4 ms·

I've often idly wondered if you could do Software Development as an apprenticeship. Use industry tools in your work day, and theoretical computer science at nig

I've often idly wondered if you could do Software Development as an apprenticeship. Use industry tools in your work day, and theoretical computer science at night schools/block courses.

slackingoff2017 9y ago
I don't think software is much different from anything else in this respect. You could learn any job assuming you're fairly intelligent and being taught by somebody decent. In not sure why we churn out degrees now instead of apprenticeships. I assume it's an equilibrium where The quality of people coming out of school is "good enough" that it saves the company money on training. If you look at it as a way of companies forcing people to pay for their own training, the proper way to bring apprenticeships back is to make college more selective or expensive. This would increase upward mobility for those that can't afford school by forcing companies to train their employees again. However it would probably be seen as an attack on the poor and minorities for making college more exclusive. Put differently, the increased accessibility of college has killed informal forms of education. To undo this would mean making college elitist again because the widespread nature of college education is what causes companies to hire only graduates. Another factor in the downfall of apprenticeships is the inability to weed out people unlikely to succeed because of discrimination laws. In the past it was common to get engineering apprenticeships off the street IF you could pass a series of tests. IQ especially has a strong correlation to job success, and only taking say the top 10% of scores made apprenticeships much more likely to succeed (and less expensive for the company). These tests were found to be biased against minorities and women so disappeared in the 60's, around the same time college education became popular among the middle class. Correlation isn't causation of course, so I can only speculate on these being driving forces behind the end of job training. Looking back at Germany, an interesting twist is that education is free but the acceptance rate low. Basically college in Germany is elitist, and if my theory holds water this would lead to more on the job training. Another somewhat depressing thing to keep in mind is that HN is a bubble. You need to be fairly smart to be an effective engineer. Most are significantly smarter than the average person, and by popular accounts an odd bunch. It might seem reasonable to people like us to teach people to code by osmosis but to most people programming is incomprehensible and unenjoyable. I saw this first hand in primary school where software programming was an elective. There were 30 or so students in the class and only three of us had any idea what we were doing and interest in writing code.
flukus 9y ago
Not so much the apprenticeship, but my formal education was in a trade school in Australia (TAFE, back when it was funded properly, my 2 years cost about $2K). It was a lot more hands on and less theory than comp sci, which meant the graduates could actually code. Even a lot of the theory we did cover was done through hands on activities, like creating our own databases so we had to know how things were stored and indexed efficiently. The only major areas left out that are of use in the real world were the lower level stuff (c/asm) unix tools, which would have served us better than learning how to mail merge in the early "computing" courses. From what I've heard Germany has a similar trade school path for software development.
eksemplar 9y ago
You could. The majority of software development isn't science it's craftsmanship and often good business skills make more value than something like calculus or linear algebra. Not for people inventing new stuff or pushing boundaries, but for the horde of developers who are copy pasting, google programming and writing classic ASP every day.
- sjg007 9y ago
  It sucks right. It'd be nice to compute things or design data storage or something.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I did the Portuguese apprenticeship program back in the late 80's/early 90's, as I wasn't sure to be able to qualify for the university on my first round and wanted to have already some kind of degree, to pay bills until the next attempt. Those three years of apprentice were great and I learned a lot, but at the university I got to learn how little did I knew, even if those of us coming from informatics apprenticeships knew more than the majority coming from classical high-school programs.
  - eksemplar 9y ago
    Well, nothing beats learning how to make informative decisions in your field, which is something you'll have a much easier time picking up at a university than on your own. Though with all the free video lectures online, the gap is slowly disappearing. Almost all the practical stuff I use for actual development has been learned outside of CS though. So you could easily have a talented CS degree with middlemanegement skills run an apprenticeship and teach someone how to be a great developer. You probably couldn't build an entire company around people who cant decipher the shit from the quality stuff though. But a degree isn't a certainty in that department. I've interviewed CS majors who couldn't explain ACID, hadn't heard of SOLID and who also thought the singleton pattern was absolutely vital.
Cymen 9y ago
There is a whole movement around this called Software Craftsmanship. There are a lot of companies involved and typically they are using the apprenticeship model to bring on new employees and grow the company. The one I'm most familiar with is 8th Light which started in Chicago but is now in Los Angeles, London, and New York City too. Their approach is more spend 5-9 months having the apprentice do mostly directed self-study, then a kind of final project and other work and, if they pass, an offer of employment. It's a really interesting model that seems to have worked well for them -- they attract developers from both traditional backgrounds and non-traditional. They have a page that goes into what apprenticeship means to them here: https://8thlight.com/apprenticeship/ https://8thlight.com/apprenticeship/
legulere 9y ago
You can in Germany. It's called Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 9y ago
  The English certificate translates it as "Computer Science Expert / Software Development".
laughingman2 9y ago
Its being done in Zoho corp. A product based company in India. They pay students from economically weaker segments who don't/can't attend college and teach them software development basics some time. And these students are put in production teams to learn from apprenticeship. http://www.livemint.com/Companies/LU4qIlz47C5Uph2P5i250K/Challenging-conventional-wisdom-with-Zoho-University.html http://www.livemint.com/Companies/LU4qIlz47C5Uph2P5i250K/Cha...
pjmlp 9y ago
You can do that in Portugal. Basically the three last years of high-school are mixed with some apprenticeship, both theoretical and practical, with some kind of training at the end, sadly usually not remunerated. Students can still apply to the university if they want to, they just need to meet the requested scores and do the exams like everyone else. At the university level you can take the usual 5 year university degree oriented to "learn to learn", or a more skill oriented one just 3 years long. With Bologna those 5 year degrees became a classical 3 + 2 master, but still kept their "learn to learn" spirit. At least on the good universities, the majority being public ones.
BrandoElFollito 9y ago
This is the case in France. I had three apprentices (huge software company) and one of them was hired afterwards. This is extremely useful (for both sides).
RugnirViking 9y ago
Here in the UK I just completed mine and to be honest it was not worth it at all. It was essentially used as an excuse to pay me below minim wage, and now that i've finished, they hired me at minimum wage. I could make more money at McDonalds. In the end, I'm going to university anyway
mcv 9y ago
I think that would work very well. You can't learn software development on just theory.

