I work for Google and I find there's already a very large amount of on the job training required due to all the powerful but complicated internal tools. My manager has told me that I should not feel pressured to contribute at all for my first 6 months and I should feel free to just focus on learning as much as I can.
I've been here for almost a year now and feel like I still know nothing so the training is still certainly not done.
I didn't mean to jump to the defense of my employer as I'm obviously biased but do think we are far from perfect (although I am very happy here :). I just wonder what the right balance is. It seems like if people can't program at all then it's not really on the job training because they wouldn't be working right?
At least my own experience has been that I came in with some college experience but no college degree and not really knowing anything besides the bare minimum to contribute (being able to program, having some grasp of CS fundamentals) and have learned a ton on the job and still have much much more to learn. I think there is an expectation (and pressure!) for all SWEs to hit the senior level, L5, so in a way everyone who is hired under that level is doing on the job training no?
Sorry for the long post!
I don't see why Google couldn't do that today.
I'm not saying they are morally obligated to do so. At the end of the day they are a for profit company and they don't have to do anything at all about this problem. And, sure, the donations they are making instead are probably better than nothing. But as I mentioned, and as top19 mentions on what is as of this writing the top post on this article, the track record for these job retraining programs going back decades isn't very good.
What I'm saying is that if Google were to go to Pittsburgh, Youngstown, or Detroit, hire some bright unemployed people, pay them a decent but by no means exorbitant salary while it taught them how to code and then, as you point out, how to be a productive engineer at Google, at the end of the process those people would likely have very marketable skills to either continue moving up the ladder at Google or elsewhere. Of course this would cost Google something -- not only in the salaries while people were learning and not contributing but also in the salaries of people that were training and mentoring them. But Google is planning on spending a billion dollars anyway, so here's another way they could do that. A way that I think would be more effective.
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Congrats on getting what sounds like a great job.
I don't think our brain suddenly evolved in 200 years from illiterate peasants to software engineers. We just have more school time these days.
Truth of the matter is that most tech work doesn't involve AI, machine learning, self-driving cars or augmented reality but down-to-earth business applications. Developing those requires abstract thinking, empathy and problem-solving skills but it doesn't necessarily require a college-level IQ.
In fact a high IQ could even be harmful in that situation because apart from getting bored quickly highly intelligent people can display a tendency to overthink problems (which is probably how many notorious enterprise frameworks came about ...).
There is no evidence that a person with low IQ cannot accomplish the the tasks involved in e.g. software engineering, although they would probably do so more slowly than a person with high IQ. From Wiki:
"The prevailing view among academics is that it is largely through the quicker acquisition of job-relevant knowledge that higher IQ mediates job performance. "
Also, going to college has no effect on IQ, so "college-level IQ" is meaningless gobbledygook.
Edit: responders to this comment seem to miss that the parent comment is suggesting Google hire new individuals and train them, not find talent in their workforce and do training there. Thats the unrealistic part- creating a secondary application process for individuals without the skills -- when they already reject a ridiculous number of people with many of the skills.
Do you think Google lets anyone to work their way up from front desk admin or barista?
A basic aptitude for the role or transferable skills maybe?
>"What salary should those positions command?"
Whatever the company wants to pay. Why does that matter at all? Employment is still an agreement between the two parties.
>"Sounds pretty handwavy."
Not at all, "on the job training" has a history stretching from Medieval Ages and the guild system, to the industrial revolution, powering the war-time workforce etc:
The commitment of capital to tanglible jobs that lead towards ojt is not handwavy at all. That said, i bet the tax breaks from the schooling is substantial
In my case I had no choice but to do a draining unpaid internship in college, their return offer was only $15/hr, nowhere I applied to for months (likely hundreds of applications) would take me even though I did all those things in the list and continually put my resume through those resume threads on reddit, except one offer for 30k. 15/hr and 30k are abysmal insults to the amount of time money and effort put into programming since middle school, getting a BS CS degree, volunteering on big online projects since high school, etc. I'm not in the middle of nowhere either, this was NY/NJ.
