoR app in six months you can probably walk out the door at that point and get a 25% salary bump from another startup that now does not need to spend six months training you. If you learn the details of your specific cog at Lockheed in six months you are not going to be able to go to General Dynamics and apply the same skills as soon as you walk in the door.

That is completely true. It only gets worse the longer you stay in one group. After 20 years of doing 1 little piece of a giant puzzle (of which there is only one and there are no competitors), can you really go anywhere else and be anything other than entry level? And how do you give up $120k for $60k as an entry level guy elsewhere even though after 20 years you should be making $180k.

It is a giant trap for those that aren't aware of it from day 1.

Yes, you hit the nail on the head. Nobody in the Valley or NYC wants to train employees, they only want fully-formed engineers right out of school. This is a huge problem because a convincing argument can be made that CS programs don't teach programming-- they teach computer science.

There were a couple of submissions here in the past about a certain UK firm-- name escapes me now-- that takes Oxbridge grads in English and other liberal arts with no programming experience and trains them. I understand they are very successful in developing productive employees. Anybody remember the name of that corp.?

I agree, and I'd like to clarify that when we are talking about training it's not about learning how to program. It's about being OK with hiring a developer who is expert in C++, LISP and Haskell, and being able to say, hey, it's OK he doesn't know PHP because it will only take him a weekend to pick it up. The training of talented developers is self training, but sometimes they do appreciate the company providing or covering the costs of the books they'll need.

I'm a big believer in self-study and self-training. Meetups, books, on-line study - I've personally done it all.

With that said, schooling at all levels, even when liber arts and fundamental, prepares people for the world they will work in. At the most basic level, writing and math prepare students for the workforce.

I'm simply arguing that we swap out a lot of industrial and unnecessary coursework (i.e. Latin) for technical thinking, examples, and coursework.

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