I've often idly wondered if you could do Software Development as an apprenticeship. Use industry tools in your work day, and theoretical computer science at night schools/block courses.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

I don't think software is much different from anything else in this respect. You could learn any job assuming you're fairly intelligent and being taught by somebody decent. In not sure why we churn out degrees now instead of apprenticeships. I assume it's an equilibrium where The quality of people coming out of school is "good enough" that it saves the company money on training. If you look at it as a way of companies forcing people to pay for their own training, the proper way to bring apprenticeships back is to make college more selective or expensive. This would increase upward mobility for those that can't afford school by forcing companies to train their employees again. However it would probably be seen as an attack on the poor and minorities for making college more exclusive. Put differently, the increased accessibility of college has killed informal forms of education. To undo this would mean making college elitist again because the widespread nature of college education is what causes companies to hire only graduates. Another factor in the downfall of apprenticeships is the inability to weed out people unlikely to succeed because of discrimination laws. In the past it was common to get engineering apprenticeships off the street IF you could pass a series of tests. IQ especially has a strong correlation to job success, and only taking say the top 10% of scores made apprenticeships much more likely to succeed (and less expensive for the company). These tests were found to be biased against minorities and women so disappeared in the 60's, around the same time college education became popular among the middle class. Correlation isn't causation of course, so I can only speculate on these being driving forces behind the end of job training. Looking back at Germany, an interesting twist is that education is free but the acceptance rate low. Basically college in Germany is elitist, and if my theory holds water this would lead to more on the job training. Another somewhat depressing thing to keep in mind is that HN is a bubble. You need to be fairly smart to be an effective engineer. Most are significantly smarter than the average person, and by popular accounts an odd bunch. It might seem reasonable to people like us to teach people to code by osmosis but to most people programming is incomprehensible and unenjoyable. I saw this first hand in primary school where software programming was an elective. There were 30 or so students in the class and only three of us had any idea what we were doing and interest in writing code.

