Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

http://chronicle.com/article/Business-Can-Pay-to-Train-Its/231015/

by petethomas • 11 years ago

165 145 11 years ago

zrail2• 11 years ago

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.

tertius• 11 years ago

This should be less risky for large corps like MS, IBM etc. I believe this may already be done?

zrail2• 11 years ago

Depends on the company. I think it's done much less now than it was in the past. I know when I was hired into my first job in 2007 I barely knew their default programming language and definitely didn't know their in-house framework, so I spent the first two months in organized training and the next six or so in "on-the-job" training on a low priority production system.

linkregister2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

pjungwir• 11 years ago

Today's code schools may be new, but not code schools in general. Riding on the T in Boston 2000-2005 I saw plenty of advertisements for courses in Java, XML, etc. I always assumed those were low-quality classes for low-quality programmers. Nowadays the code schools teach Node.js and TDD, and their branding is more hip. I hope the quality has increased (of both instruction and students), but I still see it as a continuation of the training classes that have always been out there. Not the same people (I think), but the same market need.

skylark• 11 years ago

It's a tough situation. It's hard to identify people who have no background in computer science, but still have tons of potential if given the opportunity.

Coding bootcamps exist to bridge that gap - in a sense, you can think of them as recruitment agencies and not as learning institutions. The goal isn't to replace a 4 year degree with 3 months of intense learning. That's simply not possible. The goal is to find smart, motivated people who can learn quickly, give them a skill which will let them hit the ground running, and present them to companies.

Companies benefit because they get a low cost hire who has the potential to grow tremendously if given the right environment. Employees benefit because they can typically enter the workforce at a higher salary than they could command from self-study alone. Win-win all around.

The key takeaway is that for-profit code schools are not schools. Code schools are primarily recruitment agencies designed to find high quality, non traditional talent. In that regard, I think the best ones are an absolute success.

walterbell2• 11 years ago

The Uber robotics talent raid of CMU took piratization to a logical extreme, http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...

"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?

cgearhart3• 11 years ago

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.

walterbell2• 11 years ago

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.

akgerber• 11 years ago

I would guess that that the NREC engineers were paid locally-competitive engineering salaries in Pittsburgh, which would enable them to live a very decent lifestyle. Doubling their salaries probably was a change from $80k a year to $160k or so— from Pittsburgh to Silicon Valley pay.

For reference, $160k can buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood or suburb in Pittsburgh.

Animats• 11 years ago

CMU was doing development for Cadillac[1], underpaying their employees while charging more to the customer, General Motors. That backfired on CMU.

[1] http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2014/fall/from-0-70-...

wavefunction• 11 years ago

Perhaps this can serve as a cautionary tale to the public about the perils of private-public partnering. Especially when the "partnership" is so slanted in favor of the "private" side of things that such a situation can occur.

meatysnapper• 11 years ago

Football coaches are often the highest paid employees at big schools. If I was a world class researcher, I'd be pissed as hell about that.

That said, Uber pretty much showed that they are unable to be trusted (if anybody trusts them at all still).

jdmichal2• 11 years ago

It's quantifiable to the administration how much money a winning sports team can bring to the school. What is the average return on a world-class researcher?

vinnyc• 11 years ago

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.

emodendroket4• 11 years ago

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

yummyfajitas10• 11 years ago

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.

emodendroket4• 11 years ago

If you don't make the worker want to take off then it doesn't have to come to that.

mrxd• 11 years ago

And yet it was the norm only a few decades ago. What's new is the emphasis on speed and flexibility. If you're starting a new initiative, it's better to hire skilled people now than to start a training program and get them 2 years from now. And if the new initiative fails, laying off people you've trained is throwing away the money you spent on their training.

yummyfajitas10• 11 years ago

It's not just starting and stopping projects faster, it's also social norms about changing jobs. We have a much more liquid job market and this provides a lot more opportunities for folks to arb opportunities.