These experiences signal to me that the tech field is hightly oversaturated for new grads and it's a matter of time before people realize the bubble popped. Someone in my position should not be getting offered what amount to poverty wages taking into account student loans, the high price of car insurance for a driver of my age range, etc. Programs like what google is doing are just going to make this problem even worse as companies feel further emboldened to require increasingly more experience out of junior programmers and offer them salaries further approaching minimum wage.
From curiosity, and certainly not to offend.. you _did_ place your resume elsewhere as well, right?
I think retraining programs primarily help sharp, energetic folks who somehow got into a bad state (useless major, bad school, rough childhood, etc.); maybe even social connections and stability are more important than the skills they end up getting. However, those programs are IMO worthless for folks who lost a stable job and hope that Yet Another Certification Class will put them into a pipeline for a similar one. I am not sure how to help the second type.
Mind you they do hire some of the best, but the idea that google engineers are “the best” is a myth.
However, just today I listened to the most recent Freakonomics Radio episode, which was about how Germany managed to become the economic powerhouse it is today. Most economists that were asked agreed that an essential ingredient of Germany's economic success is its unique concept of vocational training, which combines on-the-job training with school education and general - as opposed to employer-specific - job training.
Perhaps a system that's essentially a combination of both on-the-job training and more formal training programs would be conducive in this case as well.
I'm going to warn everyone of what's coming.
Software engineer jobs will be blue collar, $40-$60k a year jobs, by 2030.
The HUGE push from government, and private business, to fill the PERCEIVED lack of engineers, will come to fruition around that time.
Make no mistake about it - there is NOT a lack of skilled engineers right now. There is a disinterest among business to pay higher, and higher salaries.
If you are a SWE right now, save your money, and invest your time into improving YOURSELF. Have a backup plan, because I promise you, the good times are coming to an end sooner than you think.
Learning to program takes a lot of dedication and focus. Which a lot of people have no interest in, it is just too much work and too difficult. Every student that takes a engineering degree here, have to have a class with introduction to coding. And everyone, except those few who enjoys computer science, says that class was the hardest class to pass by far compared to the rest.
So I believe the opposite will happen. The demand for software developers will grow beyond our imagination.
Combine that with the fact that big companies (like Google) release SDKs that make application development trivial, and you've got a recipe for the skill cap lowering along with wages.
This to me looks like the same kind of privileged outlook that other professional guilds like the AMA desire. Do you want cheaper healthcare, or doctor compensation to keep going up? Hey, letting nurse practitioners take on some of the load is "flooding the market with n00bs"
This just seems like protectionism by another name.
Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate?
What's your definition of "skyrocketing"? Outside of, maybe, a dozen high-prestiege companies located in a couple specific areas I don't see salaries skyrocketing. Mine hasn't; not saying I'm not well compensated, just not as overpaid or in demand asbsone people make it sound.
Further, my experience with the aforementioned high prestige companies is that they are picky as hell. That tells me that either there is no shortage of talent for them or they are choosing beggars.
In 2003, the average salary in tech was $69,400.
By 2017, the average salary had risen to $92,081.[1]
While that might seem like a pretty large payrise, after adjusting it for inflation, you come to a clear conclusion that over the last 12 years, salaries have stood basically still. You can point to people getting $120k+ as a first year employee at Google, but salaries like that are massive outliers. Average developer in america earns much less.
[1] Dice Tech Salary Survey 2017 https://marketing.dice.com/pdf/Dice_TechSalarySurvey_TechPro...
Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their investment every year, for doing nothing?
They are certainly spending their energy on fighting attempts to spread the economic pie around. We need solidarity, not shaming people for protecting their means to make a living.
If you re-read my original post you will notice that I did NOT advocate for artificially restricting worker supply, or any kind of protectionism.
I merely warned that what we're seeing in tech WILL bring an end to the "high" salaries, and that those who wish to maintain their current state, should consider PERSONAL GROWTH and advancing their skillset as a means of protection.
We can debate all day about whether its a "perceived" lack, or a real lack. I whole heartedly disagree that salaries are, as you put it, "sky rocketing", especially when you account for cost of living in the areas where the "skyrocketing" is happening.
And oh, yes, how dare a doctor who spent upwards of $500,000 in medical training, and devoted years to internships, and residency, be worried about a lowered skill cap or regulatory protections (which they counted on) for entering their profession! How dare they!
