A main reason that this situation has come about is that companies will no longer bring employees "up the ladder" by OTJ training. There was a time - lo, these many years ago - when you could start out as a tech support guy, talking on the phones all day, and work your way up to a dev job. You just had to show your interest and some initiative to learn.
Today's managers don't look around for candidates in-house. They get approval for a new seat, the paperwork is processed by HR, the ad goes up on the job board, that's that. Imagine - I once worked at a company where all positions were advertised first internally, and only pushed out if no suitable candidates were found there. Wut? My wife worked over 25 years at the same company, making the machines that make silicon wafers for computer chips, for companies like Intel. She went from assembly line worker to QA manager. She had to get ISO certified to run a cleanroom.
The world o' work today is truly f'ed. Tech is ruled by young white guys pumped on their own innate superiority, claiming that it's a "meritocracy." Pfft. It's good to see stories told from the other side of the room.
My dad did this! He worked for Bell Atlantic then Verizon as a telecom technician and then later they sent him to "cable college" (name always makes me laugh for some reason but it was this, honestly pretty good internal training program they had) and eventually he crossed over from blue-collar, going up in bucket trucks, to being titled as an engineer and was very involved in the rollout of fiberoptic cable to residential areas that Verizon pushed in the 2000s. I would have more sympathy with companies not wanting to train if it weren't the case that all of them have special snowflake tech stacks for the most part, and while you CAN get transferrable knowledge some of the larger companies are honestly frankly very invested in massive legacy systems that you really aren't going to be 100% prepared for unless you are in that company receiving training (my first programming job was like that, they had entire made up programming languages running gigantic internal systems. Around the time I left they were training me to learn a proprietary language they used with no name, lol). Anyway now just rambling but thank you for your comments really appreciate it
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Excellent article.
A main reason that this situation has come about is that companies will no longer bring employees "up the ladder" by OTJ training. There was a time - lo, these many years ago - when you could start out as a tech support guy, talking on the phones all day, and work your way up to a dev job. You just had to show your interest and some initiative to learn.
Today's managers don't look around for candidates in-house. They get approval for a new seat, the paperwork is processed by HR, the ad goes up on the job board, that's that. Imagine - I once worked at a company where all positions were advertised first internally, and only pushed out if no suitable candidates were found there. Wut? My wife worked over 25 years at the same company, making the machines that make silicon wafers for computer chips, for companies like Intel. She went from assembly line worker to QA manager. She had to get ISO certified to run a cleanroom.
The world o' work today is truly f'ed. Tech is ruled by young white guys pumped on their own innate superiority, claiming that it's a "meritocracy." Pfft. It's good to see stories told from the other side of the room.
My dad did this! He worked for Bell Atlantic then Verizon as a telecom technician and then later they sent him to "cable college" (name always makes me laugh for some reason but it was this, honestly pretty good internal training program they had) and eventually he crossed over from blue-collar, going up in bucket trucks, to being titled as an engineer and was very involved in the rollout of fiberoptic cable to residential areas that Verizon pushed in the 2000s. I would have more sympathy with companies not wanting to train if it weren't the case that all of them have special snowflake tech stacks for the most part, and while you CAN get transferrable knowledge some of the larger companies are honestly frankly very invested in massive legacy systems that you really aren't going to be 100% prepared for unless you are in that company receiving training (my first programming job was like that, they had entire made up programming languages running gigantic internal systems. Around the time I left they were training me to learn a proprietary language they used with no name, lol). Anyway now just rambling but thank you for your comments really appreciate it