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But even this is not sufficient to guarantee employee retention: the new employer could just offer to pay the employee’s clawed-back training costs when he leaves the old employer, perhaps with some clawback provisions of their own.
Indeed, this is how a lot of young Singaporeans in Big Tech got their start: they went to elite American universities to study CS on the (Singapore) government dime, but were obligated to go back and work in the civil service for a period of some years or else repay the cost of their education. FAANG was all too happy to foot that bill (with some strings attached, naturally) in exchange for that sweet, sweet engineering talent.
Well, of course. This is what buyouts are for. If I am a talented football coach and some small school offers me a job for $200k/year for 4 years and I go 12-0 and win a D2 national title, and the next year USC wants to hire me for $10 million/year that is how the cooky crumbles. What my small university should have done is put an appropriate buyout into my contract, say a couple million dollars, such that they can now basically pay the next 10 football coaches using my buyout money.
The downside is that if I suck, they still pay me. This is what companies in tech (and frankly many places) dont want to do and is what the OP is describing. They want a 1 sided agreement where if I suck I get fired and if I am awesome I get no raises. That is silly.
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Yep. It's pretty common practice at some levels for people to regularly update their personal accounting of these things (including things like not-yet-vested 401k/ESPP/etc.). You want to know what your expected comp actually is over time. You want to have a process worked out for how to compute all those things when necessary (maybe even so you just have an approximation in your head already), so you can negotiate quickly if anything comes up rather than having to scramble to pull it all together at the last minute. If you've really got value and a new company will give you that bundle of money up front to get you, it really is incumbent on your current employer to compete to keep you.
Another pretty simple thing that is done (rather than a claw back, allowing them to go above and beyond just the mere cost of the education or whatever), not always tied to a degree, often in the form of something like stock options, is just a delayed bonus. "You just got this degree. We'd like to offer you a big bonus. Only catch is that we sign the paperwork now, but it doesn't vest for three years." That way, it's harder for a competitor to plunk down enough money to take them, they plausibly do get compensated in accordance with their increased value, but you only have to pay out if they actually stick around and give you another three years of value.
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