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Comment by ImageXav | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting point in this article for me lies towards the end: "the role of the Guild was not to form rules, mores, regulations, and laws with respect to their crafts; their role was to introduce a system of art or craft to a new individual, to instill in them the idea of standards, quality, consistency, and perfection".

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.

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> their role was to introduce a system of art or craft to a new individual, to instill in them the idea of standards, quality, consistency, and perfection".

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?

I don't really see why a leap to indentured servitude is necessary here. There are obviously many other ways of implementing a training relationship - see the other comments re. how it is done in Germany.

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.

> how it is done in Germany

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.

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