
Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force - petethomas
http://chronicle.com/article/Business-Can-Pay-to-Train-Its/231015/
======
learc83
The worst class I had in college was Software Engineering. It was the
university's attempt to prepare us for the work force, and it was taught by an
adjunct who had plenty of industry experience, but it was already a 10 years
out of date.

Industry processes are mostly fads that change with wind. CS fundamentals
however, are much more stable. 20 years from now knowledge of automta, graph
theory, and complexity analysis will still have immense value--a scrum master
certification won't.

~~~
kartickvad
I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is
a fad or has only short-term value.

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.

~~~
learc83
>I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals
is a fad or has only short-term value.

I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say
that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value.

There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics,
salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to
run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer
Science program.

They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit
testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful
but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job.

>In college, I didn't learn version control...

I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both
version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to
distributed version control like Git.

In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version
control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands
of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial.

I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your
assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you
listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be
ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork
during a group project.

~~~
kartickvad
I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether
something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me
over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for
that.

In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been
useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

~~~
learc83
That's perfectly fine. What you're looking for is vocational training, not a
liberal college education. Non professional college programs are explicitly
not vocational training. If they were, they wouldn't require spending nearly
half your time on general education requirements (assuming we're talking about
the US here). I doubt art history, physics, or psychology has proven much
direct use to you in your career.

>In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been
useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.

Finite state machines and pushdown automata are an incredibly common pattern,
and I can't see how you can work as a professional software developer without
running into that pattern time and again. Have you never used regular
expressions?

Automata (usually taught along with theory of computation) teaches you all
kinds of useful real world knowledge, like why you can't parse HTML with
regular expressions, and why you can't write a program to tell if another
program will eventually halt.

~~~
kartickvad
My idea of education is one that teaches you skills that are broadly used
throughout your career. I don't a priori reject things that meet this criteria
just because it's not based in theory (because theory is not an end to
itself), or by applying arbitrary labels like "vocational" (whatever that
means), "liberal" or "professional".

As for art history and psychology, that's a different debate to be had about
education — whether these should be part of education and how much time they
should take.

As for your question, I've used regexes, but you don't need to understand the
details of the regex engine in order to use them. Neither do I, in my day-to-
day work, write programs that try to tell if other programs halt.

~~~
learc83
>but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to
use them.

Yes, at some point you do. Without understanding how regular expressions
actually work, you can't know when it is appropriate to use them. Many things
aren't possible with regular expressions and many grammars aren't parsable
with regular expressions. You can either waste time trying to write an
impossible regex (or write one that works on your tests, but blows up in the
wild) or you can study automata theory and understand what actually goes on
underneath.

As for the halting problem, I'll leave you this stack overflow explanation for
why it is beneficial to understand.

[http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/32853](http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/32853)

Many problems in CS have already been solved, some are impossible to solve.
You can either waste time on trial and error trying to reinvent the wheel or
you can study the theoretical underpinnings.

Do you want to spend a week trying to model a problem as a finite state
machine, only to determine that finite state machine isn't powerful enough to
solve your problem?

Do you want to spend a month banging your head against a wall trying to solve
a problem that you could have solved in 5 minutes had you realized it was just
a well known graph theory problem all along? A problem that was solved decades
ago. The only way to know these things is to study the theory behind what you
do.

Why do you think Civil Engineers are required to take physics? The difference
between an Engineer and an artisan is a rigorous understanding of the formal
system underpinning his work. Artisans build through trial and error and
experiences, and they leave many failed projects in their wake while they gain
this experience. Engineers use theory and modeling to limit the number of
failed projects to the net benefit of everyone involved.

------
yummyfajitas
For the most part, bonding agreements ("you can't leave for X years without
repaying us for your training") are considered exploitative and usually not
legally enforceable.

As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force - if a business
invests $20k in training and $80k in salary, there is nothing stopping another
employer from offering $90k in salary after training is complete.

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.

~~~
mrbabbage
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs)

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.

~~~
__z
Yeah, I heard about companies who pay for college - as long as you stay one
year after your last class. If not you have to pay them back. Actually, just
pay back just the tuition you spent in the last year.

~~~
mariodiana
Seeing as Army ROTC will want 4 years, it sounds like a great deal.

~~~
__z
If you take classes for 4 years then you'll have to stay 5 to get your
education fully paid off. If you took 4 years of classes and worked for 4
years then you'd owe them 1 year tuition (the previous year)

That being said, this deal was to further your education for your job. So you
couldn't get your masters in finance unless you worked in finance. A software
developer couldn't get their finance degree paid for.

This was for a company my friend worked for.

