Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master: The Medieval Guild (2018)
blog.philosophicalsociety.org
blog.philosophicalsociety.org
One should not underestimate how the "Journeyman -> Master" step is overall also one of gate-keeping. My cousin did his "Meister" as a car mechanic and it was costly (compared to for example getting a university degree in Germany which basically is for free) and he needed to do it, so that he could own his own repair shop (otherwise he would have had to hire a "Meister"). In his Meister-Training he was also exposed to a lot of legal regulations and some training in book-keeping etc, which of course is valuable to someone to whom math never was intuitive.
What's nutty is that journeyman usually means "capable of a day's work without supervision" (hence the name: journee-man) and I doubt three years of work is really sufficient for that in complex fields like software development.
Granted, I worked with unusually skilled people for much of my early carreer, but I didn't stop feeling like an apprentice for at least seven years if I include education.
I mean, you can do a lot more, and many are... It just cannot be underestimated how much low hanging fruit software dev there is in practice.
The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Computer Science is Informatik in Germany. Prior to the Bachelor/Master system it was a Magister study meaning you'd usually have to take a second major and a minor or two minors alongside it. Typically you'd either study Wirtschaftsinformatik (business computer science), which was focussed on computer science applied to business processes, Technische Informatik (technically used to be a Diplom study I think), which was more focussed on interacting with hardware, or Theoretische Informatik, which is more similar to the pure abstract computer science and more concerned with higher mathematics than applying the knowledge to build real software.
There is also a recognized trade called Fachinformatiker (I think there's another one called Anwendungsinformatiker which is more similar to Technische Informatik) which is a job training of applied computer science, involving a mix of classes in English, computer science, mathematics, business and other subjects. This still exists and IMO it's the best way to build a foundation for a career path as an application developer.
The university studies are more useful for specialist jobs or larger corporations that insist on university degrees. If you have broad knowledge despite having a university degree rather than the job qualification, it's mostly because of things you did outside the university track itself.
There is no apprenticeship track I'm aware of like there is for traditional trades that have an apprentice/journeyman/master (Lehrling/Geselle/Meister) distinction, e.g. carpentry, mechanics, hairdressing.
Something like this kind of exists in Switzerland, even in two forms:
One track goes like: normal Lehre -> EFZ, as a Geselle -> eidgenössischer Fachausweise and later -> eidgenössisches Diplom (Meister)
or in case of a Lehre with Berufsmatura: Lehre -> EFZ + BM -> Bachelor FH -> Master FH (Meister)
Maybe at some universities. Usually it was a diploma study, with a minor (often mathematics or electrical engineering — I did linguistics).
It goes both ways, excellent developers, quite often people who would also have excelled in a computer science program (but failed because bad grades in foreign languages prevented them to get admitted, etc.)
But you also have those that struggle to adopt something other than the Visual Basic they learned in their apprenticeship.
> The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Is that different from Germany? Most devs have completed some kind of university degree (or "Hochschule").
If I think of the quality of Software-Engineering instructions I have seen in universities they were always so outdated, that I wonder whether its actually something that can be studied in such an institution in a way that makes sense.
For example I had a lecturer who was ADAMANT that in every software-engineering organisation, Nassi-Schneidermann Diagrams were drawn prior to implementation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi–Shneiderman_diagram ).
He taught a C++ course which basically was C (with printf and scanf having been replaced by std::cin and std::cout). Of course it was outdated material and if someone had cared enough they could have created new material, but at what pace and at what frequency?
It makes much more sense to teach concepts, that that's what computer science curricula do, then add some engineering concepts in the mix (requirements engineering, validation / verification) and you have someone who can pick up tech on the job quickly.
The same outdated academic thing is true in other disciplines where the cutting-edge is being developed in industry rather than academia. And yes, teach concepts, but that doesn't produce graduates who are able to start writing decent code the day after they graduate.
Nothing more fun that having a security audit of a codebase and seeing how many relatively dumb security issues are present... from SQL injection, to authentication bypass in a "modern" application.
I think some people may fear the concept that their years of experience are just not equal to someone else's same years of experience.
So much more apt.
https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...
* eg https://www.wirholzbauer.ch/de/magazine-online/detail/?tx_hb...
more on the topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
A common complaint nowadays is that it is very difficult for juniors with no experience to get hired, unless they have a degree from a prestigious university, and even then that's not often a guarantee. It seems that companies are more averse than guilds to take the risk of training someone up to industry standards.
I believe that it would be very beneficial to society to create schemes that encourage learning with a similar system. Mentors can sometimes accomplish this role, but that relation is far more informal.
I always thought that their goals was controlling the supply of goods and services to maintain high prices and to prevent competition from ruining profit margins (of course not necessarily universally bad for consumers since guilds generally still maintained some sort of minimum quality standards).
> than guilds to take the risk of training someone up to industry standards.