Please. Of all the examples of protectionism you could have given, you chose perhaps the most acceptable and understandable. Yes, people care about their livelihood and the ability to retain efforts and investments they have made, so would you.
Does your employer have a natural, God given right to cheap labor?
Because Bay Area cost of living is getting pushed higher and higher. The median programmer already has roommates, a 2-hour roundtrip commute, and no hope of family-sized housing or (gasp) ownership; if standard of living falls any further, we'll all go do something else.
Obviously many people have it worse, but we have alternatives.
The amount of programmers needed is rising across the globe. Every country is going to try to retain its IT talent. In a cut-throat globally competitive world you can't afford to be the country that lets its best minds leave to greener pastures.
Also, programming isn't the sort of job where you can fake your way through. If new people are trained up to enter the field they'll need to skills to match. As a relative share to population size the number of people studying computer science has been falling, not rising. These bootcamps and training programs are trying to bridge the skills gap, and so far have not succeeded. If anything there's going to be a skills glut, with a corresponding rise in pay.
Sure, employers always try to minimize pay. IT is not special, this is the case for all industries. Labor price is set through supply and demand, and programmer's wages are no different. Can you give a single example of an industry that used to have high wages but now has low wages? It would be exceedingly unlikely for IT to behave unlike every other industry.
Not sure why you think programming would be special in that regard. In a lot of companies, you will be able to keep your badly done job for a really long time as long as you have a good bond with your higher-ups. This goes for programming the same as sales or any other profession.
Except many unions do exactly this through closed shops and other tactics.
but when you say the solution "isn't to clamp down on the supply" i lose the thread of your argument.
clamping down on the supply is exactly what a public sector union does. union work rules and other union-favorable city regulations exclude or limit non-union workers who might otherwise be hired to carry out various city functions.
working for the city or the department of water and power can be a very good deal for the worker, but city residents pay more in taxes and see less service as a result. merely unionizing the labor force helps some people but hurts others.
indeed, a case can be made that, because police officers are so highly paid and benefitted, they are scarce. and because they are scarce, there's more property crime, and murder, than there would be otherwise. it seems quite plausible that some city residents pay a very high price because of this public sector unionization.
in politics, this leads to a strategy wherein city residents who live in "electorally unimportant" areas (i.e. poor areas with lower voter turnout) receive lower levels of government service than city residents in areas that vote a lot.
Forgive my crass reply, but, I have only seen unions become weaker and weaker in the U.S. And even when they were "strong" they didn't protect labor interests against increases in labor supply. Globalization has wrecked a number of industries, which unions were powerless against. The strongest card in the hand of any laborer is their scarcity.
Also, nobody (including myself) is advocating for "playing gatekeeper". I merely made a post warning people of what's coming. If you look closely my advice was to the individual - invest in yourself. Don't count on unions, or governments playing gatekeeper, to protect your current salary.
There have always been 'blue collar' engineering jobs. When I started in the tech industry I was making $13 an hour writing HTML and a bit of SQL here and there.
There are probably tens of thousands of "Software Engineers" putting together PHP sites, doing front end JS work at an entry level, hacking together some minor software customizations. I think you're right, this will become more prevalent. The world needs a lot more engineers to do this kind of work.
>There is a disinterest among business to pay higher, and higher salaries.
Evidence points to the contrary, salaries have skyrocketed in the last ten years... have you been paying attention?
I think the industry is overdue for consolidating on some language around the various kinds of software jobs. Nurses, doctors, surgeons, anesthesiologists, PAs, medical technicians, orderlies, general practitioners, obstetricians, pediatricians, pharmacists, etc. could all be "medical engineers". But broadly understood names for the different roles clarify expectations for each.
I'd be fine with that. $60k is a solid living. 1/4th of a pretty nice house. In Wisconsin.
I'd take that salary today - in Wisconsin. But I'm not sure you could even get your own room for that in the Bay Area, where they'll inevitably require you to be to earn it.
Stop worrying about your wages! Your job will eventually be automated away. A basic income is sure to protect you.
Not everyone lives in a tech hub of the country.
