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Comment by trevmckendrick | Hacker News Reader

This is being way overblown IMO.

If you've worked at a big, regulated company, you know there are tons of trainings that you have to do.

Often said training provide little to no value, other than covering the ass (CYA'ing) of the employer.

But what's worse: these programs will sometimes log you out if you're not paying 100% attention.

Everyone I knew working at our Big 4 accounting firm would do our real work while these "training" videos played in the background.

Some engineer likely thought s/he was helping everyone out. And rightly so...their time was likely much better spent in other places given their incredible growth.

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LIC-EN-SING

This isn't some perfunctory blah-blah training.

Unlike professions where you are expected to get a post-college degree and pass a multi-day difficult test given once or twice a year, all you need to become a health insurance broker is take some classes (in person or online) for a few hours, pass a test (which you can retake as often as you like) and pay ~$100. That's it!

Zenefits is large enough they could actually not treat licensing as a nuisance (gotta SELL SELL SELL) but could have had a full time in-person instructor give a week+long onboarding/training/prelicensing class for every new sales-person. You know, so that people who are expected to be explaining the intricacies of health care laws and pro and cons of $100,000+ yearly group policies might actually know a little of what they are talking about.

How many of those accountants didn't study ACCOUNTING for at least 52 hours?

What on earth does spending x hours on something prove? If someone spent their 52 hours zoned out while the video played, just aware enough to click the "I'm still watching" button that shows up every 5 minutes or whatever, how would that make them any more qualified than the macro?

It sounds like the real problem is that the test is grossly inadequate. The regulations should specify a test that's stringent enough. Specifying x hours of training isn't helping anyone.

There's a huge difference between this happening and the CEO actively building the work around. When the CEO demonstrates this behaviour is appropriate, the whole company adopts this culture of "what laws?!".

>That was how executives discovered the macro, which Conrad had created based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training, the lawyer for Sacks said.

You are mistaking annual compliance training for things like "don't insider trade" for training on how to do the job legally to gain entrance into the profession.

There is a bit of a difference between the training videos the big co's force you to watch and the training required to get certified by the state to do business in a highly regulated industry.

I too created "macros" for the insufferable training they put you through, but it was for training videos on the "new" HTML4 standard and about the "new" invention ajax requests -- all while I was working on a team using angularjs every day.

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