America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise? It would be foolish for an employee to let someone else handle career growth for them as their interests aren't aligned (or even known). If you want help with career growth then find a mentor, don't rely on your manager.

Managers should facilitate training to improve employee productivity and help prepare them for a promotion. But that isn't really the same as career growth.

> Employees have always been responsible for managing their own career growth and always will be. How can it be otherwise?

On the contrary, from the 40s to the 70s (possibly well into the 80s) the corporation was heavily invested in your career. Employees were expected to dedicate their lives to the firm, and the firm, in turn, was expected to take care of them. This "free-for-all" employment model is fairly recent.

Edit - added source (1993): https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/employers-employees-no-...

> If you want help with career growth then find a mentor, don't rely on your manager.

Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned unless fraud is involved.

It didn't stop in the 70s. In many countries in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, it's still common for businesses to retain employees over the arc of their career.

Certainly true, my comments are specific to the North American workplace.

You fix it the way every other industry has fixed it: broke/agent model.

Can you expand on this? I can't find any references online.

Even the creepy business terminology "human capital" implies something that a business actively wants to grow. That is in stark contrast to how most businesses manage their people today.

Not entirely. Businesses don't try to grow things like buildings and inventory, they try to manage them at levels that make sense for their present and projected sales.

(So the same sort of mercenary treatment that employees get)

To get employers to invest in employees, they'd need more of a stake in it. Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.

A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.

Inventory is part of working capital. Companies generally understand that they want to expand working capital.

Buildings are often leased and are therefore not capital at all.

Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront. Individual 1-8 week training courses don’t actually cost that much to operate internally and generally allow someone to do something very specific and useful. There’s plenty of ways to boost short term retention like a bonus after 1 year of service.

50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.

> Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work.

Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on the work? ktnx

No, that's not how it usually works (at least not for professional and managerial employees in the US). Mentors are typically more senior, not peers and not someone in the employee's direct chain of command. They may be in an entirely different organization.

I don't know how you could believe that career growth interests are aligned between employees and their managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal career path will involve changing companies at some point. This is generally not in their current manager's best interest.

> Nobody is talking about handing out 200k of training upfront.

Why not?

> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.

"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?

If you don't upskill for free with no additional comp, how will they continue to cram down labor costs to make their quarterly numbers? You are, broadly speaking, treated as an asset to be sweat until you can be replaced.

As a manager, I disagree. It is entirely within my interest to have a direct do better; this provides me a path in the future to switch orgs when they switch orgs. If I level up or leave, I bring them with. If they level up or leave, they potentially bring me with. Team, self, org in descending order of priority. Companies are temporary, network is what carries you until the end of your career.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698197 ("The best advice I ever got was from a mentor who told me: Your network is your net worth but only if you give more than you take.")

> is more expensive than

Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.

Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.

Well, tbf, it's not like there's no carrot in this case. (I'm at a FAANG)

But I'm sure what you're describing is common in the general case.

It's also fundamental tech and a research pipeline supporting new ones.

There are numerous examples of whole competencies were transferred to a foreign partner, leaving only sales and marketing in the US. TV's for example, gone by 2000, leaving only a swirl of patent walls to further prevent them from coming back. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/10/22/america...

And research? DEC WRL, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc ... Which corp has the gumption to fund any of that again? They'd rather pad the current quarter than invest in the next.

> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.

I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.

I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.

Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.

Outside of government, this shift also coincides with the decline of pensions and the rise of the 401k.

Career growth has always been a shared responsibility between employees and employers. In white-collar fields--especially medicine and engineering--education has long been frontloaded, with formal schooling as the main on-ramp.

Blue-collar jobs, by contrast, have relied more on trade schools, mentorship, and hands-on training. These pathways have steadily eroded since the 1980s.

Much of this traces back to the Open Door Policy with China and the broader Free Trade Agreements that followed. These moved massive segments of industry offshore--along with the structures that once incentivized long-term employee development through education and skill-building.

Revitalizing domestic industry could reintroduce competition among employers, which in turn could restore the pre-1990s incentives for long-term investment in the workforce.