An unplanned, unsustainable, and uncommitted allowance provided to you by a group of people that seek power and do not share your interests will meet all of your future needs.
So what is the exact dollar amount one has to make before they no longer are allowed to worry about whether or not they'll have a job?
"A basic income is sure to protect you."
Given the current political climate in the US, I can only say bullshit.
Replace "developer" with any other profession to convince yourself.
Increasing the skill supply is the right thing to do if you're Google stakeholder, or broadly speaking, a capitalist. It's much more questionable if you're in the labor force.
I don't know how much a piano teacher costs, but I know it's the right amount because that's the equilibrium.
A more efficient allocation of resources would look like getting rid of 'too big to fail' banks and decreasing the rent that the finance industry extracts.
And, more importantly, why should I care if it's an "efficient allocation of resources" when the alternative is that I no longer get a decent wage?
My intuition is that the Pareto optional solution is one where nearly everyone is proficient in engineering. I see engineering as the new reading/writing. I think an engineering literate society would be more valuable and stable than our current society is.
Otherwise be a programmer.
This can be seen through how companies sponsor hackathons, the courses they create on websites like udacity and so on.
Maybe some of these grants can go towards retraining existing engineers who need to acquire new skills.
Programming / Networking / Hardware need a new type of University that is similar to Trade colleges but focus primarily on the skills and nothing more. The first 1-2 years could focus on the foundations while the next 2 years focus around solid design principles and actually developing projects (real or fake).
Watering down university education is not necessary. If someone wants to focus just on tech skills, they can go to a boot camp. Expanding boot camps so they become multi-year experiences may be a good idea, but they should not be called universities.
I guarantee if you created a tech school that focuses strictly on tech related classes for 4 years compared to a University that you would produce higher quality students than you would from schools that spend half of your college teaching you things that are not directly related to your job.
Some programs in universities can be glorified vocational schools. Other programs are excellent, relevant and evolving both for industry, and as innovators.
I disagree. I think they provide services to customers. Customers decide what the services are for. I suppose some students are very interested in laying a foundation in the liberal arts. Most, in my experience, are more worried about getting their careers started out on the right foot (especially considering all the loans that they are taking out). There is also a nontrivial number of students there for unsupervised extensions on their adolescences, though.
> ...they should not be called universities...
Why not? Is that going to be a regulated word now? What purpose does the distinction serve? We don't look at a degree and think, "Oh! University degree! This is a well-rounded person with a good foundation in the liberal arts!" No, we see, B.S. in Communications from Boise State and draw inferences from there.
The assumption here is that education is nonsense. I think the skills are far less valuable: Education teaches you about the world you have to live in, in business, and as a citizen, a parent, a consumer, etc., by exposing you to leading people and ideas from around the world and throughout history. It teaches you to reason, by exposing you to the great thinkers now and in history. Reading blogs on the Internet isn't nearly the same thing.
If we send people home from college only with the vocational skill of building an integrated circuit, they will find that it doesn't begin to address most of the challenges in life, much less their community's and society's.
Integrated circuits aren't what the West needs to move forward at this point, to address poverty, discrimination, war, and all the other issues. In our current society, we do very well with integrated circuits and very poorly with life, social and political issues, perhaps we need to focus on education in the latter, not the former.
Training people for jobs is the responsibility of vocational schools and corporate training .
As, there is no guarantee that it will even be alive by the time you leave university/your potential employer would be looking for that particular "skill".
Also you realize that learning a programming language can translate into other programming languages right?
There's the Khan Academy, too.
Im learning equity investing, and there seem to be never ending stream of free learning material online. Lectures from the top universities, youtube videos that teach you curious spreadsheet skills, assignments. As a matter of fact you have very few reasons to justify anything these days.
It just comes down to personal motivation.
For all practical purposes these days the cost of learning anything is equal to your monthly internet bill.
If you already have a degree, just in the wrong field, you don't need to get another degree. Just get the training by whatever means.
Heck, my degree is in mechanical engineering, yet I had jobs writing software.
Big, mature bureaucracies want formal signals. Small/young businesses and startups care about competence. Google is very large, but I suspect still manages to act "young" in many respects.
Soon they will.
