The future of work requires a return to apprenticeships

>what the relative risks of adopting one database over another might be

Entire companies get that wrong. Those licensing terms are complex legalese a lot of the time. Databases are not trivial things. You always get new risks as more product features get added. It's very difficult to predict the future on that front and how your database(s) will handle those challenges.

Yep 1000% agree

> Friends who had maxed out their investment in [...] personal projects were in a relative bubble.

-0% agree, I'm actually a bit baffled that you mention it in the same breath. I've found, in my own xp and in others', that personal projects on your own are almost the only way to learn how to be high-impact.

In many companies, they've already decided their db, their frameworks, etc. and you'll need a lot of political capital and technical trust to be able to start a real conversation about splitting the stack and so on. So, here, you'll learn about how to work on existing rails doing n+1 tasks and bugfixing.

In a personal project, you start with an empty dir and work from there. You end up knowing why you like pg over mysql. You know why it was worth it to use rails instead of rolling your own. etc etc.

I have some social friends who also do software who don't really have it as a hobby (just a job) and while that's totally fine, they're unable to answer questions like "what framework does your work use?" (answer I found later: Spring). To their credit, it's probably a good thing at some level that the company has managed to shield people from that much detail.

Obviously everyone's journey is different, but I've always found that individuals who can go "I want to build <thing>" and then google/IRC until it's built are generally pretty impactful people.

That said, I speak PhD, so I trend towards working with Google folks and people with fancy degrees. So far, my career seems to blow away everyone else I graduated with.

Plan is to work maybe 5 years, then effectively retire to graduate school or family / cave expeditions. Explore, research and build shit for the rest of my life. :) Compound interest should handle the whole 'you gave up salary to do some cool thing'

I think another flaw in the article is the "entirely". Most of the time you won't automate everything, you will replace 10 factory workers with a machine and a technician.

That's what people are saying every 10 years for the last 70 years. Until it's a reality it's pure sci fi, and we shouldn't care about sci fi when trying to solve current issues.

What makes it different from a job then?

[1]: https://www.apprenticeship.gov/employers

Also certainly in the UK and the USA the cohort that would have filled the advanced apprentices (not trade ) that realistically could train junior developers now just goes to university.

So you have lost the ideal entry cohort - maybe ex vets in technical areas might but they would have all ready had the training to that level NVQ 3 4 and 5

You don't need to replace people entirely. You need to give them tools to increase productivity by 50%, then magically observe as 1/2 the workforce disappears.

The world is sloowwwwww to adapt. If everyone put one month of attention into learning basic python, we'd see a massive productivity increase for back office functions that would make tens of thousands of people redundant. Of course, that will never happen, but the tech literacy of the average young person is increasing by the day...

I disagree with your second premise too. Reducing the number of people in a profession increases the profits to the ones that make it in, thereby making it more desireable. Probably less candidates as you say.

OK, but if you think about it optimistically, it ALSO means that you're able to hire folks that have trained at and left other places.

That is to say, the nation benefits, the government offsets much of the burden from the master, and the industry can still be competitive to attract (or retain, in the case of the master) the trained talent.

Seeing my code and processes through the lens of a beginner helps me improve my code and documentation. Seeing their code through the lens of a beginner helps some other people fluff their egos.

You don't really notice the difference until you get a chance to grow your company fairly rapidly, and even then some bosses misinterpret the people who hoard knowledge as their most trusted lieutenants instead of the boat anchor dragging them down.

See also teams who "can't find good people". Either your bosses aren't offering enough money, or you have shut the door behind you and you're trying to find people who made it through that door somewhere else. You should be mostly looking for people who can learn, instead of people who already have.

Could you please elaborate on this? What do they teach?

In Canada, I have found that while there's no official program for IT apprenticeship, the cultural value of implicit apprenticeship is there; perhaps an inheritance from our excellent trades programs. Thing is, you'll find it mostly in the older, more-local institutions; not so much in the sexier, flashier software companies and international conglomerates.