> you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.

Because it would be very easy to abuse. It would be oh-so-easy to give an employee training worth $200k - in the company's estimate - and then force them to stick around for years.

"But nobody made them agree to that!"

Sure, and nobody makes anyone take on a bad loan from a shady car dealership, or a bad mortgage sold by the same people who tanked the economy, etc., etc.

Certainly, at FAANG outlier comp, it is likely worth your while vs the median.

In a broker/agent model agents are people doing most of the client-facing work, but they defer an offset of both liabilities and earnings to a broker. This is how real estate agents, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and many others enter their professions, at least in the US. Because the broker carries civil, and possibly criminal, liable for the violations of their represented agents they have a vested interest in the quality of product/service those agents deliver. In the medical industry the agent phase is described as residency and internship. Its a matter of who actually holds the license that allows a person to perform professionally.

In criminal enterprise drug mules and prostitutes often subscribe to this business model. Drug mules will transport drugs as part of an illegal enterprise and are paid by criminal organizations that have vested interest in the successful completion of the logistical services provided by the drug mules. Likewise, in some geographies prostitutes will voluntarily pay pimps a percentage of their earnings in exchange for physical security and those pimps stake the value of their services on the success and reputation of the services they provide to their prostitute agents.

You also have to understand most of the software industry loves to bitch and cry about all these problems they see in hiring and practicing and yet don't really want any of these problems to be solved.

My bestie works in sales and marketing. Events, promotions, audience engagement. Long time experience with national brands, loves helping local businesses (side hustle).

A huge part of her job is recruiting and hiring. Part of her pitch is proactive career development.

Paraphrasing: I want you to join our team. I also understand that this job is just one stop on your journey. While you're here, what can I do to help you get the skills and experience you want for your next job?

Consequently, she has a HUGE network, built over decades. Something comes up and she knows just the right person. She has her pick of new opportunities.

Wouldn't you love to have her as your boss?

I've had precisely 2 bosses in my career that had any impulse for nurturing, mentoring, career development. Whereas I've tried to be that kind of boss, given the limits of our current system.

I find "human capital" better than "human resources", as it has connotations of something valuable to be invested carefully as opposed to something simply to be consumed and discarded.

Of course, in the end it doesn't really matter, it is all Orwellian anyway.

If more employers gave raises such that an existing employee in a given role was paid the same or more as what they would pay a new hire to fill the same role, I don't think we'd see the level of job hopping that we currently do.

Corporate research spending is nearly $1T/yr. Yes, corporations have a lower risk tolerance than the government, but that's not always a bad thing.

> Right now if you invest $200,000 to train someone, they can immediately quit and go work somewhere else and you're out $200k, so they don't do that.

And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not paying people enough to stay.

What you’re describing already exists and are aptly named TRAPs (Training Repayment Agreement Provisions). Companies already abuse these and in fact are illegal in California. Here’s an article covering it from a few years ago: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-us-companies-charging-...

Companies who pay attention to free cash flow will typically try to manage inventory and non-cash/equivalent working capital down, not up.

Not just risk tolerance - they also have different (generally much more short-sighted) incentives.

> How can it be otherwise?

It was otherwise. And is IS otherwise in many other rich countries, as well as not-so-rich ones.

In these places, the employer-employee relationship is more of a relationship and less of a transaction to be reassessed every morning.

If you don't believe it, because you've never seen it, then you are probably American, probably young. And seeing other possibilities is a good reason to study (modern!) history, and to travel.

How do you improve your "return on capital"?

That's right - by keeping output constant (e.g. through automation) while reducing capital!

> I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.

From a statistical point of view, that's probably to be expected. Kind of like how open umbrellas get rained on more.

When a hard-to-hire minority gives way to a big growth in the workforce, by definition the majority arrive after the change.

It's deep hubris in our leaders that assumes existing capital/values/structures/motivations are sufficient to allow newcomers ( & new generations) to contribute..

  However. Bell Labs did it, so what sort of humility existed then that (mostly) does not exist now?!?

