It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills.
I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!
Hanging around for a while (a long while) doesn't necessarily mean dedication worth investing in, it could just be that I have a shocking lack of ambition :)
What is more likely with the 35 number is that these are multiple simultaneous contracts. When working as a contractor you're fixing that problem or that project. The company isn't going to have you around for longer than a month after it's been fixed and documented.
There's no reason to spend company resources on training a person any more than there's reason for you to pay a plumber to be reading "learn to be an electrician in 10 days" while they're supposed to be working on fixing the sink or doing the plumbing for new construction.
You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff.
You get hired to do a job for money.
What "investment" do you expect company to do?
Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent?
If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like you pay college to teach you?
(To explicitly state the obvious: I'm not saying OP's a bad person for doing this, just saying the employers were right not to invest in them...)
I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.
Guided learning with instant feedback can be much more efficient than just consuming and tinkering on your own. Depends on the topic, the teacher and situation of course. The quality of available material is also all over the place, and not every topic has enough material, or anything at all.
Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out."
What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!
Book subscriptions and conference travel are quite cheap in comparison.
e.g. my current company's ladder explicitly mentions that the first two levels are receiving active mentoring and supervision. Third (~5 yrs xp) is still receiving mentoring but also providing it. Fourth and up you're generally expected to be the one doing the mentoring.
What that actually means on the ground is that I try to make sure my teammates are asking good questions/paying attention to the right things/thinking from the right perspectives. I can also let them know about some solution or basic approach for what they're doing, but then they need to go read more and think more deeply about what I'm talking about. So to me, "skills" are just something people need to pick up themselves.
With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.
There is a mismatch between how you would expect industry to work and what my last 30 years has taught me.
> With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement.
I have been at 4 companies for around 2 years or more. The rest of the positions were either contract or startup or contract-to-hire. The vast majority of engineers seem to settle in and suffer at terrible companies, rather than make moves to better jobs. They also tend to settle at whatever they are assigned and grow their skillsets by their employer's needs, rather than on their own.
Over the last 2 decades, if you stayed somewhere for over 2 years, you better have added concrete skills to your resume and have increased your compensation by over 10%. If that's not on track, look for another job, imo.
Contract-to-hire has been very popular. ie JPMC, credit, medical, adtech, games, big retail, subcontractor shops, to startups (4 of which were acquired). All initiatives to progress the careers of developers is applied more or less company wide because the line between contract-to-hire and fulltime is considered an engineering issue if there is more than hub. If you are a sole contributor, on some satellite project or still considered in training, you might not participate due to scheduling that had already been arranged, but the idea that contractors are excluded is more a possibility than a certainty. Most of the initiatives are little more than maybe someone talking with you every quarter, anyway.
> Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.
It's strange that people are assuming engineers are treated special because of a resume that nobody looks at after an offer is made - having conducted hundreds of interviews. This must be a very rare thing some people may do.
It's not like I don't speak with ex-coworkers or run into them at times - eg one guy I taught Java to (at a position where java wasn't required except for a tiny tool), is the team lead at blizzard now. If I was made a pariah, I would hear about it over the years.
In US you go to college for 4-5 years and pay $50k per year. Or more.
You pay to learn. A lot of money, a lot of time.
Then you get a job, where the idea is that you get paid for doing work and you expect the employer to do what?
You seem to expect that not only you won't be doing the things you're being paid to do but the employer will pay for your education on company's time.
How many weeks per year of time off do you expect to get from a company?
You'll either say a reasonable number, like 1 or 2, which is insignificant to the time you supposedly spent learnings (5 years). You just spend 250 weeks supposedly learning but 1 or 2 weeks a year is supposed to make a difference?
Or you'll say unreasonable number (anything above 2 weeks) because employment is not free education.