This is overall a good thing, but there are side effects.

VLM• 11 years ago

"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"

Doesn't this assume a lifestyle from several generations ago where you get "the training" then you're set for the rest of your working life? I don't think the real world has worked like that since at least the 70s.

If I took that $90K job I'd be OK while I'm there... thats what, on average just a couple years? Then I'd be dead in the water and have some explaining to do at the interview for the next $80K job that provides the entry level training I'd need. Why would any employer hire an untrained employee if there's a perfectly well trained employee from the $80K job? Meanwhile the guy who stayed at the $80K job likely got a promotion to $100K and here I am trying to get in at the ground floor yet again.

How this fits in with stereotypical OTJ training is a mystery. Most formal training is a way to shovel money to middlemen who provide it in an accelerated format for an extremely large fee. Most real world training is "here's a PC with a web browser and your bosses bosses boss declared the due date for the project is next month, now figure it out yourself".

Think of the last time you worked a project with a junk spec that has no relationship with reality. Those people who can't spec a fizzbuzz if their life depended on it are the ones specifying the required training. I wonder if that training spec will be worth the paper its printed on?

notahacker5• 11 years ago

If I've got a specific skill or qualification that's increased my market value to $90k, I'm not really sure why I'd be reduced to applying for entry level jobs and requiring training again in two years time?

And there's a huge spectrum of on the job training, from pointless classroom exercises to tick company compliance boxes to highly expensive professional qualifications that might pay for themselves in two years if the firm can hang onto the employee and bill for their time, but also make it much easier for the employee to get a better offer. It's the latter type that costs firms the most money as well as benefits candidates the most.

mrbabbage• 11 years ago

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.

__z7• 11 years ago

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.

dnautics• 11 years ago

Hard to say, but if banned it seems like that sort of a signing bonus could simply be retraced by issuing a signing bonus that only vests after one year. And of course, the hire could probably finaigle a loan against it to have it basically be the same as the original intent, except with a middle man taking out interest.

__z7• 11 years ago

Vesting options on your 401(k) are common. For example, my company does it like this:

First year - no company 401(k) contributions.

Second year - full 401(k) contributions but 25% vestment. That means you get the money in your account (and it compounds) but if you leave before you hit your third year you only get to ultimately keep 25% of the money they contributed.

Third year - 50% vested.

Fourth year - 75% vested.

fifth year - 100% vested. Money is all yours.

(I think vested is the right word, correct me if I'm wrong)

Also, I worked for a company (in a non-technical position) where they initially hired at a low rate. You learned your job as you went and each job milestone had a test (written and practical). Passing the test netted a large increase in salary. You could learn other jobs other than the one you were hired for and increase your salary even more. It was a great system.

jackmaney2• 11 years ago

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.

Then that business will have to pay better.

You want me to stick around? Fuck you, pay me[1] (or give me some other reason that is compelling--to me, not to you--to stay).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

thirdtruck3• 11 years ago

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.

And nothing stops the first business from raising the employee's pay to $91k. Why should they expect to keep paying the same salary to someone they've made more valuable? They already amortized the costs of training over the value added by the employee in the first year, right?

yummyfajitas10• 11 years ago

Then the total cost to the first business for this employee is $111k. The cost to the second business (who provides no training) is $92k to beat the first company's offer. It's a losing proposition to provide training - you get the same labor at a higher cost.

In contrast, if you simply pay $100k to trained employees, and employees can pay for training out of pocket, you preserve the cost structure (big caveat: I'm ignoring taxes) but without the risk of losing your investment.

s73v3r• 11 years ago

That's not true at all. Business doesn't want to have to actually compete for it's employees, that's it.

switch007• 11 years ago

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.

Extremely common in the UK :(

emodendroket4• 11 years ago

They're common in the US too; they just aren't enforceable. However, I assume a lot of people aren't aware of that or else just feel grateful enough to an employer that offered them training of some significant value that they stick around for a few years.

mindslight2• 11 years ago

Your argument rests on an assumption that an employee produces nothing of value while learning. If they are performing useful work while learning, then the salary paid to them isn't being wasted.

