Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

Math, on the other hand, has been around for thousands of years, is relatively stable, and unlikely to become obsolete in the way a scrum certification, or even a machine learning algorithm, will.

Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.

All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS...

When companies hired people for 30 year careers, they could afford to invest a tremendous amount in training. When they hire people for 2-3 years, they have less time to amortize the costs. And it's up to the employee to convince the companies that they can learn quickly, and on their own if need be.

Any CS major with decent grades and a positive attitude can learn anything in most any job. (Certainly CS, consulting, finance, marketing, even some kinds of sales) I can't say the same for liberal arts majors. There are great ones out there, but also a lot of folks who goofed off for 4 years and didn't learn anything.

In college, I didn't learn version control, continuous integration (continuously submitting your work in small changelists or patches), unit testing, making sure you're building the right product before building it, delivering the simplest possible code and design that meets the requirements, code quality, working in teams, untangling dependencies and making as much progress as possible today without waiting for all your dependencies to be resolved, and so on.

I expect that all these skills will be very much relevant 20 years from now. So, don't confuse long-term value with "grounded in CS fundamentals". Programming isn't a hard science like physics.

First Semester we took Intro to Programming and Algorithms (CS1100 or something like that). We learnt everything from Binary notation, logic gates through to floating points, I went from not knowing any programming language to having a fair idea about how topics like recursion worked our last project was to write some code to walk a tree using recursion. I also learnt how to use Unix and recieved my lifelong love of Emacs (which we used in our tutorials) from this course.

Second Semester we had to take Software Engineering (CS 1110 I think). It covered waterfall model, version control, specifications, unit tests and more estoteric stuff like loop invariants and formal correctness. Our major project was to write an essay about the Arriane V rocket explosion. I really enjoyed CS 1100 class but CS 1110 effectively succeeded in boring me to tears. It was somehow supposed to give us a taste of real world software design. All it really did was encourage myself and many others not to take CS electives in later years.

My major was Materials Engineering I took mostly physics electives in the last year of my degree, which is kind of ironic now because I work pretty heavily with programs - my day job involves writing computer simulations. I learned most of the skills I need on the job (including the C programming language, databases/SQL etc.) I probably would have benefited from more formal training but my experience of university CS was so miserable I actively avoided it.

Doesn't this assume a lifestyle from several generations ago where you get "the training" then you're set for the rest of your working life? I don't think the real world has worked like that since at least the 70s.

If I took that $90K job I'd be OK while I'm there... thats what, on average just a couple years? Then I'd be dead in the water and have some explaining to do at the interview for the next $80K job that provides the entry level training I'd need. Why would any employer hire an untrained employee if there's a perfectly well trained employee from the $80K job? Meanwhile the guy who stayed at the $80K job likely got a promotion to $100K and here I am trying to get in at the ground floor yet again.

How this fits in with stereotypical OTJ training is a mystery. Most formal training is a way to shovel money to middlemen who provide it in an accelerated format for an extremely large fee. Most real world training is "here's a PC with a web browser and your bosses bosses boss declared the due date for the project is next month, now figure it out yourself".

Think of the last time you worked a project with a junk spec that has no relationship with reality. Those people who can't spec a fizzbuzz if their life depended on it are the ones specifying the required training. I wonder if that training spec will be worth the paper its printed on?

How would training followed by a bonding period be considered differently than other mechanisms inducing employees to stay? Could these other mechanisms also be legally questionable?

E.g. some San Francisco Bay Area technology companies offer large (~$20k) signing bonuses to new uni graduate hires that the employee must return if she leaves within her first year at the company. Similarly, companies offer five-year equity packages that deliver no equity until the twelfth month.

Then that business will have to pay better.

You want me to stick around? Fuck you, pay me[1] (or give me some other reason that is compelling--to me, not to you--to stay).

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

And nothing stops the first business from raising the employee's pay to $91k. Why should they expect to keep paying the same salary to someone they've made more valuable? They already amortized the costs of training over the value added by the employee in the first year, right?

Extremely common in the UK :(

How true this is depends on the field and subject matter, but surely any entity will tend to see their own specifics as basic things anyone should already know even though the field is actually much larger.

