it would probably be useful to know how many of the current layoffs were people on H-1Bs.

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

Consider the rate of job hopping that would be evident on that resume. I'm not sure how many companies would be willing to invest in sending a FTE who stays somewhere for likely less than a year to a conference or say "Ok, you an spend 20% of your time improving your skills."

What is more likely with the 35 number is that these are multiple simultaneous contracts. When working as a contractor you're fixing that problem or that project. The company isn't going to have you around for longer than a month after it's been fixed and documented.

There's no reason to spend company resources on training a person any more than there's reason for you to pay a plumber to be reading "learn to be an electrician in 10 days" while they're supposed to be working on fixing the sink or doing the plumbing for new construction.

It's all so vague. "lack of investment in their skill".

You just spent $250k and 5 years in college learning stuff.

You get hired to do a job for money.

What "investment" do you expect company to do?

Give me number of weeks and amount of dollars per year and tell me how it stacks against $250k and 5 years that you just spent?

If you want to learn on the job, shouldn't YOU be paying the company for teaching you, like you pay college to teach you?

Continuing education is recognized and required in many fields.

This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your business goals. Asking what that number is completely misses the point.

Actually I found that if you have a pretty good understanding of the core parts of the C standard (e.g. the idea of the abstract machine, storage durations, unspecified vs undefined behavior, etc.) and working experience with the language, Rust is then quite natural. To first approximation, Rust basically makes lifetime management/ownership semantics that would be "good practice" in C into mandatory parts of the type system.

I agree - I was mostly trying to think of an example against OP's rather facetious attitude towards the time and effort required to maintain engineering performance.

In my experience, a lot of the Rust fighting with the borrow checker is really just enforcing better quality code I should've been writing anyway.

If all you got out of a Computer Science undergrad program was "learning C" you were severely shortchanged. An 8-week bootcamp could have done that.

Point still stands. You're going to take up the mantle for suggesting a computer science degree from 2000 completely qualifies someone for work in 2026? No further education needed?

If you've been working all that time, probably not, at least not any more than you had to learn any other language your employer was using.

The core concepts covered by a good CS curriculum haven't really changed. Specific languages were never the focus.

I don't disagree about the core CS fundamentals - 100% the same page. I suppose this really boils down to a difference in what constitutes "training/education".

Any $PROGRAMMER_TITLE worth their salary can learn a new stack for a project, because they know the fundamentals. BUT there's still a lead time on being comfortable with new languages, frameworks, problem domains, etc. It's this kind of time and effort that I am trying to get at when discussing companies paying for training/education. It can be worth investing in your people if your goals are longer horizon.

I don't think it makes sense for companies to pay for their employees to learn basic data structures or other "prerequisite" fundamentals, though. That would be a large investment!

Not a lot of prestige in that.

The referenced article ends like this:

"I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role."

:-(

How can I not be flippant? I lived in Canada for a large part of my life (30 years-ish, 15 years ago). The bills are introduced, not passed.

“Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea” is a book about the treasure hunt, recommended.

It is a fantastic book. The author was a spectator for much of the treasure hunt. The adulation of Thompson is amusing in light of the fact that, 15 years after publication, he was arrested for defrauding his investors.

Thompson himself published a coffee table book about the find, "America's Lost Treasure."

It is a very good book, but the author is enamored with Tommy Thompson. It's a borderline hagiography. And then when you do some independent reading about Tommy, you sort of question the researching skills of the author, Gary Kinder.

I was about to come recommend this book! I picked it up at a book sale without knowing the story. It is fantastic.

In the ballpark ($2-4 billion in the 1970s): https://priceonomics.com/how-the-hunt-brothers-cornered-the-...

It’s not clear to me whether you’re characterizing that as trenchant business advice or cynical bullshit. Meta has had several rounds of layoffs now so it surely can’t be the former.

Also Guy Kawasaki probably isn’t the first to say this, but I’d guess he predates Zuckerberg: https://guykawasaki.com/the_art_of_the_/

Once upon a time I took a course where the prof read excerpts from Chaucer to us. Middle English was much more decipherable to this modern English speaker when it was spoken.