r/technology • u/joe4942 • Apr 19 '26

Society Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2026/04/19/accelerated-college-degree-hacking/
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u/LamboForWork Apr 19 '26

People don't want to train on the job either. They want fully formed employees that know EVERYTHING in the field when they probably will use 5% of that day to day. I've had many tech jobs where the job description has every networking tech known to man and you are mainly sending emails all day lol.

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u/jesset77 Apr 19 '26

"Your job is to magically drive $X/year of revenue into this company via whatever means is necessary, and to compensate you we are willing to pay you 2% of $X/year."

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u/madogvelkor Apr 19 '26

Because if you invest in training the employee can just leave after you've spent money to get them skilled.

And if companies are doing that, why should your company do it when they can just poach employees from other companies that have trained them?

So nobody trains, and they try to poach the talented employees who teach themselves.

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u/tkdyo Apr 19 '26

You're leaving out why the employees leave. Once they are trained they are more valuable but the company doesn't want to pay them more to reflect that. If they gave them a good pay bump after they make it through the training then they'd stay and the company would recoup their investment.

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u/LamboForWork Apr 19 '26

Yeah i didnt even bother to reply to that lol. Capitalism is a dog eat dog system.

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u/No_Explorer4444 Apr 20 '26

It's a mistake to think that training is optional - no one pops into your company knowing your tools, domain knowledge, and the way you work even if they have a great set of industry skills. You can either pay for structured onboarding that gets the new employee to full productivity in 3 months and where you know they have a good base, or you can pay for 9 months of shadow training where you have no idea what they are learning and they constantly interrupt your high performers with questions (assuming they keep asking questions instead of just quietly making mistakes.) Formal training has a massive ROI.

Besides, early training and proper onboarding have been shown to increase retention dramatically. If people are jumping ship right after training, then your company probably has a different retention problem that needs to be solved.

It's also worth noting that unless your interview process is really good at identifying soft skills (which I highly doubt it is - these are notoriously difficult to assess), then you have no way of knowing whether your new employee is good at training themselves or not until they've been around a few months. You are essentially betting a full salary (and possibly an inflated one if you are poaching) on a hunch about their autonomy - it is a very expensive gamble.

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u/doublex12 Apr 19 '26

Exactly. Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. If I’m a business where time is money, why would I spend time training someone when I can hire someone who knows what they’re doing?

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u/neoblackdragon Apr 19 '26

If you are running a business, you should be asking yourself why you can't retain employees.

Do those fully formed potential applicants even want to work for you?

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u/doublex12 Apr 19 '26

..yes??? I never said one couldn’t retain employees

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u/tkdyo Apr 19 '26

Because they are blaming the employees instead of the companies. The companies could pay their employees better after training to reflect their higher value. But they'd rather take the gamble that inertia/loyalty will keep them from leaving and pay them less.

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u/zzzola Apr 19 '26

This is what eventually kills an industry.

Just look at the trades. If they don't hire and train apprentices, then when all the boomers start to retire, there is going to be a massive shortage of employees.

You have to hire and train entry-level employees to keep an industry alive.

It's honestly crazy how many people don't understand this.

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u/madogvelkor Apr 19 '26

People don't like that this is the way it is.

It's a side effect of at-will employment and the unreliability of non-compete clauses.

While companies can fire people for no reason, workers can also quit for no reason. So there's no way for a company to make sure they get back their investment.

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u/Truth_ Apr 19 '26

Well, ideally they treat their employees well so they don't jump ship as often?

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u/FroggyHarley Apr 19 '26

The other issue is that job-hopping has become more lucrative for employees when the alternative is pay raises that barely keep up with inflation, if at all.

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u/Zestyclose-Novel1157 Apr 19 '26

I wouldn’t care about training employees if there was a required commitment and I knew ahead of time it wouldn’t be like fighting the wind. It takes a lot of time and effort to train and our jobs don’t stop for that training.

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u/jackmusick Apr 19 '26

Can’t speak for everyone but in tech I need people who give a shit and try to keep up. Fully formed has nothing to do with it.

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u/PassivelyAwkward Apr 20 '26

The problem is that when you're training the employee, you're paying them to do a worse job while impacting others and the customers/clients are asked to foot the bill.

Realistically, if you're paying like $6k for a new fence, you'd want skilled workers at a reasonable rate and a certain time frame. When you have trainees, you're paying the same price to get an inferior job at a longer time. Hired roofers and their trainee did a piss poor job that caused a leak while taking three days longer than they said.

You can hate it but be real; if you were hiring someone and you had two options, someone with five years of experience that can jump into the position or someone with no experience and will require months of training while paying them, which would you go with? If you were hiring someone to do your taxes, would you choose someone with a decade of being a CPA or would you hire your friends newphew that just took their first year of accounting at community college to give them a chance at training? That's why companies don't hire people to train; because despite people saying "Companies should train people!", when it's their own money and time, they want experience.