How true this is depends on the field and subject matter, but surely any entity will tend to see their own specifics as basic things anyone should already know even though the field is actually much larger.

verbin217• 11 years ago

The investment could produce a net gain, even in the immediate, and there would still be a problem. Leaking value into the competitive environment in which you're trying to survive will kill you. As alluded to by the GP, training as compensation produces employees that are worth more to competitors. Once trained, an employee experiences a loss in pay equal to the cost of their training. This Effectively subsidizes their departure.

brixon2• 11 years ago

Companies have to do stuff like this since employee loyalty was lost when companies started making layoffs commonplace.

Training from a company says that they have a vested interest in the person, but they don't. Companies don't care about you, they only care about the bottom line and do not have any interest in spending effort to teach you something you could use somewhere else.

anigbrowl4• 11 years ago

For a mathematician you sure like fallacious arguments.

As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force

Well, they could offer more pay after the training is completed, or focus on being a nice place to work such that employees would choose to stay put with a company that treated them well. Your argument rests on the implicit assumption that employees will leave the moment they receive a competitive offer and are only interested in maximizing the take-home pay aspect of their economic advantage. Employees are motivated by a combination of monetary compensation, benefits, and good will towards a firm in the same way that a firm is valued by both its book assets and its good will in the marketplace. You assume, without foundation, that employee loyalty towards an employer that provides training will be nil, and ignores the possibility that employees might look forward to receiving future training (and promotions) which would have significant economic value, whereas a firm that poaches employees and offers no training of its own presumably won't be offering any in future either.

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.

You could equally argue that it's pointless for employees to run up debt buying expensive an education which an employer might then say doesn't quite meet their requirements and therefore shouldn't be rewarded by additional compensation. Considering the non-dischargability of student loans in bankruptcy and the financial weakness of employees relative to employers when it comes to negotiating prices for training/education, I would say it's rather irrational for employees to take on all the financial risk involved.

yummyfajitas10• 11 years ago

The other company without training could also be a nice place to work, and pay more as well. You are right that some employees might give "goodwill" to their employer. If such goodwill effects become sufficiently large, maybe employers will start offering training again. I guess you'll be encouraging employees to hold irrational feelings of loyalty towards their employers?

As for the costs to employees, that is indeed a potential concern. I encourage anyone considering investing money in education to consider the marketability of same.

DoggettCK• 11 years ago

I remember some motivational poster from my old tech recruiter's FB feed that seems appropriate here:

"What if we invest in training and our employees leave?"

"What if we don't, and they stay?"

kenko• 11 years ago

"As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force."

I believe in Germany consortiums of businesses in the same industry subsidize training. Seems reasonable.

In any case, your observation would seem to be refuted by the fact that businesses in general used to do precisely that, and many businesses still do do precisely that.

"Having employees pay for (and be compensated for) their own training is the most reasonable workaround."

For the business, maybe.

wisty• 11 years ago

There's no reason why they would pay $80k in salary if they're not getting enough expected value.

Until a new programmer is making minimum wage, there's always a point at which companies can employ them for less, and hope their value (plus expected value from the ones who stay on at a higher wage) will be more than the costs of training.

Also, training is often domain specific. Employees are generally worth more to their employer than a competitor (though there are exceptions).

sheepmullet• 11 years ago

"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."

Except for the massive information asymmetries in the market.

Even ignoring the information asymmetry, hiring a new employee is expensive. You can easily end up paying 40-50k to hire a good developer (as a combination of the recruitment process and ramp up time).

So really company B is paying salary + $40-50k recruitment. This means company A can easily match company B as well as provide training.

kartickvad6• 11 years ago

I think this logic breaks down when you run out of people who already have the skills du jour.

