What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures (at least if you're fulltime). Now at least at my company, we have unlimited use of codex, which you can ask for help explaining things to you. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable.

I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.

▲

adrianN 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

PurpleRamen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

▲

ndriscoll 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone who's completed undergrad, minimum. Part of an undergrad degree is getting used to seeking out resources yourself and learning from them instead of having a teacher spoon-feed it.

Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out."

What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!

	▲	mixmastamyk an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Often doesn’t matter. Fancy degree gets an interview in this job market. Not, “I read a bunch for free.” The explosion of stacks means it’s hard to keep everything in your head at once. Lookup is routine but will sink you as a candidate. Personally not great under the gun in adversarial interviews, so my extensive self learning is not well highlighted.