So what are the long term risks when senior staff leaves and those need to be replaced with new seniors that have never seen the existing work vs. promoting younger people who knows the projects and practises?

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globular-toast 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Long... term... risk? What is this archaic concept? I just want to get into a position where I can extract rent from children when they grow up. Why do I need to worry about this so called long term risk?

	▲	mothballed 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>I just want to get into a position where I can extract rent from children when they grow up. That's called social security.

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kypro 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These days normally what corporates do is bring in people from abroad who have the skills.

The idea that companies would seek to train up domestic workers if there is a skill shortage is outdated today – even if theoretically this might be good for the domestic workforce. It's just cheaper and easier to import the skills needed.

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nicce 5 days ago | parent [-]

I think I disagree. It sounds like that companies that do this are average at most and has nothing own - otherwise it would not be possible to just replace the workers. If your company is average, it does not attract real talents.

But maybe my comment was not noting every discipline. I was mostly thinking about software development.

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kypro 5 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not talking about "replacing" workers. I'm talking about hiring the most qualified which in a global talent pool will almost always be someone from abroad. There's no reason for a company to hire a relatively unskilled graduate domestically when they could hire someone with more experience from abroad.

If you look at the workforce makeup of many large tech companies today there's a reason Indian and East-Asian talent is so overrepresented, and it's not because they lack talent. It's because if you actually want to hire the best of the best you're not going to bring in juniors from the domestic workforce and train them up.

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nicce 5 days ago | parent [-]

> I'm not talking about "replacing" workers. I'm talking about hiring the most qualified which in a global talent pool will almost always be someone from abroad. There's no reason for a company to hire a relatively unskilled graduate domestically when they could hire someone with more experience from abroad.

What I meant with replacing was that when someone retires, you hire a new worker and hope that they immediately produce a similar value. If the company has unique skill requirements, it is unlikely that the new hire provides similar value, at least immediately. How long it takes, is a question.

Alternatively, you have hired a junior already _on top of the_ already existing senior person. Junior doesn't have so good value/cost ratio but they still contribute. But this will increase over time.

And when the senior then retires, you are comparing the value of this trained junior vs. the associated risk of random new hire. You are never replacing retired person directly with "junior", junior is just an additional less necessary investment worker.

> If you look at the workforce makeup of many large tech companies today there's a reason Indian and East-Asian talent is so overrepresented, and it's not because they lack talent. It's because if you actually want to hire the best of the best you're not going to bring in juniors from the domestic workforce and train them up.

I haven't heard yet a company that actually has produced valuable product because of it. Usually the flow has been, that some Western country has created a succesfull product, and then later the workforce has been changed. And almost always the quality has decreased. But it does not matter because the product got already decent market share, and it takes years for revenue to drop because of that.

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kypro 5 days ago | parent [-]

> I haven't heard yet a company that actually has produced valuable product because of it. Usually the flow has been, that some Western country has created a succesful product, and then later the workforce has been changed. And almost always the quality has decreased. But it does not matter because the product got already decent market share, and it takes years for revenue to drop because of that.

Are you talking about out-sourcing or hiring the best talent from abroad with work-visas? I guess I don't understand why you would think domestic labour is inherently better? I understand this perspective with outsourcing because it can be difficult to maintain quality when outsourcing to a team in another country, but there's plenty of examples of successful tech companies hiring the best talent from abroad, no? I'd argue this is almost the norm for large tech companies in the US.

And for what it's worth, I'm not saying I agree with this. I'm just saying that if you're a company genuinely interested in hiring the best of the best it makes no sense to limit your Labour pool to the domestic market, and it rarely makes sense to consider graduates unless they are truly exceptional given their relative lack of experience.

In the past companies were simply forced to hire and train domestically because countries like India and China didn't have the education or technological access to compete with the average graduate in the US. Today most of the world is online and education is decent enough that the best talent is far less concentrated to a few geographical areas.

In a pure meritocracy (which the US is close to) in a globalised world it's quite rare that someone graphically local will be the best person available for any given role.

	▲	nicce 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		But you can domestically hire that junior too - I am just arguing about that pure replacement model. You can pick the top talent from juniors too. Otherwise, if nobody ever hire juniors, at some point you run out of any workers because there is a portion for their life when they simply cannot get the job in their field. Young people won't invest the field if the first job requires that you are magician or have 10+ years of work experience that you either can't have or need to use your free-time. Anyway, big tech doesn't work as an generic example because they have much more resources and therefore it cannot be generalized. US also is an exception because the only expectation is English language. In other countries you may need two languages.

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booleandilemma 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The beauty is that, as mere workers, it's not our problem. Let the ruling class figure it out.