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Comment by greggman2 | Hacker News Reader

> Companies used to train internally

Please no. Japan is that way. Japan pays programmers $20k to start, no better than working fast food. Their salaries go up to $60k at the top end at most big Japanese companies and they have the attitude that anyone over 35 is too old to code. I feel the fact they hire grads with zero experience is one of the reasons. Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet? Conversely interns at Google make $70k-$100k yearly equivalent. The two might not be connected but I feel they are and so AFAIK the "pay for experience" is better than "pay with free training" for employees.

It also seems better for the employer. Japan still has a culture of lifetime employment so the employer invests the equivalent of a college education into the employee and gets a lifetime commitment. That would never work in the west. People would take the free education and then leave for greener pastures the first chance they got.

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Funny scene I'm translating from French (maybe it comes from the other side of the Atlantic, I don't remember when I read/heard it):

CEO : « We should train our workers. »

CFO : « It will be expensive and what do we do if we train them and they leave ? »

CEO : « What do we do if we don't and they stay ? »

Finally I think the parable is initially french, as it's harder to fire people just for lack of training here.

I question whether training internally for any role will ever make a big comeback given current labor markets, but even if it did in the US, the labor market here is nothing like in Japan for a whole bunch of reasons. I think programmer salaries are bad there because have you seen the software that comes out of corporate Japan? There may be smart programmers but its clear companies see software as an afterthought at best, not a competitive area like in the US. In some ways I kind of respect the basic approach of not leveraging data and AI to the max to be disruptive like the current US tech market, but I wouldn’t try to go be a programmer there.

I'm wondering if they don't have a different idea of training internally than you do...

When I was younger, my mother worked as a freight forwarder. After she'd been there for awhile, the company paid to send her for training and certification to work with hazardous materials. If I recall correctly, she signed a contract agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left the company before a certain period of time had passed.

Essentially, rather than hiring externally a freight forwarder who is already certified to handle dangerous goods, they identified their strongest existing employee without that certification and paid for them to learn what they needed for a more advanced position, with conditions to assure they recoup their investment. The way I read it, I thought the person you replied to was suggesting identifying existing employees with potential and paying to expand their skillsets for a different role, e.g. with bootcamps or MOOCs, not hiring fresh graduates for low pay.

I’ve wanted to work at flex port for awhile and always wondered if they offered this...freight has so many things to learn in terms of law, economics, and supply chain....not to mention dealing with things at sea..

> she signed a contract agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left the company before a certain period of time had passed.

I had a similar clause in my first contract. Since the team I was hired into was a Perl shop and I hadn't done any Perl before starting there, they sent me on a week-long Perl training early on. The contract said that if I quit within the first year, I would have to reimburse them for the cost of the training (going down progressively by 1/12th of the price per month that I'm staying with the company).

How can you say it would never work in the west when it did for many years? It certainly wasn't the workers who stopped it working.

I personally value stability and would prefer to stay in one place if it were more feasible. Training can be at all career stages, not just the beginning.

Japan, yeah, I don't want that. It's a unique beast with a lot of dysfunctions, both anecdotally from friends and all the stories online. I'd say the things you listed are outcomes from lingering cultural problems rather than causes.

There was a piece on PBS Newshour recently about older workers (largely skilled blue collar) staying on longer with verious incentive because employers couldn't find skilled replacements.

What stuck me as ridiculous was some owner who said something about having invested 30 years in these guys. He hadn't invested shit as far as I could see. He has a handfull of employees that had invested in their own skills. If he had invested in his employees he have a new generation ready or almost ready to step up as one retired.

> Why pay someone $$$ if they can't actually do the job yet?

Senior devs have to come from somewhere.

/puts MBA hat on

yeah, other companies that invested in them but tried not to give them market raises.

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