Hacker News Reader

Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

If an employee has training, they're more attractive to other employers. Not the case with buses.

If they don't want to lose people after a training, then hire people with that skill directly, for a higher salary, no?

if everyone does that, then were will the training come from?

a friend of mine had the same problem with hiring junior developers. by the time they had enough experience so that he could make a profit from their work, they left for higher paying jobs. he barely broke even most of the time so he ended up closing his business because it wasn't viable.

Obvious answer to this problem is to offer more money after training. Keeping someone on junior salary after this person reached next level is not smart.

but that pushes the break-even point out even further.

If that affects your break-even point you may have problems with your business model. Hiring juniors, training them and keeping on junior salary is a gross misunderstanding of how things should work.

that may well be. my friend was in asia doing classic outsourcing for european and american companies, which means he was competing against other companies in that space. i don't know the details. maybe he was offering more but not enough, maybe he didn't get good enough contracts, or maybe outsourcing with juniors simply doesn't work.

it's also an issue of perception. my company once tried to attract juniors with a high salary (at least 50% higher than local average) but that meant that we couldn't give them a raise early enough. after a year they got a better offer and left.

I usually offer 0,6-0,8 of the salary they will get at middle level (i.e. reaching full autonomy and being able to complete 90% of tasks). This offer is limited in time: they have 6-12 months to grow or they are out. Recognition of their personal growth and higher salary is a good motivation to stay if there’s no red flags in the company (poor processes, toxic environment, frequent overtime etc).

in which country are you working?

I hire remotely within +-2 hours from CET (Europe, Middle East, Africa), but I‘m not working for agencies.

well then stop being a shitty employer if you have a problem with people moving on after you train them up. i thought we were into the free market here.

It’s a free-rider problem. How can you compete with me when only you bear training costs while only I benefit from the worker’s skill?

A key question is whether the training is actually worth what’s being charged for it.

is it though? you’re training people so they can be competent at the job they’ve been hired for and then they what take their skills and go do the same thing at a different company? Why would they do that when they already have a job at your company? There must be a reason for them to be leaving in sufficient numbers to cause you problems…

maybe if i don't suffer the cost of training juniors then i can offer a higher salary?

Or maybe I have all the customers because I can afford to sell at lower margins.

sure, but if i don't pay a higher salary then i won't be able to poach the employees you just trained.

So you pay them a little more but less than the cost of training. Win-win (previous employer loses).

The same issue comes up any time a company makes an "investment" in their staff. The bigger the investment, the bigger the incentive to jump ship.

then maybe you should stop training people; or think for a second that if you are the one training everybody you can take a little less profit in exchange for starving your competitors of trained employees. Besides it works itself out anyway if they stay on longer even though it takes you longer to recoup your training costs. tldr this training argument is full of contradictions

it works itself out anyway if they stay on longer

but they don't stay longer. and unfortunately a pleasant work environment doesn't help because juniors don't know yet that other companies are different. it takes working for a few companies before someone learns to value work culture over a higher salary.

finding the right balance is not easy.

Enjoy living in a country with poorly-trained workers then, I guess.

that's the challenge, especially for foreign companies trying to hire locals. in china big companies pay good salaries but they also often don't have a good work culture. i got better results hiring juniors who have not yet experienced that work culture. at least in china students do learn programming so they are not poorly trained. a friend of mine tried that in another country and could not make it work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com