------
zrail
The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I
started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential
employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer
outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to
hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a
productive level.

~~~
linkregister
My opinion is divided about the "pay-to-play" model of workers paying for
their own training. On one hand, they assume all the risk and financial
hardship of training. On the other hand, compared to other developed economies
(British, Australian), they have more opportunities to change careers because
the risk of training has already been assumed by the worker. I've found that
American hiring is far more flexible than the Commonwealth tradition of
jockeying for an apprenticeship. And older workers have far less opportunity
for apprenticeships.

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.

~~~
mseebach
> There are a high amount of horror stories we hear about them on HN, from
> both the students' and hiring managers' perspectives.

Can you link to them? I'm trying to do due diligence on some of them, but
haven't been able to find much at all of substance. I'm specifically
interested in Maker's Academy in London.

~~~
linkregister
Just going from what I remembered reading, here are the ones that stood out
the most. Comments vary from supporters to detractors.

Ask HN threads I found interesting:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844848)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7147664](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7147664)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9616691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9616691)

The one I really wanted to find, which accompanied an article about some
students who felt scammed by their bootcamp, is eluding me right now. It was
an interesting article about how the students were required to post misleading
stories on social media that made the school look better than it was.

Edit: I found out why it was hard to find; it was taken down. Here's the link
to the comments.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492381)

------
walterbell
The Uber robotics talent raid of CMU took piratization to a logical extreme,
[http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...](http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber-
self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached)

 _" They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically
whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all
the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property,"
recalls a person who was there during the departures" ... Uber snatched up
about 50 people from Carnegie Mellon, including many from its highest ranks.

... the deal includes a "transition period" that keeps some of the departed
staffers around ... "The work of these employees is very incestuous and
loose," says the same NREC insider. "They are given free rein of the
facilities as part-time CMU employees, but there are absolutely no checks on
the work that they are doing or what [intellectual property] they are taking.
Is it for CMU? Is it for Uber? None of us here know."_

Edit: could CMU have gotten better IP licensing terms and ROI for the
University, if they had spun out the entire team (with private financing) and
had an open auction of RoboticsResearchCo to the many companies investing in
this field?

~~~
cgearhart
I think this is a better example of dysfunction in academia than
retaining/training a workforce. In particular, previous articles suggest that
most folks saw their salaries _doubled_ , with six-figure incentive checks to
lure them away. From what I hear, it's not so much that the new salary is
unusually high for industry researchers and engineers, but that the old
salaries were unusually low (except in academia).

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.

~~~
walterbell
Historically, university researchers doing fundamental research with mass-
market industrial applications have been spun out into a company, so that both
the university and the researchers have an upside opportunity for founding
equity stakes.

A signing bonus or normalized salary is in an entirely different (smaller)
class of compensation, especially since there was already an international
track record of investment into the commercialization of self-driving
vehicles.

------
nateabele
> _The trick is to relabel it as education, then complain that your
> prospective employees aren’t getting the right kind._

Well, I guess if already-educated workers are the norm in your industry,
companies are going to change their hiring practices accordingly. It's okay
not to like it, but arguing against it on the basis that 'it didn't used to be
like this' just makes you look entitled and whiny.

> _Bemoaning the unpreparedness of undergraduates isn’t new. Today, however,
> those complaints are getting a more sympathetic hearing from the policy
> makers who govern public higher education._

Yeah, well, when policy makers are responsible for all the cheap money flowing
into the system (without which the system would probably collapse at this
point), I guess that'll happen.

~~~
cgearhart
> _...if already-educated workers are the norm..._

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.

~~~
nateabele
> _That 's the point -- there's a difference between education and training._

Excellent point. Two problems:

(1) Over the past ~2.5 generations, the narrative about education has been
informed by the conventional wisdom of {grades -> university -> job ->
pension}. Hence, education is now only nominally about producing 'citizens of
the republic' (so to speak), and _de facto_ about producing well-trained
workers. Disambiguating these goals is important, but hampered by...

(2) The perverse incentives created by cheap government money encourage
malinvestment (i.e. an English degree [I say this with love — my wife is an
English major]), and the consequent propensity of industry to not only see it
as a jobs program, but also as a government policy problem.

------
paulpauper
One possible solution is cognitive screening - the use of tests such as the
Wonderlic, SAT/ACT, or Wechsler to find prospective employees who can learn
quickly and have good critical thinking skills (and thus would benefit the
most from on-site training for technical tasks. training obviously costs
money), but unfortunately something called 'disparate impact' makes this
difficult to implement, so employers instead have to let colleges do the
screening, turning an advanced degree into a very overpriced, time consuming
'IQ test'. Some people are more concerned about hurt feelings than providing
equal opportunities. The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't
politically correct, we must do away with the test, so the result is more
student loan debt, a worse labor market, and more credentialism.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The 'logic' is if the tests expose a reality that isn't politically correct,
> we must do away with the test

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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Strangely, we are unwilling to apply that same logic to traditional hiring
processes. I.e., few companies have ever done a study (sufficient to win in
court) to prove that their subjective human opinion-based tests do not have a
disparate impact. Yet processes like this are somehow allowed.

I.e., if my subjective human hiring technique is biased, you need to prove I
discriminated on purpose. If my objective, IQ-based technique is biased, I
need to prove I didn't. Why this disparity?

