Comment by AnthonyMouse

11 days ago

> Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront.

Why not?

> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.

"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?

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AnthonyMouse

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Retric  11 days ago

> is more expensive than

Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.

Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.

  • AnthonyMouse  9 days ago

    > Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.

    How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee?

    The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will take whichever job pays more, so the employer who paid the $50k has to offer the same salary as the one who didn't. And then who is going to pay the $50k when they could get the employee that someone else paid the money to train, for the same salary?

    • Retric  9 days ago

      > The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years.

      No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.

      Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.

      As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.