Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharken | Hacker News Reader

It's also something i wish companies would prioritize, you will be more valuable if these activities are supported by the company and not something you must do on your own time.

View on HN

Companies have very little interest in investing in their employees personal education, because once they have learned the new stuff, they might just leave to another company and take their freshly acquired knowledge with them. It's the same reason why companies want to hire only experienced people even when the skills they require could be acquired by an otherwise competent person in a few months with proper training. In economic terms, it's a market failure; no-one wants to be the one paying (either in terms of money or employee working hours) for stuff that someone else can benefit from.

They do. You can take a lower paying job while you earn improve your skills, and then get a new role or raise with the skills earned. If they wanted someone in the role without the skills already in place, they would have hired that person and paid them less.

And misses OPs point.

> You can code all you like, but reading text books on the subject and studying other people's code will quickly improve your skill.

Companies need to prioritize this is the point. It's not about low pay, high pay jobs. Or obtaining a role once you have the skills, it's that companies don't prioritize learning/development as part of the role, they focus on output - and they would get more value from their employees of they did.

That flies in the face of the current Lord of the Flies policy and extracting maximum effort from each employee though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com