~~~
learc83
>Why this disparity?

For the simple fact that we already have evidence that some protected classes
perform worse on IQ tests. Therefore, simply by using an IQ test you are
discriminating against a protected class. The burden is on you to prove that
the discrimination is necessary. No one needs to prove that discrimination is
happening because you are using a test that has already been show to be
discriminatory.

Interview based hiring techniques are much more varied than IQ tests, and they
have not been shown to be near universally discriminatory. Therefore the
burden is first to prove that discrimination is happening in the particular
situation.

~~~
__z
>they have not been shown to be near universally discriminatory.

They actually have...

I am not going to get fully into it at the moment (but there's a ton of
research on the topic) but we know that resumes that say Lakisha are
significantly less likely to get a callback than a resume that says Karen.

Another example is blinding in orchestras. When the practice became the
applicant played behind a curtain (so they judge didn't know what the
applicant looked like) the number of women in orchestras increased.

~~~
learc83
I'm with you on this, but there are differences.

Subjective interview based hiring across all companies has been show to be
discriminatory towards protected classes. But that's different than showing a
specific company's hiring process is discriminative.

If company A uses IQ test X, and IQ test X has been shown to be
discriminatory, then you can say definitively that the hiring process of
company A is discriminatory.

If company B uses hiring process Y, and you can show that hiring process Y is
discriminatory in 50% of the companies that use it, you can't make a
definitive conclusion about company B in the same way you can company A.

~~~
__z
Yea, I agree, thanks for clarifying.

There is a huge difference is explicit bias (give applicants an IQ test even
though we'll weed out the blacks or even _to_ weed out the blacks) and
_subconscious_ bias - which is an incredibly complex problem.

Most companies _are_ trying to eliminate (unintended) bias in the hiring
process.

------
theodorewiles
As a lib arts graduate, I might be biased, but I believe that it's still the
best education for the type of decision-making that's most useful in real-
world business decisions: ambiguous and incomplete information from a variety
of sources with competing interests.

That being said, if you're not in a leadership position that kind of decision
making isn't what you're doing: you're most likely just optimizing on your own
little anthill, so a "profit-centered" education like the article is against
might make sense for the worker bees.

Another thing that I think is usually missing from the "train your workers"
debate is how much variance there is in productivity, and how actual
productivity is usually unknowable unless you have 2-3 months of project data
for a given worker (these are assumptions). So hire unskilled contract
workers, fire 80% of them, and then train the remaining 20%. They won't have
the credentials to work elsewhere, and you've been able to identify the true
all-stars using data on their actual work product.

------
laurentoget
It seems expecting schools to do all the training your employees will ever
need would not be a good bet from a business point of view either. If your
employees have the exact same skills as the competition's employees how do you
expect the business differentiate itself?

------
wwweston
It's true that business _should_ pay to train its own work force, but I'm not
convinced it _can_.

Businesses that would like to but that operate in a sector where a competitor
can successfully externalize that cost will be at a competitive disadvantage.

And businesses that subscribe to managerialism -- the idea that it's primarily
management/leadership skills that differentiate a business, rather than domain
knowledge -- may not know how to train employees at all, as it takes someone
with domain knowledge to know how that can be done...

------
nitwit005
Companies are often eating the cost of training employees without admitting to
it.

Pick some company at random, look around, and there will often be piles of
people who have no official training or certifications to speak of, and no
relevant degree, but who are perfectly competent at their jobs. Somehow, magic
happened, and they were trained, despite no training money in the budget.

A lot of it is just done semi-officially. The boss points at some guy he
trusts and tells him to fill them in, and lower productivity is accepted for
some period.

------
joshu
I thought tech internships were more about recruiting than about training.

------
vinnyc
Students aren't dealing with the proper issues that arise in a regular
workplace. Many professors lack knowledge on what has been going on between
them leaving the workplace and today. Because of this students are learning
principles that aren't fully applicable to many business jobs today instead of
learning how to deal with corporate incompetence. If companies train employees
on how to deal with personnel, they will learn more of the technicalities on
the job underneath a hopefully competent supervisor.

~~~
emodendroket
Why should they? That's the whole argument of this piece -- that they
shouldn't.