When I started my career, fresh out of school, I worked at a small (~200 person) company. There was an IT greybeard (well, he seemed so to me, but he was only 40something). He taught me a lot, but more importantly like a good mentor he gave me room to grow, let me take on projects way beyond what any sane person would have given a 21 year old to work on, etc. The result was that I stuck around, contributed an awful lot of value, and then became eminently more employable than I had been. The next job at a much larger but still local institution had a real 60something greybeard that took this concept even further. Even now as I approach 40, there's a 50something guy at my current "senior" job who is just that much more "senior" and his wisdom is a continual benefit.

It's obviously made me realize that I need to do the same thing to pay it forward. It doesn't strictly need to be an organized program where I get some co-op student, but that _can_ work; I've had some in the past to great success. What it does need to be is a keen younger person who has a learning style that benefits from personal interaction. That's really not everyone in our field; some people are simply self-starting learners and they bristle at mentorship. We should never constrain such people to "require" someone breathing down their neck, as it were; but for people who need the guidance, that have the talent and aptitude but benefit from someone else setting their focus, it is indispensable.

Things like the TCP/IP stack and the OSI model, Types of programming languages, number theory (you can convert between decimal octal, hex and binary with out a calculator)

In this system, learning a trade's practical aspects is mostly the job of a specific company the student is employed with (or rather "pre-employed"), and the theoretical/general aspects is the job of the country's education system.

It's a good alternative to a purely academical system like universities, or getting an extremely company-specific skill set only:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system

That totally happens. Got hired straight out of college for a new team at Google. There were no senior people on the team, the closest was management which didn't have the time for that sort of mentorship. It sucked and meant nobody got anything done for a year.

Not sure which decade your time machine brought you from, but no, I would not say that "plenty" of companies do this.

Far more common is a sink-or-swim scenario where new hires are expected to learn from overworked and not particularly interactive senior-level folks, while everyone gets their noses pushed into a grindstone by project managers.

If that's the case, I'd say there's a massive shortage of 'decent' companies. Modern business strategy shuns apprenticeship because that's viewed as additional cost no one wants to pay that ultimately becomes a sunk cost. I'm not saying they're right/wrong, just that's the perspective I see.

Every business I interact with wants quick turn around/ROI and any respectable semblance of apprenticeship doesn't fit well in that framing. Even in research where it's assumed you're taking on new problems you've not seen before, the pressure is constant and budgeted/planned on the assumption everyone "hits the ground running."

I don't know how any of these environments promote apprenticeship which is slow, costly, and supports practices like long term investments in relationships between employer/employee. On top of that, if you do go into training new hires and your competitors don't but instead hire experienced workers, that puts you at a competitive disadvantage in the near term which may strangle you long before your new hires can help level the playing field.

I'm not sure how you reincorporate the concept of apprenticeship back into the current labor market. The big tech companies strategy is to simply start kids earlier by integrating some training materials into k-12 and colleges so tax payers and future employees will eat the training costs. They also get their pick of experienced folks when they want/need them because they can front the costs/expenses. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Traditionally there's been a balance of sharing the cost between apprentice and mentor. More and more that cost is pushed on the apprentence and who wants to pursue that pathway if so?

This seems to especially be a problem in tech over more traditional roles where apprenticeship is expected: medicine, engineering, trades like plumbing/electrician, etc.

I have never seen such a thing actually work. The companies I have seen maybe formally had a mentorship program but that was only on paper. Usually it’s sink or swim for new people. And a lot of them get stuck at the advanced beginner level because as soon as they produce something useful all mentorship stops and they get thrown into the deadline machine.

In my experience, there's usually a few good senior people to learn from, unless you've joined a truly terrible company where everyone good has either left or burnt out.

However, it's almost always good senior people working against the system to help juniors, not the system supporting any meaningful mentorship (except through a bunch of box-ticking bullshit to burden everyone with).