Tangentially, I have not personally tried, but it seems possible:

("Unintentionally moderate"[1-2] business thinkers like PG/YC partners do it all the time)

  Wonder if hubris is necessary for continued survival of the economy.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html

>Have to be an asshole or something

[2] https://archive.today/latest/coralcap.co/2022/02/why-japanes...

In networking the situation is just ridiculous. Companies just expect people to know Cisco Nexus, ASA, XE, Palo Alto, Linux, AWS VPC, and do a bit of database and backup admin all for less than $100,000 a year.

But then the ip-poachers wait for you at the gates. Investing into the new thing, in a world order where copying the new thing is the best game approach, makes R&D a looser strategy. You need temporary punishment tariffs on products that steal IPs to recuperate the investments and make it a bad strategy - or else..

Patents do not work - because the rule of law does not exists without the international order and goverments have a tendency to trade away such cases for protection of big players.

Literally patents.

But you have to take out a copy of the patent in EVERY country you want protection. Most companies don't do this and then whine about copies.

And lest someone whose never done it says they don't work: note how diligently generic drug companies wait for patents to expire.

> Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work.

Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year.

What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.

Isn’t that simply the inherent risk associated with business ventures? Not every investment will yield a profit. I recall reading about Ward Parkinson, one of the founders of Micron Technology. During his tenure at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company paid for his Master’s degree at Stanford. However, upon graduating, he promptly left to work for Reticon.

The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual business. It's typically something like the business hires a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company. The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-english speaking coders locally.

It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.

> "But nobody made them agree to that!"

And to amplify your point just a bit, if the alternative is losing your healthcare and possibly going homeless, what does "agreeing" even mean anymore?

It's the same problem in the trades. Apprentices tend to cost the company more than their output so no one wants to hire and train them.

What you’re describing is monstrously expensive, and doesn’t actually prevent IP violations, it just allows you to recover some of your losses, which is also expensive, and is unrealistic if the violators are fly-by-night operations.

This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.

That’s sounds like a functioning free market. Either they find the quality of labor they require at that rate, or they don’t. Either you take such a job at that rate because you have the required skills and knowledge and that’s your best offer, or you don’t.

If you are willing to have a remote team then this is not a problem - lots of great (senior) developers in EU, Asia,... No need to pay FAANG level compensations either. Curiously enough not many US companies do that, or those that do, put rounds and rounds of interviews in front of each candidate. Which is OK I guess - if you pay FAANG salaries. But if not, maybe just limit to 3 interviews, one hour each? If that's not enough to judge a potential hire then I don't know what is. Once the hiring is fixed you should have lots of great candidates available.

> What you’re describing is monstrously expensive

I would actually consider this to be an desirable side effect: if you want governments to enforce your monopoly using their state authority, you better pay for this really well. :-)

So you'd prefer there be no protection for inventors who aren't already wealthy?

I prefer for inventors not having to deal with the minefield of loads of existing patents.

I wonder if we could reproduce the magic of Bell Labs by basically re-creating some Ma Bell style businesses: grant a profitable, but regulated monopoly that had the financial security to think long-term and be willing to fund out-of-the-box research to service internal needs or hypotheticals.

I mean, wasn't this ZIRP Google? Chrome, Android, Project Zero, etc.

1) The alternative is for millions of local-currency patents in Lesotho to automatically be valid for two decades in USA, EU, and Japan.

2) An of course it doesn't prevent IP violations - Eurocopter (now Airbus helicopters) had to spend millions to enforce their patents against the thieves* at Bell helicopter.

https://www.bananaip.com/intellepedia/bell-helicopter-v-euro...

* not my preferred choice of words, but its the tone on this forum.

I would point to the emergence of Milton Friedman’s school of thought that the only thing a company should care for is delivering “shareholder value.”

One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up.

I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the ones putting the upfront capital so early). Google also has the X moonshot lab that is trying to do similar things to Bell Labs. I think there’s just a lot of romanticism of the golden age when developments were relatively easier because we hadn’t exhausted the low hanging fruit of applied quantum and material sciences.

> Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.

How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee?

The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will take whichever job pays more, so the employer who paid the $50k has to offer the same salary as the one who didn't. And then who is going to pay the $50k when they could get the employee that someone else paid the money to train, for the same salary?

I'm confused by the ending of this article. It seems like two mutually exclusive outcomes happened.

> The court held that the landing gear certified and sold by Bell Helicopter on its Model 429 helicopter, namely the Production Gear, does not infringe the Eurocopter patent. The court invalidated all but one claim of Eurocopter’s patent. Bell Helicopter is, therefore, free to continue all use and sales of its Model 429 helicopter with its existing landing gear.

So it doesn't infringe and they can continue to use the landing gear. But then

> In addition to awarding to Eurocopter damages and punitive damages, the judge also issued an injunction enjoining Bell from manufacturing, using, or selling the infringing landing gear, and also ordered Bell to destroy all infringing landing gears in its possession.

What? I'm clearly missing something here.

It's almost like maybe there was a point to unions and guilds and what not...

You don't even need to go out of the US. Plenty of good US people are down to live in non-FAANG COL areas and thus can have more take-home for less upfront pay.

> The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years.

No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.

Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.

As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.

There is also the negative effect of over-expensive ip blocking product development as no new product with unclear potential can take on prohibitive license costs.

Exsept usually adding extraneous requirements and low pay offer is cover for wanting h1b1 wage slaves that have a visa bound to the employer so they can't demand market rate or risk being sent home so a new artificially low market rate is created. So much for it being a free market.

I kind of wonder how much of that money being reported is really research vs gamed numbers? eg for taxation claim purposes and things along those lines.

[I wish HN could host more long-running threads like SO as these topics require substantial back & forth]

Lasers? Information theory? Transistors?? Silicon tech in general? If you think hype-&-wishful-thinking-driven Google now or ever can be compared with Bell Labs.. you might just be a recent immigrant. The atmosphere at BL, I'm told, was way different. More an indefinite excitement (what can we do with quantum??) rather than the definite, closely guarded, superstition of Thiel ("quantum computing is the next big secret!!")

(Or maybe it's just that old subdued Jewish atheism of the East Coast vs the neurotic ambitious religiosity of California!)

I'm less biased against your low-hanging fruit framework.. still, I suspect that a rival framework based on the minimal attention paid to teaching undergrads at American universities would surpass it. I.e. materials science knowledge base has been spreading only about as quickly as the Baumol cost disease

2 other issues,

Even if there are low-hanging fruits in STEMM (of which I think there are still aplenty), infotech and especially advertising fruits are thought to be strewn all over the floor.

With AI, both thinkers & doers get into this weird emo haze of hubris+laziness, expecting neuro-furniture rearrangement to turn magically into paradigm shifts

Microsoft and Google are not representative of most companies.

They have to invest in the innovation. Investor returns for most other companies are based on copy and paste.

What about Meta^W Amazon*.. is their innovation too directed/constrained/product-based?

(I regret to inform you that HN are still withholding my comment upvote privileges)

*Because the gender of their founder is Kind Inventor

Especially interested in data from Alphabet (e.g., from ongoing legal battles?)

(I'd assume Amazon & Microsoft are too clever, too well-run for their own good/our eptification)

The first gear that Bell made was clearly a copy of Eurocopter's, though they claimed otherwise, and because of this they couldn't / didn't want to move on with certification and production. A lot of this can be considered as not being patent infrigement (development and experimentation, prior art claims...).

They slightly modified the gear on the production models. Eurocopter claimed the slightly modified gear is essentially the same (likely true) and thus still infringes on the patent (the court ruled otherwise).

The judge said the new modified gear is okay but ordered the old ones to be destroyed.

A Pyrrhic tactical victory for Eurocopter (kept their patent at great cost) and a strategic defeat (as Bell is essentially still selling their tech).

And it will come back to hunt bell, as there ip can no be invalidated in europe and get a tactical defeat in the tit for tat that the ip-laws have decayed into.