
My Father-In-Law Won't Become a Coder, No Matter What Economists Say - wyclif
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/death-salesmen-why-my-father-in-law-wont-coder-matter-dustin-mckissen
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banned1
I don't think that companies are effective at guiding your career. I tell
folks every time I can: take responsibility for your own career and
development, or risk one day waking up, looking in the mirror at an obsolete
person. That is a risk you cannot take.

If you are hoping that HR or "the company" will train you, you have abdicated
the single most important determinant of your overall professional worth.

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pfranz
I'm not sure why (maybe because there was so much competition on the labor
side or they don't expect employees to stay around as long), but companies
stopped training people. My industry has one major conference every year. They
all talked about how 20 years ago the company would close down for a week and
pay for everyone to go. In the past 10 years for me, about half the time I got
paid my salary, the other half I took a vacation day. Never have they paid for
my tickets. I do think this conference isn't as useful to the average worker
as it was 20 years ago, but I think it's also an example of companies no
longer investing in workers. Disney helped form CalArts, as another example.

There was another thread last week where someone brought up why certain
domains in programming are considered "dark magic." A few examples would be
databases or computer graphics. Many programmers only learn them superficially
and consider them intimidating and scary. I feel like there's a stigma and
just means there's domain knowledge you don't have. Honestly, computer
programming is like that for the average person. I've seen a lot of examples,
like insane Excel spreadsheets, where it is technically programming by someone
who would be scared of "programming."

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wyclif
I always got the impression (not backed by any verifiable numbers, mind you)
that many tech companies cooled to training employees because of poaching and
the relative frequency of changing jobs. If you devote company resources to
training an employee, only to have that employee end up working for your
competition, you just helped erode your business. Now, I think that's a short-
sighted viewpoint, but it's one I've heard expressed before by CTOs.

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gozur88
Yeah, that's pretty much it, and it's not just tech companies. Prior to about
1990 or so, if you spent less than about five years at a company before moving
on it was considered a black mark on your resume. If it was a regular pattern
you were only going to get hired if your prospective employer couldn't find
someone else.

So companies had some confidence they would get a return on their training
investment. They couldn't force you to stay, but they knew you realized it was
in your best interest to stick around for awhile.

That all changed. These days, particularly in tech, it's pretty normal for
people to move on after 18 months or so. While it might make sense for the
_industry_ to train people, for an individual company it's stupid to put
effort into an employee's career development only to have him move on to a
competitor.

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nitwit005
If they worked in sales in one industry, I suspect they'll just move on to
sales in another industry.

People have been trying to automate sales forever. Catalogs, telephones,
websites, etc. We still seem to have tons of sales people.

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gozur88
I agree. His skills as a salesman will never actually be obsolete, whereas if
he becomes a coder he'll be on the skill upgrade treadmill like the rest of
us.