Because as an apprentice you were effectively bound to your master and had to work him for a paltry wage for a number years just to get a chance to advance your career. Since workers are now free to leave whenever they want and have no obligations to the company that spent money/resources to train them those companies have few incentives to do that.
> I believe that it would be very beneficial to society to create schemes that encourage learning with a similar system.
We might as well bring back indentured servitude while we're at it? Otherwise who is going to pay for this?
The point I'm making is that society as a whole is worse off if companies are too risk averse to hire and train juniors up to a certain level of quality. This results in too few people capable of doing a specific, presumably valuable, job well. The consequences of this are a society that underperforms it's true potential in the long run. In monetary terms, as you raise the question, that means that less taxable value is generated. So society as a whole pays the consequence.
Germany isn't exactly a huge centre of innovation these days or even remotely close to being a success story when it comes to software.
I do understand your overall point though and agree to a large extent, it just seems to me that this is primarily a natural outcome of workers having significantly more bargaining power than before. i.e. it makes little sense for companies to invest much into less experienced workers when they can't "force" them (directly or indirectly) to pay back all of those costs by working for depressed (i.e. compared to what companies which only hire experienced workers can pay) wages.
How can we bring this back without significantly reducing worker rights/bargaining power?
Government/etc. funded programmes might be an option but that would/should effectively be more of a reshaping of formal education to be more inline with teaching the specific practical skills/etc. that would allow workers to be immediately productive (not necessarily a bad thing but not quite the same).
OTH if tech mega-corporations continue growing at the same pace and consuming all competition we might end up in a situation where investing into junior/inexperienced workers will makes sense again because they wouldn't have any other choice but to stay and to work at the same company that hired them for the remainder of their career.
That was of course in a prior age. Last century, in the dawn of Particle Physics, but I think he wrote of science in general in that time, not just Physicists.
Meanwhile because of degree inflation trades for a long time had such a bad reputation they can't find any apprentices but also can't afford the lucrative wages and perks promised by international megacorps.
There's also a very strong cultural and class divide between the three tracks of "highschool", especially Gymnasium (the highest tier -- doesn't have anything to do with sports) and the other two as only the former allows you to graduate with an Abitur which allows you to study at a university (unless you want to take night school classes to earn the same qualification with more time and effort). It's kinda like public vs private schools, except less explicitly about wealth and heritage.
Agreed… it is. This is a loss and a gain.
In the 1980s, as a foundation (19 yo) student of a certain London art school, I was taken to Hyde Park for ‘drawing lessons’ and given drug-laced cake by my lecturer, without my knowing. Student-staff sexual relationships were common and it was not unusual for lecturers to be absent the entire semester yet still be paid. Staff rollover was practically non-existent: a job was Ipso-facto a job for life, regardless of your performance. Pertinently, the program was pass/fail.
As a university lecturer, I now work in a credit-based system. Everything is accountable and the layers of administration have quadrupled.
Neither system is perfect. In the end, I believe that it is the faith and energy of those who deliver the system to be the deciding factor.
I agree with this point, but all of the specific things you mention were already well in place twenty years ago (e.g. modular courses).
I ended up dropping out for many reasons including the move to focus on self-employment but part of it was that I passed the deadline for graduating under the old system and that the switch meant a lot of my effort had been for naught as I would have had to write dozens of essays about lectures I attended over the years and the combination of courses I picked didn't neatly fit into the required modules.
I was also active in the department's student group so I got to see how they adapted to the new system and a lot of it was literally just rearranging the existing courses into modules based more on meeting formal structural requirements than actually developing a coherent lesson plan. I acknowledge that this is likely more of a quirk of the Magister studies than Diplom or Lehramt (for teaching professions) which always were more structured even before the transition.
I personally prefer the modular system. In the traditional system (in the UK at least) you were assessed by final exams with more or less fixed content, so you actually had less flexibility to study what you were interested in.
It is strange on a resume listing a university I never technically went to, but now only Wikipedia remembers! And I was there before Thor destroyed it in a movie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Devoir
They learn the basics and then they make a tour of France to refine their skills. They are required to move at least every six months.
I know a couple of them from my family and this looks impressive. If this existed for software engineering, this would be the best training.
Those are now more properly referred to as Apprentice, Journeyperson and Main.
George Carlin has a famous comedy bit where he states "It's a big club and you ain't in it" [1]. My own feeling is that guilds of all sorts prioritize exclusivity for the purposes of bestowing power on some select few. As the article states "Master’s were few and far between". This is similar to how luxury brands maintain their high value: exclusivity. The standardization and guarantees of quality seem to be secondary to the pyramid scheme nature of ascension within these organizations (in the same way that the quality of luxury goods is often secondary to their exclusivity). It reminds me in some ways of the concept of "familiars" in vampire lore, humans who willingly toil away for their masters hoping one day to be elevated to the same level.
