[invalidOrTaken]

There's an element of a collective action problem going on: why train your employees when they will most likely be gone in 3 years or two years or six months? Even if you retain half of them, you're still spending time training the other half---training that will reap you no benefit, and may even end up helping your competitor.

People take better care of things they own, and higher employee mobility means that companies "own" their employees less than before. As such, investing in them just yields less return than it used to.

That doesn't mean I think we should go back to the bad old days of cradle-to-grave BigCo---rather, I think the author doesn't realize that's what drove the "good old days." Be careful what you wish for.

All that said, the author is correct in identifying the problem of a future shortage of senior developers.

But shortages are not a problem if you control the supply. Become a senior dev anyway, if on your own time. Learn to market yourself. If you think a shortage is coming, profit off of it by investing in yourself.

[cousin_it]

Wow, that's a good point I hadn't realized before: if we make it harder for people to switch jobs, then companies will be more eager to hire people without experience, and will invest more in their education. Yet another reminder that economics is unintuitive...

[spitfire]

What happens if you don't train them and they stay?

[hnal943]

Then the productive ones (whether through self-training or hard work or both) rise to the top while the others don't. It's true that they may be less professional in the solutions they create, but that's a hard thing for non-technical people to identify.