Training from a company says that they have a vested interest in the person, but they don't. Companies don't care about you, they only care about the bottom line and do not have any interest in spending effort to teach you something you could use somewhere else.

As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force

Well, they could offer more pay after the training is completed, or focus on being a nice place to work such that employees would choose to stay put with a company that treated them well. Your argument rests on the implicit assumption that employees will leave the moment they receive a competitive offer and are only interested in maximizing the take-home pay aspect of their economic advantage. Employees are motivated by a combination of monetary compensation, benefits, and good will towards a firm in the same way that a firm is valued by both its book assets and its good will in the marketplace. You assume, without foundation, that employee loyalty towards an employer that provides training will be nil, and ignores the possibility that employees might look forward to receiving future training (and promotions) which would have significant economic value, whereas a firm that poaches employees and offers no training of its own presumably won't be offering any in future either.

If an investment can't be protected it's pointless to make it. Having employees pay for (and be compensated for) their own training is the most reasonable workaround.

You could equally argue that it's pointless for employees to run up debt buying expensive an education which an employer might then say doesn't quite meet their requirements and therefore shouldn't be rewarded by additional compensation. Considering the non-dischargability of student loans in bankruptcy and the financial weakness of employees relative to employers when it comes to negotiating prices for training/education, I would say it's rather irrational for employees to take on all the financial risk involved.

"What if we invest in training and our employees leave?"

"What if we don't, and they stay?"

I believe in Germany consortiums of businesses in the same industry subsidize training. Seems reasonable.

In any case, your observation would seem to be refuted by the fact that businesses in general used to do precisely that, and many businesses still do do precisely that.

"Having employees pay for (and be compensated for) their own training is the most reasonable workaround."

For the business, maybe.

Until a new programmer is making minimum wage, there's always a point at which companies can employ them for less, and hope their value (plus expected value from the ones who stay on at a higher wage) will be more than the costs of training.

Also, training is often domain specific. Employees are generally worth more to their employer than a competitor (though there are exceptions).

Except for the massive information asymmetries in the market.

Even ignoring the information asymmetry, hiring a new employee is expensive. You can easily end up paying 40-50k to hire a good developer (as a combination of the recruitment process and ramp up time).

So really company B is paying salary + $40-50k recruitment. This means company A can easily match company B as well as provide training.

If you can hire people who already have the specific skills you need, sure, let others pay for the cost of acquiring those skills. But, when you run out of those people, then the choice becomes paying to train them, or suffer the cost of leaving the work they'd do undone. If the value of the work they perform is more than the cost of training, it's logical to train them.

In this example, the market rate for someone already trained at a certain set of skills is $90k, and the cost of training is $20k. Nothing prevents a company from offering people who are smart and capable, but not trained at whatever the company happens to need today, $70k. But with a promise (in the employment agreement, not orally) to offer $90k one year from now.

Everyone benefits from this arrangement — the candidate, who now has a better job they otherwise would have (which is presumably why they're taking the offer in the first place). And the company, who's getting a capable employee without spending more on training.

So, the bottom line is that you can always structure your incentives in a way that makes the training worthwhile for all parties involved, without asking the employee to pay for it.

If the training has increased her market salary, then the simple solution is to raise her salary to meet the market.

It's hard to defend the code schools though. There are a high amount of horror stories we hear about them on HN, from both the students' and hiring managers' perspectives.

Coding bootcamps exist to bridge that gap - in a sense, you can think of them as recruitment agencies and not as learning institutions. The goal isn't to replace a 4 year degree with 3 months of intense learning. That's simply not possible. The goal is to find smart, motivated people who can learn quickly, give them a skill which will let them hit the ground running, and present them to companies.

Companies benefit because they get a low cost hire who has the potential to grow tremendously if given the right environment. Employees benefit because they can typically enter the workforce at a higher salary than they could command from self-study alone. Win-win all around.

The key takeaway is that for-profit code schools are not schools. Code schools are primarily recruitment agencies designed to find high quality, non traditional talent. In that regard, I think the best ones are an absolute success.