flukus 9y ago

Not so much the apprenticeship, but my formal education was in a trade school in Australia (TAFE, back when it was funded properly, my 2 years cost about $2K). It was a lot more hands on and less theory than comp sci, which meant the graduates could actually code. Even a lot of the theory we did cover was done through hands on activities, like creating our own databases so we had to know how things were stored and indexed efficiently. The only major areas left out that are of use in the real world were the lower level stuff (c/asm) unix tools, which would have served us better than learning how to mail merge in the early "computing" courses. From what I've heard Germany has a similar trade school path for software development.

eksemplar 9y ago

You could. The majority of software development isn't science it's craftsmanship and often good business skills make more value than something like calculus or linear algebra. Not for people inventing new stuff or pushing boundaries, but for the horde of developers who are copy pasting, google programming and writing classic ASP every day.

sjg007 9y ago
It sucks right. It'd be nice to compute things or design data storage or something.
pjmlp 9y ago
I did the Portuguese apprenticeship program back in the late 80's/early 90's, as I wasn't sure to be able to qualify for the university on my first round and wanted to have already some kind of degree, to pay bills until the next attempt. Those three years of apprentice were great and I learned a lot, but at the university I got to learn how little did I knew, even if those of us coming from informatics apprenticeships knew more than the majority coming from classical high-school programs.
- eksemplar 9y ago
  Well, nothing beats learning how to make informative decisions in your field, which is something you'll have a much easier time picking up at a university than on your own. Though with all the free video lectures online, the gap is slowly disappearing. Almost all the practical stuff I use for actual development has been learned outside of CS though. So you could easily have a talented CS degree with middlemanegement skills run an apprenticeship and teach someone how to be a great developer. You probably couldn't build an entire company around people who cant decipher the shit from the quality stuff though. But a degree isn't a certainty in that department. I've interviewed CS majors who couldn't explain ACID, hadn't heard of SOLID and who also thought the singleton pattern was absolutely vital.

Cymen 9y ago

There is a whole movement around this called Software Craftsmanship. There are a lot of companies involved and typically they are using the apprenticeship model to bring on new employees and grow the company. The one I'm most familiar with is 8th Light which started in Chicago but is now in Los Angeles, London, and New York City too. Their approach is more spend 5-9 months having the apprentice do mostly directed self-study, then a kind of final project and other work and, if they pass, an offer of employment. It's a really interesting model that seems to have worked well for them -- they attract developers from both traditional backgrounds and non-traditional. They have a page that goes into what apprenticeship means to them here: https://8thlight.com/apprenticeship/ https://8thlight.com/apprenticeship/

legulere 9y ago

You can in Germany. It's called Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung.

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 9y ago
The English certificate translates it as "Computer Science Expert / Software Development".

laughingman2 9y ago

Its being done in Zoho corp. A product based company in India. They pay students from economically weaker segments who don't/can't attend college and teach them software development basics some time. And these students are put in production teams to learn from apprenticeship. http://www.livemint.com/Companies/LU4qIlz47C5Uph2P5i250K/Challenging-conventional-wisdom-with-Zoho-University.html http://www.livemint.com/Companies/LU4qIlz47C5Uph2P5i250K/Cha...

pjmlp 9y ago

You can do that in Portugal. Basically the three last years of high-school are mixed with some apprenticeship, both theoretical and practical, with some kind of training at the end, sadly usually not remunerated. Students can still apply to the university if they want to, they just need to meet the requested scores and do the exams like everyone else. At the university level you can take the usual 5 year university degree oriented to "learn to learn", or a more skill oriented one just 3 years long. With Bologna those 5 year degrees became a classical 3 + 2 master, but still kept their "learn to learn" spirit. At least on the good universities, the majority being public ones.

BrandoElFollito 9y ago

This is the case in France. I had three apprentices (huge software company) and one of them was hired afterwards. This is extremely useful (for both sides).

RugnirViking 9y ago

Here in the UK I just completed mine and to be honest it was not worth it at all. It was essentially used as an excuse to pay me below minim wage, and now that i've finished, they hired me at minimum wage. I could make more money at McDonalds. In the end, I'm going to university anyway

mcv 9y ago

I think that would work very well. You can't learn software development on just theory.