If you can hire people who already have the specific skills you need, sure, let others pay for the cost of acquiring those skills. But, when you run out of those people, then the choice becomes paying to train them, or suffer the cost of leaving the work they'd do undone. If the value of the work they perform is more than the cost of training, it's logical to train them.

In this example, the market rate for someone already trained at a certain set of skills is $90k, and the cost of training is $20k. Nothing prevents a company from offering people who are smart and capable, but not trained at whatever the company happens to need today, $70k. But with a promise (in the employment agreement, not orally) to offer $90k one year from now.

Everyone benefits from this arrangement — the candidate, who now has a better job they otherwise would have (which is presumably why they're taking the offer in the first place). And the company, who's getting a capable employee without spending more on training.

So, the bottom line is that you can always structure your incentives in a way that makes the training worthwhile for all parties involved, without asking the employee to pay for it.

analog31• 11 years ago

If the training has increased her market salary, then the simple solution is to raise her salary to meet the market.

nateabele2• 11 years ago

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.

cgearhart3• 11 years ago

...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.

nateabele2• 11 years ago

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.

laurentoget• 11 years ago

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?

joshu• 11 years ago

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

paulpauper2• 11 years ago

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.

dragonwriter4• 11 years ago

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.

paulpauper2• 11 years ago

Trying disprove disparate impact can be time-consuming and expensive, especially with the litigation, and that's why only large companies and municipalities can use these tests. One problem according to business surveys is the skills mismatch, which is that employers can't find enough qualified employees to fill open spots. Maybe the labor market would be better if these tests were made more readily available so employers can find talent that would benefit the most from on-site training, but most businesses don't have the resources to disprove disparate impact should a lawsuit arise, nor the compiled data to show there isn't discriminatory hiring . Even if the plaintiff's case is without merit, it still costs the employer time and money to disprove the case. And it's not like the defendant can recover from a frivolous lawsuit.

cousin_it3• 11 years ago

I'm not sure why employers must prove the relevance of IQ tests but not work sample tests, given that the former are better predictors of job success (Hunter & Schmidt 1998).

yummyfajitas10• 11 years ago

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?

__z7• 11 years ago

It isn't about political correctness (this word has really lost its meaning lately) its about eliminating tools that companies use to illegally discriminate against a protected class. It depends on its intent and its effect. The company must demonstrate the job requirement that has a disparate impact is job-related and consistent with business needs. A strength test might have a disparate impact on women and those with disabilities but that's ok as long as the job actually requires heavy lifting.

Tests have been used as a tool to weed out the undesirables, this is a fact. Look at literacy requirements for voting, for example. If this wasn't the case we wouldn't be facing this issue.

That being said - its a huge can of worms that needs more clarifying. It has a spotty judicial history, to put it lightly.

It is also questionable that requiring a college degree for many jobs is actually legal anyway and it is consistent with precedent such a practice is actually illegal.

Griggs v. Duke Power was a big Supreme Court case in this area. The Duke Power Company had explicitly segregated its workforce when it was legal to do so reserving the low paying jobs for blacks and the high paying jobs for whites. When it became illegal to do so they changed "you have to be white" to "you have to have a high school diploma or pass an IQ test."

Duke lost the case.

