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by Apocryphon
3557 days ago
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Why shouldn't companies invest in training? What's with offloading job training to universities and to the applicants themselves? Yes, HN is a startup-focused site, -'d startups have limited resources. But large tech companies, or at least IBM, had historically trained engineers, at least in the 70s and earlier. |
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I would sooner invest in training somebody from the ground up, even straight out of college, if I knew that they had the humility to listen and apply their learnings to their job. It'll cost me team resources and it'll take time to get them to where I need them, but as long as I can find junior level work for them to cut their teeth on, I will take them over someone who doesn't learn any day.
The problem is that training is expensive, so I need to filter for people who will give me good ROI on training. I'm not afraid they'll leave. People who feel that they are learning a lot generally won't leave their job unless you're doing something shitty to them.
Which brings us to the common debate about how big the talent pool really is. On one extreme, you have the argument that competence is really rare and the applicant pool mostly sucks. On another extreme the applicant pool would be huge if companies would be willing to train employees. In my experience it's somewhere in the middle: there are a lot of okay people who can do certain jobs to a certain level, but most of them have an immediately visible growth ceiling because they are not as adaptable or reliable as they need to be, and as a manager it's very hard to give such a person more challenging projects to grow into.
Some of this is a managerial problem. Some managers are better at developing talent than others. Some managers are better fits for certain employees.
However, there are also employees that are just not reliable, or culturally toxic, or unable to deliver the level of results you expect for how much you're paying them. You pay the cost for such employees in taxes on team morale, project cohesion, and predictability of execution, all of them leading to projects weirdly taking far longer than they should and ending up far more complex than they needed to be.
So making a bad hire costs you much more than just the money you paid him/her. However, it's not clear that you have more to lose on a bad hire than you have to gain on a good one. That's how I ended up on the "fire fast" approach, but that had its own pros and cons.