3 ms·

How would you feel about mentoring non-technical people? Uber seems to be piloting an apprenticeship program for people from non-technical backgrounds: https:/

How would you feel about mentoring non-technical people? Uber seems to be piloting an apprenticeship program for people from non-technical backgrounds: https://eng.uber.com/engineer-apprentices/ https://eng.uber.com/engineer-apprentices/ I don’t really know why Uber is doing it, but I wonder if in-house apprenticeship programs are going to become more of thing now.

adventured 9y ago
Vocational + apprentice systems of all types are going to be a massive thing in the next ten years. Most likely we'll all be sick of hearing about it a few years from now. It's starting to pop up everywhere in the US, an idea that has caught the culture's imagination again. It's the ideal counter to the stupid practice of everybody must get a four year degree as a base qualification. And it's the only way the bottom half in the US are going to finally start making progress again.
zerkten 9y ago
> How would you feel about mentoring non-technical people? I'm not sure what you mean by "non-technical" people. Didn't we all start at zero technical skill? If Uber have gone about this the right way and have some motivated hires with some of the right basic competency then they should do well. In terms of technical mentoring I'd be very happy to engage with individuals inside a program like this. It's a very different story when you've got someone who was originally hired for a different role and you are tasked with helping them make the jump from a non-technical role to technical one. This can fail for a number of reasons, but it often boils down to motivation, and the individuals might have been better quitting to do something like a bootcamp. I will say that I have gotten a lot of benefit from coaching/mentoring non-technical people on specific things. An example would be teaching a customer success manager how to capture useful info from the browser dev tools. They have a superpower and that results in them getting better troubleshooting info to help customers.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

adventured 9y ago

Vocational + apprentice systems of all types are going to be a massive thing in the next ten years. Most likely we'll all be sick of hearing about it a few years from now. It's starting to pop up everywhere in the US, an idea that has caught the culture's imagination again. It's the ideal counter to the stupid practice of everybody must get a four year degree as a base qualification. And it's the only way the bottom half in the US are going to finally start making progress again.

zerkten 9y ago

> How would you feel about mentoring non-technical people? I'm not sure what you mean by "non-technical" people. Didn't we all start at zero technical skill? If Uber have gone about this the right way and have some motivated hires with some of the right basic competency then they should do well. In terms of technical mentoring I'd be very happy to engage with individuals inside a program like this. It's a very different story when you've got someone who was originally hired for a different role and you are tasked with helping them make the jump from a non-technical role to technical one. This can fail for a number of reasons, but it often boils down to motivation, and the individuals might have been better quitting to do something like a bootcamp. I will say that I have gotten a lot of benefit from coaching/mentoring non-technical people on specific things. An example would be teaching a customer success manager how to capture useful info from the browser dev tools. They have a superpower and that results in them getting better troubleshooting info to help customers.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]