See here: http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3118

Furthermore, the company’s lawyers argued, the legislative history of the Civil Rights Act clearly showed that it was not intended to interfere with bona fide aptitude testing, widely used in business at that time. During Senate debate on the bill, opponents argued that it could be used to attack employment testing, which had in fact occurred in a case in Illinois involving Motorola. A state official had ruled the company’s testing illegal under state law because it was “unfair to disadvantaged groups.”
Bill sponsors, including Senator Hubert Humphrey, replied that nothing in the language of the statute could be construed that way, but to head off objections, they included a new section, 703(h). That makes it legal for an employer to use a “professionally designed ability test” if it is not “designed, intended or used to discriminate….”
You might think the Court would have ruled in Duke Power’s favor. Wrong—it ruled unanimously against it. The justices ignored the legislative history and gave deference to the federal agency charged with enforcing the law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
But there was also a delayed consequence. With actual intelligence testing now an invitation to costly litigation, “many employers made the college degree a de facto intelligence test and focused only on hiring applicants who possessed it.”
O’Keefe and Vedder raise that question: “If challenged, could employers who have set the college degree as a requirement show that it has anything at all to do with ‘business necessity’ or are ‘job related’? That is very doubtful.”
Suppose that someone who’d been turned away from a sales job for lack of college degree took the company to court, claiming that its educational requirement had a disparate impact, screening out people who could succeed in the job. That would appear to be a strong case.
I have never heard of such a case, attacking an employer’s college degree requirement on disparate impact grounds. But nothing would more rapidly deflate the college bubble than if the Court were to hear such a case and rule consistently with Griggs.

Intention doesn't match with reality. Honestly, we need to revisit the issue and so something differently. However, political correctness has nothing to do with it.

(I am also not convinced such tests actually have much to do with intelligence anyways...)

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

"Political correctness" has maintained its primary meaning over the years, which is an indication of terrible opinions coming from the user.

evanpw• 11 years ago

Actually, there seems to not really be any legal issue with IQ testing job candidates (in the US), and plenty of companies do some kind of cognitive testing: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/07/three_big_facts....

learc8314• 11 years ago

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.

brixon2• 11 years ago

If college education is too specific to one company then you are locking yourself into that company and you will lose any leverage over salary or even leaving.

bduerst• 11 years ago

I guess it depends on the purpose of the education. If you're already getting the CS fundamentals, maybe it doesn't hurt to get up to speed on some of the industry fads at the moment, since most of the students could be looking for an industry job in two-three years.

learc8314• 11 years ago

Everything is a tradeoff if you spend time on industry fads, you're spending less time on CS fundamentals.

Industry fads aren't useful outside of industry, so learning them should be paid for by industry. As the article argues, 20 years ago they were. Now employers are trying to push the cost of vocational training onto workers and the public.

sanderjd2• 11 years ago

Well, the whole point of the article is that those students looking for industry jobs in two-three years should just be hired and trained in the fads of the moment, instead of wasting higher-ed time teaching trivial and likely irrelevant-by-then knowledge.

genericuser3• 11 years ago

My software engineering class spent most of the semester going over design patterns which are in fact quite useful to learn in school. And then maybe 1/4 of the class on going over the various development methodologies. I agree that a class devoted entirely to methodology would be complete over kill. However I think there is room for getting some exposure to it in school. Ideally before taking higher level classes, where having knowledge of a existing ways to structure your group work will be beneficial.

learc8314• 11 years ago

The problem is design patterns are subjective, they are craft, not science or engineering.

There hasn't been enough work serious research done on "Software Engineering" to call Engineering with a straight face. You can't point a whole stack of serious research to say the design pattern A is objectively better in situation X because Y and Z.

What you can say is that design pattern A is currently in vogue so you should probably use it, while design pattern B has fallen out of favor in industry, so you should avoid it.

That is something that belongs in a vocational training program or an internship/apprenticeship not in a university Computer Science education.

samirmenon• 11 years ago

You could take that one step further. CS has, in it's modern incarnation, only been around for ~90 years. CS, as it is taught at the undergraduate level, has changed dramatically in recent years, and will continue into the future.

Math, on the other hand, has been around for thousands of years, is relatively stable, and unlikely to become obsolete in the way a scrum certification, or even a machine learning algorithm, will.

Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.

learc8314• 11 years ago

Of course, 'CS fundamentals' usually end up at a very close intersection with math. I'm just suggesting that mathematics has an even deeper level of the 'stability' you referenced.

I agree with you completely. The parts of CS that are stable are the parts that are based on rigorous mathematical foundations. I think that teaching things like Object Oriented Programming strays too far from a rigorous foundation--away from math and even engineering into craft (which belongs in vocational training).

