Actually, that seems like it was generated by some half-ass SQL generator written by a summer intern. Wait, are you running my code from 12 years ago?
The problem I've had with the RFPs I've responded to in this regard is that training may or may not be accounted for in the original RFP and if you try to increase your bid to accommodate the knowledge transfer sessions and especially the three to four that you have to schedule eventually because the people you need to train are all on PTO for three weeks at a time all for critical stakeholders.
We based this on our internal training for our IT hires based on the gaps we found when we onboarded people over the last 7 years. We invested a lot in making the material practical and lab driven vs just rote memorization.
Hummmm... you wonder how much of that money is invested in internal training for those skills they claim they cannot find. I bet the average is pretty close to 0. I guess it just makes more sense to throw money at the problem and hope for magic in 43 days.
Instead, why not just devote that $33K to a training program for a duration of roughly 43 days? Now you have the skills you were missing with the bonus of added loyalty and lower risk at no additional cost (money and time that would have been spent anyways). You also get a massive productivity boost for free according to Brook's Law. The only cost is that an external candidate might (or might not) have a diversity of skills your company doesn't provide.
Training is a huge industry especially for enterprise and government organizations. Every RFP will include a significant training component and it's a huge fraction of spending in government and enterprise IT.
Maybe it's because most enterprise/government software sucks so bad it's impossible to use without significant training.
Sidebar: Back in the first dot-com boom, the CTO of the company I worked for (who was an idiot in most respects) had one gem that I still remember: if users need training to use our website, we have failed.
Whatever the case, if you've only worked in enterprise IT, it may not really occur to you that software and programming is something you can learn on your own without training.
I am thankful that my computer science curriculum was never specifically about languages. The language used for a class, whether it was C, Scheme, assembler, or whatever was "an excercise left to the student." That helped me learn that learning any language was just a matter of using it, with the aid of a couple of good books.
The problem with training is that you hire 10 people. 3 of them pan out. Then they leave for 100% more salary from a company that doesn't need to make up for hiring those other 7 in the first place.
In my experience companies that rely on armies of junior programmers to do things manually tend to end with horrible code bases and a lot of technical debt. Few abstractions, lots of repetition, little automation and so on.
What happened to having people trained by external trainers for what you need? That’s much cheaper than having everything externally “managed” and still having to integrate all of it. The number of services listed in TFA is just ridiculous.
How are you going to keep this hypothetical honor student down on the farm? [1]
In other words, once the employee has the skills to earn $85k, why should she wait six months for her giant raise when she could just switch employers and get the giant raise right away?
Not that this is the reason why the fantasy scenario doesn't work - if it were reliably possible to turn a raw recruit into DHH with six months of training, the fact that we'd have to pay market rates the entire time would be the least of our problems. Indeed, it would not be a problem at all.
A real reason why more companies don't try training up raw recruits is that (a) running a school is a specialized business and (b) the yield is far less than 100%, so it only works at scale. You need to admit - optimistically! - 10 or 20 bright and motivated nonprogrammers in order to graduate one person who, after six to twelve months of training, can be expected to successfully attack problems like:
"A customer has called; he has an obscure problem with his web site. Help him debug this problem over the phone. You have no access to the code or the server."
or
"Here's a legacy codebase that spans 267 files, two major versions of Rails, and three generations of programmers. Improve it. Don't break it, though, because our revenue depends on it."
or
"Here's a collection of 175 cloud instances running in Amazon. Build a system that reliably backs them all up once a day, with no downtime, and that can verify on demand that those backups exist."
or even something as "simple" as
"Here is a Wordpress site with a handful of specialty plugins installed. Here is an empty Git repository. Fill this Git repository with Rails code that implements a site that looks and acts exactly like the Wordpress site."
Note that this isn't cheap because training doesn't scale like software businesses. That means the revenue multiple is lower than for a software company.
This isn't the guy looking for it, this is the guy running the emergency alert system. It's likely to be a contractor who gets meagre pay, limited benefits, and no job security as the contract probably turns over to a new vendor every 2 or 3 years.
The "training" they have is, if anything, an MS word document with a bunch of screenshots or a flash animation showing each of the functions that the contract required the developer to build in.
1 was always caused by the requirements being made by HR.
4 is caused by people wanting to learn things on the employer's dime.
If employers weren't so cheap with training budgets, employees wouldn't do learning projects that end up in Production... wanna see a dangerous company? Find a place that has 37 different technologies in their hiring ads.
Not programming but I work in a Project Management Office in a global corporation. This company sends all PM’s and BA’s on a job-relevant training course each year.
This is the only company that I’ve received real training from in a ~15 year career
(I have had a few small 1 day or less internal courses.. “negotiations”, “leading people” etc)
Re training, yep. Our training budget was seriously mismanaged.
We got a budget every year, but our development manager was too weak to organise it himself along with his other demands. So it got passed off to a senior team leader to organise. He didn't really have time to organise it properly. We went many years where the budget was not spent, and therefore got shrunk the next year.
When we did finally organise training, it was very basic, and the company gave us 1.5 days off to study, which included the time to go to the testing centre (1hr trip each way, 2hr exam). Result: one afternoon off to study. At least I got Java 1.4 Certified Programmer (yay :-/ ).
The next training was organised the same, only this time, to avoid us all taking the 1.5 days at the end of the financial year (who'd have thought we'd do that!?!) training was organised in waves of 3 months. At the end of the 3 months, no one had taken an exam! So guess what? Training materials stayed with those people for the next 6 months. That was galling for the rest of us.
When I moved department, we had much better managers. They were pro-active is seeking out our training needs, and everyone knew what training or courses they would be doing over the next year. Then corporate HQ stole our training budget to train a team of inexperienced, but geographically cheaper, resources in our jobs. Surprise surprise we got pissed and started leaving. Now I hear that little experiment was an abject failure and they were trying to hire us back as consultants!
deep breathsigh
Hey, I got paid regularly, travelled a fair bit, learned a TON, and did get to work with some exceptional people. However racism was endemic among senior management, who were all based in ###### (redacted).
Well, in a world where everyone is self-taught from what’s trending at the moment. In the old days if companies needed someone with particular skills they would train them and make an effort to retain them. Now the cost and the risk has all been pushed onto the employee.
It should be a simple equation: cost of training vs cost of rewriting every 2-3 years...
The problem I've had with the RFPs I've responded to in this regard is that training may or may not be accounted for in the original RFP and if you try to increase your bid to accommodate the knowledge transfer sessions and especially the three to four that you have to schedule eventually because the people you need to train are all on PTO for three weeks at a time all for critical stakeholders.
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