> entire concept of professionalized industries that are unwilling to invest in the education and training of their employees is absurd and something we should all adamantly reject
1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc.
2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?
1. I'm talking about professionalized in the sense of being an occupation that generally requires college credentials and specialized knowledge to participate in. Not always the case for software engineers, but often. Professionalized in the sense of being an occupation of the PMC.
2. There are probably many reasons for high turnover (especially among startups), but you kind of allude to a salient one (for this conversation) yourself. Leaving a job is a chance to get hired in a place where you'll learn something new, so if employers need a reason to train their people, that seems like a fairly good one for how it might benefit retention and experience of their employees. Ultimately I don't really care how it benefits employers, but software engineers tend to have a lot of leverage over who they hire so I see it as something we should do for our own sake
Unless you are the employer, or at least the hiring manager, the decision ultimately isn't yours, regardless of leverage, so you have to care about how a change would affect the employer or hiring manager, if you want them to make that change take-effect.
Yeah it sounds like we have different experiences w/ how this works and how much input engineers have into the hiring decision. This isn't really the main point of what I'm saying.
1. We're a professionalized industry? Really? I don't see any licensure outside Texas, any credentials that aren't sheerest fluff, any teeth whatsoever to the ACM's deontological ramblings^W^W Code of Ethics, any etc.
2. For reasons I don't know and which are another topic of discussion entirely, the CS industry is all about high turnover. Career advancement comes less from promotion and more from switching employers. Under these circumstances, if you are a company that employs software engineers, do you really want to make an investment whose returns will mostly be reaped by others, if not by your direct competitors?