I've worked for five companies, on the same products (well, variations there-of over time), for 25 years, due to take-overs (I nearly left ~10 years ago due to management numskullery, but a timely buy-out of the bit I worked for fixed my problems while the rest of the company died off).

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 :)

Perhaps the lack of investment in their skills was the cause for the commenter’s job hopping, not the effect.

If you include consulting that could easily be 10 companies a year...

Putting people on projects they’re only partly qualified for, ideally with mentoring, and letting them learn even though it takes longer than having the mentor do it by themselves. Allowing people to fail and try again without risking their ratings or their career.

Book subscriptions and conference travel are quite cheap in comparison.

> For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free.

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.

> I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year.

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.

I mean the comment says "contract" right there; you can easily be on a contract with multiple companies simultaneously. When I was freelancing full-time ca. 2010-2013 or so I often had 5-6 active contracts running simultaneously. I probably worked for 15-20 different companies total in that 3-4 year span.

That's not how these initiatives are executed, unless the shop is very small. In which case, there's no concrete training offered anyway. If it's large, they don't want to allocate a lot of budget rather than starting a new hiring round. I would say the lack of in-job developer training (or resourcing) is due to multiple factors that results in a consistency rather than specifically targeting individuals.

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.