When I look back, the classes that I learned the most from were, Discrete Math, Automata, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, and Programming Language Concepts (which went into the academic side of programming language research more than what was currently in use in industry).

manyxcxi• 11 years ago

I also had a Software Engineering class (actually two them) that were focused on how to build software in real life. This was in '03 and we covered things like waterfall methodology, requirements gathering, functional specs, etc. If taught the exact same way today it would be woefully out of date but the time we spent on requirements gathering (where the teacher or TA) pretended to be a product owner and purposely gave really crappy answers and we had to extract useful information but by bit was one of the best pieces of prep I ever received.

All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology. I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS...

learc8314• 11 years ago

I use those lessons to some degree all the time, I rarely directly use all the work I had to do to create my own OS...

I think you probably would have learned those lessons after a few months on the job. You probably wouldn't have picked up the knowledge to build your own OS on the job, however.

All in all, it was boring and tedious but it certainly wasn't the worst class I ever had in regards to preparing me for a career in technology.

Did you learn about billing clients, and effectively advertising your services in your CS degree? What about equity versus salary tradeoffs?

At least 50% of working in technology is soft skills, why doesn't a CS degree spend 50% of the time teaching you those? The answer is that a CS degree isn't supposed to be vocational training.

Vocational training, including learning to talk to clients, should be done on the job, during an internship/apprenticeship, or in a specialized vocational training program. By including it in a college degree, employers have successfully pushed employee training costs onto workers and society (as the article argues).

mathattack• 11 years ago

The article isn't complaining about CS majors not getting jobs, it's about soft liberal arts majors not getting jobs.

When companies hired people for 30 year careers, they could afford to invest a tremendous amount in training. When they hire people for 2-3 years, they have less time to amortize the costs. And it's up to the employee to convince the companies that they can learn quickly, and on their own if need be.

Any CS major with decent grades and a positive attitude can learn anything in most any job. (Certainly CS, consulting, finance, marketing, even some kinds of sales) I can't say the same for liberal arts majors. There are great ones out there, but also a lot of folks who goofed off for 4 years and didn't learn anything.

kartickvad6• 11 years ago

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.

learc8314• 11 years ago

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.

Retra• 11 years ago

I did learn a lot of those things in college...

bigger_cheese• 11 years ago

Oh god yes I went through the same pain. Our university decided that every Engineering student had to take two CS courses during the first year. This applied regardless of whether you were studying Civil Engineering, Electrical, Mechanical etc. This was alongside all the other first year courses we were required to take such as Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statics, Dynamics and all that.

First Semester we took Intro to Programming and Algorithms (CS1100 or something like that). We learnt everything from Binary notation, logic gates through to floating points, I went from not knowing any programming language to having a fair idea about how topics like recursion worked our last project was to write some code to walk a tree using recursion. I also learnt how to use Unix and recieved my lifelong love of Emacs (which we used in our tutorials) from this course.

Second Semester we had to take Software Engineering (CS 1110 I think). It covered waterfall model, version control, specifications, unit tests and more estoteric stuff like loop invariants and formal correctness. Our major project was to write an essay about the Arriane V rocket explosion. I really enjoyed CS 1100 class but CS 1110 effectively succeeded in boring me to tears. It was somehow supposed to give us a taste of real world software design. All it really did was encourage myself and many others not to take CS electives in later years.

My major was Materials Engineering I took mostly physics electives in the last year of my degree, which is kind of ironic now because I work pretty heavily with programs - my day job involves writing computer simulations. I learned most of the skills I need on the job (including the C programming language, databases/SQL etc.) I probably would have benefited from more formal training but my experience of university CS was so miserable I actively avoided it.

wwweston• 11 years ago

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...

theodorewiles• 11 years ago

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.

nitwit005• 11 years ago

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.

Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force

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