If the internet people come at cheaper prices.
There isn't much difference between people who watch a lecture on the internet vs those who watch it live.
Expecting your education to make something of you, instead of making something of your education (track record) is another.
Managing to get a certificate does not guarantee one can apply those YouTube videos.
The cynic in me can clearly see their interest in the effects of this grant, but thinking on it more that interest might serve us better in the long run. I just hope the community gains from that money before it makes it's way back to Google.
Training kids to code? Yup..threat to their own job.
I'll admit that part of my suspicion is rooted in self-interest, but if demand for my labor grows faster than other people can supply it I'll still win out (along with many others).
"Coding bootcamps" are the new DeVry IT program of the 2010s.
While it's great they are working to train workers, it's not hard to imagine them having a conversation about this regarding lowered salaries.
This is a billion dollars going to nonprofits to help people level up their skills.
While Google should benefit indirectly from this, their investment will also help countless other enterprises and individuals.
This is badly needed, so I'm going to suppress my reflex to twist the story against Google and celebrate the fact that they're taking concrete action.
Show me another company doing anything similar.
To put it in perspective, $1 Billion is 10,000 times $100,000. Or 1000 $100,000/year jobs for ten years before discounting for the time value of money. Instead, big chunks of the money will get siphoned off to administrators and technical instructors and computer manufacturers and lots of other areas that already have plenty of money.
A billion dollars is less than half the annual budget of University of Nebraska for serving ~50,000 students [1]. Back of envelope turns $1 Billion into ~22,000 student years which is in the same people-helped ballpark as the 10,000 worker years, with the difference being that those 10,000 worker years come with actual jobs at $100,000 a year. And the 10,000 worker years are offset by the current cost of contracting out the work and the value that work returns to Google's bottom line.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Nebraska_system
Big companies are terrible at this. As companies add more engineers, the engineers become less productive, then managers get worried and so they 1. Hire more engineers and 2. introduce new project management tools and methodologies to the company which lowers productivity even more but which creates an illusion of progress for idiotic upper management — Over time managers and engineers get used to lower levels of productivity as it keeps declining and the company keep hiring more and more engineers whose engineering skills themselves keep declining from being poorly used.
They could hire a bunch of janitors, who are already employed anyway, and essentially just transfer that $1b directly into their pockets but at the end of the day they're still going to be janitors. By investing that some amount of money into education though, they're enabling them to go off and achieve something more meaningful that they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do.
More to the point though, what happens when a janitor learns to code and gets a coding job? You still need a janitor!
There is no need to train more CS people. There is a need for recovering the “grand bargain” between employers and employees that began in the 1940’s and was slowly unwound beginning in the mid 1970’s.
The reason that business schools exist on university campuses in the first place is because they were supposed to train business leaders to aspire to the same ideals as a university: knowledge, development of character, the search for truth to create a better word, etc.
If people knew how much harder they work today for fractions of a chance at a reward that is now 3x expensive, gestures like this would be seen for what they are, a band-aid in place of a tourniquet.
BTW if you’re upper-middle class, know life is now pretty good, but your economic base is being slowly eroded as well and there will be a time when your economic fall will come.
*- - - -
EDIT: Keep in mind, this is the same company whose head of HR (Laszlo Bock) literally says he does not believe training helps at all develop people. This sounds like I am taking him out of context but I kid you not. I wish I was at home so I could find the physical page numbers, but he says it in his book “Work Rules!” from a couple of years ago. It’s at the beginning of the chapter where he talks about the New York Yankees.
Laszlo Bock stepped down in July of last year. Eileen Naughton is the head of HR: http://fortune.com/2016/07/27/google-eileen-naughton/
https://qz.com/744740/googles-hugely-influential-head-of-hum...
He works here now: http://www.humu.com/
Regarding your larger point, I agree that we need more support for the lower middle class, but that's no reason to abandon training programs that provide better job opportunities to those who need it. On the margin, training a thousand janitors into productive web developers, would be a net positive for the economy and society as a whole.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-have-just-finished-reading-...
"Did you know that within 1 hour of training an employee, they have forgotten 50% of what they were taught. Within 24 hours they have forgotten 70%, and within a week they have forgotten 90%.
