Snapchat Sneakily Uses Its Own App to Poach Uber Engineers

the technicalities of your argument imply that it is false for any company to say "we have X employees" and it is offensive for them to say "we have the best talent in the valley". the only truth would be "our company has no employees".

if you feel that way, at least you're logically consistent. it just feels disingenuous to me.

There's a reason that labor union membership is at an all-time low, and yet here we are with the labor movement trying to double down on a 19th-century solution to our 21st-century problems. The concept of organized labor is more beneficial today to robots than it is to Americans -- robots, and imports from developing nations.

We won't even get into all of favors the labor movement hasn't done itself on various topics, either, like union leaders paid executive-like compensation or the Teamsters' ties to organized crime.

Yeah, it sure is great when I'm not allowed to adjust my own monitor due to union rules. Only facilities is allowed to do that!

That doesn't make any sense. If Google disburses that $14B Net Income as salary/bonus to the employees, the Net Income would be $0. One can't have it both ways, unless you illogically count that money twice.

Besides the issue of recategorizing "net income" as "employee expense", Google wouldn't have new money to invest in the business as an ongoing concern. That $14B can be used in future years to invest in driverless cars, satellites, global internet hot air balloons, acquisitions of other companies, or whatever ambitious plans they have.

Disbursing the Net Income to their employees means Google would cease to exist as a viable ongoing business.

One can also look backward and see why and how companies get formed in the first place. If angel investors and venture capitalists knew from the beginning that Google was going to disburse all Net Income to employees, they would have never invested $$$ in 1998 to let them grow. Angels and VC's are not charities and they want ROI -- because things like pension funds that utilize VC's want an ROI.

From that birth of the company, the chain of events continued: a big reason why Google has $14B of net income in 2014 is that they did not disburse the net incomes to employees in previous years 2013, 2012, 2011...2000. They were able to spend previous profits to build new datacenters, offer 1 gigabyte GMail accounts, acquire Keyhole maps, etc.

We also have to look forward. Tech companies generate $500k per engineer even while those engineers are managed by idiots-- people who don't understand technology, don't value the wrong term, think "Scrum" is a good idea, and likely failed out of the mainstream business culture ("MBA culture") and are using the Valley as a second act.

Imagine what value the top software engineers could produce if they were managed well. And then imagine that software engineers would be even better at their job if major decisions were made by the right people.

This industry is running at 5% of its max potential, if that. Not only can we capture significantly more of the value that we create, but we can add substantially more value if we man up and learn how to take charge.

Yes, it should exist. You've argued against whatever image of formalized training you seem to have a problem with, but provided a decent argument training (in general) should be provided. If developers are expected of to continually learn new things, and it can be done in a short amount of time, it is all the more reasonable for the business to treat that as training and budget time and money for it as such.

The types of gaining knowledge that you acknowledge in your post are "a few formalized training courses every year" and "good communication skills and enjoy sharing knowledge". You seem to be ignoring the large band of training that exist between those two. Which is also the where most ongoing learning happens.

Good communication skills and "collaborative time" allocated with percentages pulled from your rear is a fine (if slow) way to get people up to speed with the tech used at the office. But only serves to poorly normalize knowledge across the office.

Given the amount of loyalty companies expect workers to have and the possessiveness when they're hired away by better offers--to the point of calling it poaching, a word whose historical connotations are those of stealing animals from someone else's land!--yes, I think a modicum of giving a shit about your employees and deigning to train them is certainly in order. If you're going to treat people like chattel, at least treat them well.

Isn't this the other way round? Because there isn't a reliable path to teaching programming to people who aren't self-motivated solo learners, that's the only kind of person who acquires the skills, and so when you look around a tech workplace that's the kind of person you see.