It is a complex topic because of the positives and negatives of these systems being highly intertwined. To this day in Canada there is an apprenticeship system for trades. However, it is no longer an inner circle of masters deciding who gets the special status, it is a regional qualification body with clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.
As a society we haven't at all gotten away from the degenerate aspects of guilds. Think of the association with the "golf/country club" crowd. Or things like the Skull and Bones [2] type organizations at elite universities. Or when people joke about the Illuminati. This article is arguing for that by presenting a rose-tinted-glasses view of the past.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso&ab_channel=SkyEc...
And if you are willing to be more generous (as the author and I are) these protective societies of workers and merchants were an early step toward free market economies unencumbered by lazy landed gentry. Compare the history of Spain and France during this era to that of Germany and Holland.
If your argument is that exclusive initiatory societies were an improvement on hereditary nobility rule then you won't get much of a push back from me. However, are they better than constitutional democratic republics?
I don't actually have a clear answer to that question. I mean, I have a feeling that I have more chance of being initiated into a guild than I do being promoted to nobility. That potential for inclusion goes a long way, much like the oft-cited American dream where even the poor think they have a chance at being a millionaire. And our current democratic system doesn't seem to be adequately controlling the quality of our society.
As I mentioned, it is actually a very complex question. I just recommend people to be skeptical. Societies that form around keeping some thing secret except for initiated members for the purposes of exclusivity should be treated with a large dose of skepticism.
But let's not forget that fraud and incompetence are extremely common across history. And also that the very concept of universities derived from guilds.
So in a sense we do still have, and rely on, a guild system today.
The concept of having the number of businesses artificially limited also isn't gone in modern Germany: notaries and medical practices are allocated licenses based on regional population densities. As I understand it, taxi medallions are another example in the US (not sure how this works in Germany). Of course the idea in this case is to encourage specialists to spread out throughout the country rather than bunch up in the most lucrative population centers.
The guild outlived her.
https://www.artisansguildgallery.com/history.html#/
The linguist was out of his mind.
Like all things, we need balance. This is a good argument against guilds, but there are positive aspects of the system too. Imagine a world that was truly a free for all -- one in which there were no trusted authorities in any field. I believe such a society would quickly devolve into a dystopia and collapse.
From my perspective, the big problem is when there is no competition among guilds and the guild leaders wield disproportionate societal power. That is how you end up with oppressive oligarchy, which honestly is a reasonable description of the global order right now. My hope though is that we are better able to organize and compete against the current oligarchic order.
The main argument in favor of totalitarianism/authoritarianism is pretty much always law & order. And the main argument against the prevailing power structure is pretty much always freedom (e.g. from oppression and/or protection of fairness in competition). So the question is often, what is more important to you, order or freedom? How much freedom would you give up for order, and how much order would you give up for freedom?
However, guilds aren't the only way to promote structure/order. As I said, the system in Canada is regionalized through state run organizations which are answerable to a democratic process. It is not through some secret cabal of "Masters" who make arbitrary decisions. We can achieve order without requiring esoteric fraternal societies. For all of their flaws, constitutional democratic republics offer a much better system of accountability.
One possible reason could simply be there's a lot more future impact to granting someone the final title. If you proclaim someone a "Maestro of C++," then suddenly all the other C++ laborers will get a clear signal that whatever that person is doing is implicitly also what they should do, if they want to move up the ladder.
Beyond that, the top jobs usually comes with required work to train the next generation. So this person would heavily contribute, both implicitly and explicitly, to the future of the C++ guild.
Considering that impact in combination with how hard it would be to undo the decision, it's not surprising that many organizations might be cautious about deciding to hand someone that title.
> clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.
This makes sense, too. For any organization that wants to stay in the business of handing out these titles for the long-term, meaningful transparency is a good way to go about it.
Not for free. The reason the system worked back then is that apprentices were basically just a source of extremely labour if not indentured servants outright. They were entirely dependent on their master if they wanted to advance their career.
The differentiation of craft and art originated in Italy. It was they who developed the academies as a panic response to a perceived lack of Italian geniuses (this was following the death of Michelangelo). Following that France developed their own academies as a means to develop a national style separate to Italy.
Just for the record, the club that Carlin is referring to, is not some professional guild. Those were difficult, but not impossible to join.
He's referring to a very tiny minority of ultra-rich people. That's the club that usually doesn't take new members.
if you want to know about freemasonry, consider the quality of their enemies.
At it's core, this article is a stealth motte and bailey argument. It points out the benefits of guilds (where there is a legitimate argument to be made about skill transfer and quality of work) to support a deeper ideology about hierarchical structures of society. If one wants to make the argument that the ritualization present in free masonry is a net benefit to X, then present that argument directly.
Ah, so Lufthansa (the German flag carrier) means Air Convoy.
As example, in some towns peasants were not allowed to smith their own tools and had to travel to the city and buy the expensive tools from the guild.
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473869