[SoftTalker]

Engineers partly did this to themselves. The career advice during that time period was to change jobs every few years, demanding higher and higher salaries. So now, employers don't want to pay to train entry-level people, as they know they are likely going to leave, and at the salaries demanded they don't want to hire junior folks.

[klodolph]

“Engineers did this to themselves…”

Long, long ago, the compact was that employees worked hard for a company for a long time, and were rewarded with pensions and opportunities for career advancement. If you take away the pensions and take away the opportunities for career advancement, your employees will advance their careers by switching companies—and the reason that this works so well is because all of the other companies would rather pay more to hire a senior engineer rather than take a risk on a junior.

It’s a systemic problem and not something that you can blame on employees. Not without skipping over a long list of other contributing factors, at least.

[idiotsecant]

I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow organically. They decided that was no longer going to be the deal. So they got the current system. There was never some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event every few years just to keep up with inflation.

[SoftTalker]

As I said in another response, I think (at least partly) a contributing factor was the essentially limitless salary budget that VC funded startups and the FAANG companies had. You had software developers who could suddenly make more than doctors and lawyers and of course many of them sensibly acted in their own best interest but that left other employers saying "we're not going to invest in employees who are only going to turn around and leave for salaries we can't pay" and "if we have to pay those kind of salaries, we're not going to hire junior people we want experience."

[HappMacDonald]

Once a company hires and trains a junior, then they have a senior.. and they don't want to pay them a senior salary, but apparently other companies do.

The math remains simple: if you already have an employee on your payroll, how in the world are you not willing to pay them what they can get by switching at that point? That's literally just starving one's own investment.

The real issue is that the companies who were "training" the juniors were doing so only because they saw the juniors as a bargain given that they were initially willing to work for the lower wage. They just don't stay that way as they grow into the craft.

[Daishiman]

This is only because companies don't want to raise salaries as engineers' skill levels increase. If companies put junior employees in higher salary bands as their skill levels increase there wouldn't be a problem.

[kridsdale1]

Capitalism and fiduciary duty prevents employers from paying people their market value when they are content enough to stay.

An employee who does not do the effort to re-peg their labor time to market rates for their skill level is implicitly consenting to a prior agreement (when they were hired).

[Daishiman]

That is an extremely short-sighted view on what is essentially an iterated game where the domain knowledge employees have drastically increases their value to the company over time.

[klodolph]

Funny how fiduciary duty in these contexts is overwhelmingly short-sighted.

[Terr_]

Sometimes because the company investors are overwhelmingly short-sighted, which IMO ties back to the whole "financialization" of our economy into a quasi-casino.

I wonder how things might change if short-term capital gains tax (<5 years) went way up.

[SoftTalker]

Yes that's why I said "partly."

When I started work (this was in the pre-consumer-internet era), job hopping was already starting to be a thing but there was defintely still a large "old school" view that there should be some loyalty between employer and employee. One of my first jobs was a place where they hired for potential. They hired smart, personable people and taught them how to program. They paid them fairly well, and gave annual raises and bonuses. I was there for about 8 years, my salary more than doubled in that time. Maybe I could have made more elsewhere, I didn't even really look because it was a good environment, nice people, low stress, a good mix of people since not everyone (actually only a few) were Comp. Sci. majors.

I don't know how much that still happens, because why would a company today invest in that only to have the employee leave after two years for a higher salary. "They should just pay them more" well yeah, but they did pay them in the sense of teaching them a valuable skill. And their competitors for employees started to include VC funded startups playing with free money that didn't really care what it cost to get bodies into the shop. Hard to compete with that when you actually have to earn the money that goes into the salary budget.

Would the old school approach work today? Would employees stay?

[klodolph]

Cheap money seems to have dried up, so maybe more old-school approaches wouldn’t get sniped by VC-funded startups.

[TeamDman]

If incentives to stay outweighed leaving, people would stay.

[Salgat]

This is merely the result of the incentive structure of corporations, which make it far more lucrative to switch jobs rather than stay at one company.

[scarface_74]

Or the company could recognize the dangers of salary compression and inversion and pay developers at market rates