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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

Can you expand on the broken employment system in the US? Honestly just curious.

If I had to complain about things, it would be these:

1. Lack of workplace training - very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience, partly because there's nothing preventing someone from jumping ship for better pay once the training is complete

2. Credentialism - the things that actually matter in hiring are either difficult or illegal to test for (conscientiousness, knowledge, intelligence), and so degrees are used as proxies instead

> very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience

Yes and no.

Most HVAC shops will pay for technician's training.

Most dev shops pay for technical conferences.

Most managers have access to management seminars and training.

Expecting an employers to pay tens of thousands of dollars seems weird, but many employers do pay on a smaller scale for skills training.

> degrees are used as proxies instead

Though conventional wisdom is that a degree doesn't matter 5 years after graduation.

Nor does it seem that prestigious positions are even that picky in practice. Yes, there are a number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale alumni in Congress, but other seven of the top 10 colleges for Congress members are public state schools. [1]

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/the-top-10-colleges-f...

The degree you get certainly matters for graduate admissions though. For example, at both MacGill and U of Montreal they don't take any account of industry experience when you are applying for grad school. And they assume grade inflation, so unless you scored A average you can give up.

That's true. It's a relatively small set of jobs that require a medical, law, or phd degree.

Schools in QC are a different breed, though. The cost for QC residents is very low, and the cost for non-QC residents is still pretty tolerable. This means there are lot of applicants -- like why not, it's cheap -- and they can be picky.

I've also noticed that Canada and Australia place far more emphasis on formal credentials than US colleges. US Uni's will take you if you can demonstrate competency and can pay; Uni Melbourne won't talk to you unless you have the exact, specific kind of degree. Ditto for UBC, U Sydney, etc.

Dev shops pay for technical conferences but few tech places want to hire fresh, green devs and train them up. They all would prefer experience.

It's why you see so many forums talking about sending out applications to hundreds of places for months when searching for their first job, then never having a problem again after.

I'll just throw this out here: for IT you almost don't want your in-house trained people to stay very long because it's pretty important less experienced people to get a variety of different experiences. I would say that people who stick to their first job for a decade or so tend to become under performers and I don't think it's generally because they can't find another job. Breadth of experience is really valuable in this field.

I've often thought it would be amazing if you could do the equivalent of professional football (soccer) lending of players. Lend a developer to another company for a few years with the expectation that they will come back. If they decide to stay then the borrowing company give some compensation. But it would mean having very strict contracts that limit the freedom of workers, so it's almost certainly a no go. I wish there was a way to make it work, though...

I think in general I mean that people are seen as cogs in a machine, rather than individuals to be trained, and there's no safety net from the government, either in terms of real retraining or advanced education or life benefits or anything.

HR gets a million applications, people are evaluated on what boxes can be checked off rather than their skillset, etc.

With regard to the educational system, the problem is that degrees are seen as signals or credentials (to use the language of the article) rather than as a background. That's admittedly a fuzzy distinction, but it really reduces the degree to the degree per se rather than the host of courses and experiences the person during college. So, we talk about "useless degrees" without recognizing that someone might have had equivalent coursework and experience without majoring in something else per se. In the end it doesn't matter.

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