You can tell this is an ancient meme because it prices college at 4 years at $9,000 per year instead of 5 years at $30,000 per year ๐
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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This doesn't work for some fields imo. I don't know how I could train someone in computer science if they don't even know how a for loop works yet.
Well maybe you couldn't, but that doesn't mean there's no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn't already exist.
Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.
Heck my local technical high school offers an "Information Technology" vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn't it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?
For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with "bootcamps." Increasingly you'll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you've been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you'll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.
These can vary from "pretty good, actually" to "predatory" to "a little bit like indentured servitude." Wouldn't it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they're interested in?
I agree. I guess what I'm getting at is some fields require requisite knowledge to be useful as an apprentice on day one.
Like for an electrician, on day one you can hand me tools, pull wires, carry supplies, clean up behind me, measure, etc. You may not be able to design the layout or check that things are to code, but you can help me while I e.g. explain why I needed you to grab 3-1 wire instead of a 2-1 for this fixture.
Where as in software you need a requisite amount of knowledge to do anything useful. And it's hard to sit there and explain what I'm doing when they can't read the language. It could be done, it's just harder to bring on someone that's going to be paid when they can't do much. I'd do it, but convincing the bean counters will be a lot harder
You're right, you're probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the "college intern" grunt work of a software dev team.
The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.
But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I'd just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don't have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.
It really, really, really doesn't take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I've worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.
Let's make that even easier to do.
I agree, I guess the context of the meme made it look like I was saying people need a 4 year degree, but I don't believe that. It helps, but it's not necessary at all.
I was mainly saying I don't think a transitional master and apprentice setup would be easily workable
I agree that an apprentice working with a single "master" probably wouldn't work very well. But I'm also not sure how frequently other apprenticeships still operate on that model. Perhaps it's more common for other trades due to a preponderance of independent contractors, but there's no saying that the apprentice needs to be beholden to one individual "master."