Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfpotter | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.

View on HN

Yeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there.

Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship

>> 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers

In the 70's we didnt have NAFTA, so you couldnt just send the jobs to Mexico

In the 70's we didnt have the H1B program, where you could have a permanent "shortage of workers" and re-direct jobs to immigrants

In the 70's we didnt have Zoom, so you couldnt just send the jobs offshore

Companies found a better and cheaper way to short circuit this, just hire H1B’s and slog them till they get their green cards(which is forever).

That’s one of the biggest shortcomings of H1B program. (Even though I do support H1B’s and I do think they are good for country long term)

The 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.

Why not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com