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Comment by Futurebot | Hacker News Reader

Are there any other companies that you know of that do what you did at Matasano (offer post-hire specialist-type training to non-specialists/generalists is how I understood your posts about it)? The moneyball/trainingball idea seems like such an obvious way to get the people a company needs that one would think it would be somewhat common by now.

For all the alleged shortages, can it really be that all these years later companies are still unwilling to gamble on training because they feel like people will leave too quickly?

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Companies have too incomplete a notion of the value of training and a positive environment to retention and productivity. People really do think skill is innate and people 'are who they are' more or less.

It's probably not true in 80% of cases, is true in 20% of cases, and the 10% of cases where people got burned by a poor candidate who couldn't improve are the ones they remember and say "never again;" likewise the 10% of cases where they are amazed by a highly skilled candidate and think all of them should be that way. They're missing the majority effect that impacts the productivity of 80% of their workforce.

This is why it's crucial to have an innate sense of human variation and psychology, a la W. Edwards Deming. So, in that sense, it's not the employees that need the training, but the managers.

I know lots of the big name consulting companies in London at least used to do it. A friend of mine with a physics degree from Oxford got job offers for all kinds of things on the assumption that if you can get a physics degree from Oxford, you can probably learn other stuff as well. He ended up doing some sort of forensic accounting.

A friend of mine in Australia became a management consultant with a PhD in physiotherapy, they essentially were saying a PhD in anything is a good base.

From my perspective, I see that several other skill-based professions assume novice hires, and emphasize a some sort of on-the-job training as part of career progression.

In software dev, as much as we have stack overflow and such where we can figure out trivia of the tools we have to work with, I guess we'll come to the realization that some kind of formalized training post-hire will be useful, especially as development becomes more specialized or domain specific.

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