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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

This the technically true, but also a very tough starting position.

If my six person startup has issues squeezing as much value out of my Dev than FANG companies with all their support structure and research into this, this is only to be expected, imo.

So yeah, it's a problem, one on the list of many problems most companies have though, so it's oversimplified to simply say:"Let's just pay for expensive training and hope they stay."

Yes, you can foster a culture, build a sense of loyalty etc. but at some point in time even the most loyal employee feels underpaid if he's paid below market because the company can't afford someone at the stage they've reached by working there. I've seen this play out too often to ignore the counter argument.

The incentives of the company and the worker often simply don't align when it comes to career growth.

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I’m not sure I understand your point.

Let’s imagine that I work a job for three years, and a company spends $30,000 training me over that time period, when I then leave because that training helped me reach a better career position.

If they hadn’t paid for that benefit, I would have left after only two years — because the need to transfer for career advancement would happen sooner. This would save them $20,000-30,000 depending on how you count.

So what’s the net difference?

In scenario 1, they received a ROI of 1 year of improved labor, and 1 year of doubly improved labor. Additionally, the fixed costs of hiring are amortized over three years instead of two, and so decrease by 33%.

So for $30,000 they decreased my hiring costs by 33% and received two years of increased quality labor — say 5-10% productivity. Hiring an engineer is 25-50% of their yearly salary, so they’re saving 8-15% of my salary over three years. The productivity of an engineer is going to be like twice their salary, just to pay overhead and profit. So we’re looking at a boost of 10-20% my salary in their revenues.

So they’re looking at ~15-25% of my salary as the return for spending $10k/year. Naively, it seems like that pays off in many cases: it just requires you operate in a trust based manner.

> If they hadn’t paid for that benefit, I would have left after only two years — because the need to transfer for career advancement would happen sooner.

That depends on whether employees will switch just to get training, and not just for a bigger salary. If not, then training you will just increase your market value, making you more likely to switch.

That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone.

> That is why the small startup has to do what FANG is not willing to do, like full remote work anywhere for everyone.

This is in my opinion (because of the infrastructure) easier to do for FANG than for the startup.

What infrastructure do you have in mind? I guess if you employ people from everywhere, there's a bunch of overhead for handling international work contracts, payment etc.

> What infrastructure do you have in mind?

All kinds. From your mentioned international work contracts and payments over structuring the work/code so that in can easier be distributed worldwide,using standardized hardware and software configurations so that adminstration/updating can be done automatically etc.

There are organizational issues that make it hard @ FANG to be a full remote company.

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