CMU could probably have gotten better return if they hadn't made it a point to underpay them so much compared to their market value.

[1] http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2014/fall/from-0-70-...

That said, Uber pretty much showed that they are unable to be trusted (if anybody trusts them at all still).

That's the point -- there's a difference between education and training. It is only an issue because so much of the education looks very similar to the desired training.

It is not the purpose of an education to produce new employees, but to provide a broad basis for experiencing and making sense of the world. It just so happens that you also learn transferrable skills like a basic familiarity with a particular field, along with some tools and techniques that help you organize and solve problems. A proper education is not an extended code bootcamp, nor should it be.

Untrue. The logic is if there is a disparate impact against a legally-protected class, such that the test would be a convenient cover for illegal discrimination, and you allow discrimination using the test without demonstration of relevance, it becomes an easy, obvious, and effective tool for those looking for cover for discrimination on an illegal basis; to avoid that, the logic goes, you simply require those who wish to use the test as a basis for discrimination in that case to actually be able demonstrate that the test is meaningful to the job and that it is applied as a discrimination factor in a manner consistent with the way that it is meaningful to the job.

If they've actually done the kind of analysis that would let them know that the test really is useful, this is trivial; it does, however, prevent adopting a test with discriminatory effect against a protected class merely based on intuition or conventional wisdom.

The type of analysis involved may be costly, but then, if it really is something that those wishing to apply have high confidence would be valuable for their business, that type of analysis would be worthwhile to pay for. The reason it is difficult is because none of the people who like to talk about how useful these things would be when talk is cheap wants to put their money where the mouth is on the issue.

Tests have been used as a tool to weed out the undesirables, this is a fact. Look at literacy requirements for voting, for example. If this wasn't the case we wouldn't be facing this issue.

That being said - its a huge can of worms that needs more clarifying. It has a spotty judicial history, to put it lightly.

It is also questionable that requiring a college degree for many jobs is actually legal anyway and it is consistent with precedent such a practice is actually illegal.

Griggs v. Duke Power was a big Supreme Court case in this area. The Duke Power Company had explicitly segregated its workforce when it was legal to do so reserving the low paying jobs for blacks and the high paying jobs for whites. When it became illegal to do so they changed "you have to be white" to "you have to have a high school diploma or pass an IQ test."

Duke lost the case.

See here: http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3118

>Furthermore, the company’s lawyers argued, the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act clearly showed that it was not intended to interfere with bona fide aptitude testing, widely used in business at that time. During Senate debate on the bill, opponents argued that it could be used to attack employment testing, which had in fact occurred in a case in Illinois involving Motorola. A state official had ruled the company’s testing illegal under state law because it was “unfair to disadvantaged groups.”

>Bill sponsors, including Senator Hubert Humphrey, replied that nothing in the language of the statute could be construed that way, but to head off objections, they included a new section, 703(h). That makes it legal for an employer to use a “professionally designed ability test” if it is not “designed, intended or used to discriminate….”

>You might think the Court would have ruled in Duke Power’s favor. Wrong—it ruled unanimously against it. The justices ignored the legislative history and gave deference to the federal agency charged with enforcing the law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

>But there was also a delayed consequence. With actual intelligence testing now an invitation to costly litigation, “many employers made the college degree a de facto intelligence test and focused only on hiring applicants who possessed it.”

>O’Keefe and Vedder raise that question: “If challenged, could employers who have set the college degree as a requirement show that it has anything at all to do with ‘business necessity’ or are ‘job related’? That is very doubtful.”

>Suppose that someone who’d been turned away from a sales job for lack of college degree took the company to court, claiming that its educational requirement had a disparate impact, screening out people who could succeed in the job. That would appear to be a strong case.

>I have never heard of such a case, attacking an employer’s college degree requirement on disparate impact grounds. But nothing would more rapidly deflate the college bubble than if the Court were to hear such a case and rule consistently with Griggs.

Intention doesn't match with reality. Honestly, we need to revisit the issue and so something differently. However, political correctness has nothing to do with it.

(I am also not convinced such tests actually have much to do with intelligence anyways...)