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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

> But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. [..]

> We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring.

It's tough to square this noble thought with what's actually happening in corporate America. The culture of investing in training and mentoring to foster employee growth has been eroding for the past 40 years (if not more), to where it only seems to exist in limited capacity in legacy institutions and is completely absent in new (tech) firms. How does one convince business leaders to bring it back?

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> The culture of investing in training and mentoring to foster employee growth has been eroding for the past 40 years (if not more), to where it only seems to exist in limited capacity in legacy institutions and is completely absent in new (tech) firms. How does one convince business leaders to bring it back?

With engineers in the big tech companies mostly only staying for maybe 1-2 years I can understand employers not being very interested in training and mentoring to foster employee growth.

40 years ago engineers frequently stayed at companies like DEC, IBM, and HP for 10 to 20+ years.

> With engineers in the big tech companies mostly only staying for maybe 1-2 years I can understand employers not being very interested in training and mentoring to foster employee growth.

This is an effect, not a cause. People started voting with their feet when companies stopped investing in them.

> How does one convince business leaders to bring it back?

There are precisely 1.0 ways to do that: make all of the alternatives more expensive.

That's it. Nothing else will move the needle.

I don't believe it is possible: every policy one can imagine, short of establishing a GULAG system to compel compliance, has powerful opposing interests, including workers themselves. It would require the sort of comprehensive and sustained focus that a nation aspiring to nearly suicidal liberalism can not deliver.

Every system I can imagine as a real unintended consequence that is worse than what we have. The ideal should move to needle back - but there is no way to make that happen that isn't worse than where we are now.

When nobody is going to work for the same company for decades what is the point? This is both management's fault for not valuing the people they have (it is very common for cost of living raises to not match inflation or much less increased value as people get better), layoffs; but also workers for looking for a new job (only partially because of the above) when they have one.

I think in the ideal world 30-60% of the people who retire from your company should have started there just out of school. Much less than that and you don't get the value of experience built up over time. Much more and you miss out of good ideas others are doing. However there are many ways the world will never be ideal...

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