There is mostly because people truly learn from constant repetitive actions, yet companies cannot afford to have people learning 5 days a week instead of working 5 days a week - which makes 90% of training and development programmes a waste of money. Money which Google invest in recruiting instead.
Laszlo Bock says that because we learn on the job, the very best people not only have learnt more than you can teach them already, but they seek learning themselves in everything they do and naturally grow without you needing to spend a fortune on training.
"Harvard Business School was founded to promote Taylorism and fight back against unions and organized labor.
Just seems like Google out of all companies has a need for the best, not just blue collar code slingers. Many people with 4 years CS degrees from good schools do not get hired.
Google's hiring process does not reflect this at all. Even entry level positions have very high bar. Boring has nothing to do with it, Google wants the best.
> Secondly, Google declines qualified candidates roughly 50% of the time according to people who work there.
That's not random, that's just setting a really high bar.
Have you been through a Google interview? Their phone screen questions are equivalent to many companies' "hardest" interview problems.
(Not to be taken too seriously)
$1bn is a lot of money when put towards education and Google can make 5+ year investments when it comes to tech talent.
Labor does not get to share in economic growth, they get to split an ever decreasing share of profits. The more people that are available to sell their labor, the more pieces that shrinking pie has to be cut into.
Still, as nice as giving money to other organizations is, it would even better to see them actually training people from a diverse variety of backgrounds. They're not exactly taking any responsibility here.
Do you hold people who want to fight climate to the same standard? Is it ridiculous for an individual to support a carbon tax without voluntarily buying carbon credits on their own?
Maybe Yellowstone will erupt in 80 years and it won't matter, but on balance, it's a no-brainer.
Speaking as a Xoogler who was on a visa and got a green card sponsored by Google, from my own experience I and others in my position were treated very well.
Nothing like the horror stories I read about non-SV tech companies.
There you go. Perfect!
Degrees don't come for free, technical graduates don't come for free, students have to go to college for that and in US you need a LOT of money for that.
This is the chicken and egg problem where nobody wants to address the real problem an everyone is going around giving superficial solutions.
The rate of student loan defaults is actually inversely proportional to the amount owed.
Maybe this is shitty, maybe it isn't, but it's probably more economical.
I doubt it will make you feel any better, but I don't think there will be a place in the world for a private company the size of Google (comparatively speaking).
Imagine a world where individuals will be starting up companies in their garage with a scale equivalent to Fortune 50 companies of today.
Oh, and remember the mess Gradle was in 2015/2016? How much money could it possibly cost to better document some of the major tools?
There's popular opposition to Trump's promise to give people jobs by resurrecting industries that a lot of people (probably Google as well) would rather see stay dead. But there's no denying people need jobs, and formal education ain't cheap.
Now we've got a tech giant backing that up with cold hard cash. It would be great to see other companies getting on board and putting some dough in the ring or at least offering some kind of internship/work experience programs for people coming out of an education funded by these grants.
All of humanity growing together towards a brighter future for everyone is truly our highest calling.
In a lot of cases these are probably viewed as the same thing but, for example, I would ask: When was the last time a Senior Java Developer was a candidate for a Senior FrontEnd Web Developer position?
I think the future is going to be a lot less about being hired for "jobs" with "companies". Instead it's going to be substantially more about "projects" being done by "groups / organizations". The groups / organizations being assembled / disassembled with high frequency.
Some better nerds here can hardly imagine perfectly smart people who cannot yet touch type or turn a spreadsheet into a group calendar. Our miraculous simple decision support tools are still opaque to majorities of Americans. Only Americans far outside Google will create value to create jobs. That takes planning for any possible sweat equity or financial investment. We have generations of people to train with tools. The boy genius prizes for ever new tooling are not really separate concerns. Cultivating and harvest new boy geniuses from the field is expensive. They don't exactly grow on trees.
Google like Apple or Microsoft had to discover and rediscover their own relevance. They cultivate their markets now with intensive growth. This is a good move.
It's great that they're doing this, but unless they're going to be doing it in the places that are hurting, not much is going to change.
git add $1B
git commit -am "train US workers for high tech jobs"
git push
(please PR for a better git joke)
