I recently suggested to a manager that if he wanted more productivity from his experienced programmers, he should spend more time, attention, and money to training. He replied, “Why bother sending them to expensive classes? The experienced ones just leave here for other shops, so I’d just be training them for other people.”

When I interviewed two of his top programmers, they confided that they were seriously considering leaving, which tended to confirm the manager’s pessimistic view. But when I asked them why they were leaving, they independently said that “management doesn’t value our work.” What evidence did they have? Both told me that they had repeatedly been turned down on requests to attend courses!

– Gerald M. Weinberg, Overstructured Management of Software Engineering, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Software Engineering, September 1992