[joshuaissac]

The article references the following IEEE Spectrum article:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/an-engineering-career-only-a-young...

> Given a choice, many employers would rather hire a couple of inexperienced computer programmer and spend a few months training them than hiring (or retaining) a more experienced but expensive programmer.

In the very next paragraph:

> In addition, many employers aren’t interested in providing training to engineers or programmers who may start becoming obsolete, for fear of seeing them leave or be poached for employment elsewhere. [...] employers looking for experienced workers have fallen into the habit of poaching employees from their competitors as opposed to spending the resources to train from within their organization to meet a specific job skill.

That directly contradicts the preceding paragraph, so I find it hard to trust the other claims that it makes.

[svnt]

Once you understand that inexperienced is an HR-approved euphemism for young, and experienced is an HR-approved euphemism for old, then the discussion they’re having falls into focus:

If large companies need to train someone (typically on a company-specific toolkit) they want to train someone with more room for optimism in their workplace expectations, fewer points of comparison for the quality or utility of the toolset, and who will have less of an ability to exit post-training.

[jasode]

>>, many employers would rather hire a couple of inexperienced computer programmer and spend a few months training them [...] In addition, many employers aren’t interested in providing training to engineers or programmers

>That directly contradicts the preceding paragraph,

The "many employers" can be 2 different subsets of employers and/or 2 different tech stack situations. Examples...

Subset (1) FAANG or "tech" companies will train on specific in-house technology stacks for younger new hires. The "inexperienced" was in referencing "young". E.g. Apple hires fresh young college graduates that only did Scheme and Python in school but will train them on Objective-C and Swift so they can work on macOS and iOS. However, Apple typically doesn't hire older experienced COBOL programmers to re-train them in Swift.

Subset (2) companies that don't train new hires (many non-tech companies where IT/dev is a cost center). They usually don't recruit from college campuses and prefer the job candidates to have existing skills that already match the job listing. E.g. a hospital IT's department has a job listing for a Java programmer to help maintain their billing system. The hospital is not interested in a candidate who's skillset is only Turbo Pascal and Macromedia ColdFusion and retraining them on Java.

[spencerchubb]

If you read closely, the former is saying they want to train INEXPERIENCED programmers. The latter is saying they don't want to train EXPERIENCED programmers who are becoming obsolete.

Maybe they were trying to make a different point, but that's how I interpret it.

[cle]

The former are much cheaper to train than the latter.

[crazygringo]

I think they're about different contexts.

The first paragraph is about training inexperienced computer programmers to do things their way. It's a point frequently made that more experienced programmers don't just need to be trained in the new company's ways, but often need to be untrained from their previous ways -- yet they still cost more. So this isn't about "industry-wide" training, it's more about how company-specific training.

While the second paragraph is more about training relating to transferrable skills. Companies don't want to teach people to become data scientists or ML experts -- they'd rather hire people with those skills already.

Perhaps it helps to think of the first bucket as "generic" programmers, the ones writing CRUD apps or websites or similar. While the second bucket is about "domain-specific" engineers.

[pylua]

There does seem to be quite the inconsistency here. I feel like the truth lies somewhere near the truth of the no wants to work mantra which may simply be a refusal to raise wages.

I wonder if the so called knowledge half life exists because everyone is working in very niche, specialized area these days. Those skills are simply less transferable to even similar jobs in the same field.

[smitty1e]

There is some "loyal autodidact" unicorn who would be an ideal hire.

People tend to fall somewhere on a robot/ninja spectrum.

The observation that employers have multiple motives that are in tension is simply human.

[aleph_minus_one]

> There is some "loyal autodidact" unicorn who would be an ideal hire.

Let us understand "loyal" as "not very willing to switch jobs" (and not in the sense of "submissive"/"obedient").

(Loyal) autodidacts are still a nuisance to many bosses, because autodidacts, nearly by definition, often have a very strong tendency to "think autonomously". Thus they have a tendency to question a lot of (technological, architectural, ...) decisions - often for good reasons (and if they are experienced autodidacts they often also the background knowledge to support their reasoning). In other words: autodidacts are commonly less ingrained in "the way things are usually done", which can easily lead to conflicts with bosses "who love to boss around".