Apprenticeships in a trade tend to be such that with sufficient hard work and determination, anyone can fill the trade requirements. The problem solving skills of software development don't seem to fit that model - there are some people, no matter how much you train them, don't seem to be able to move beyond "follow instructions" to "give tasks" when it comes to developing software.
The second part is that the trade has a bonded period. Depending on how that is written, this becomes more difficult to enforce with at will employment. It can also lead to companies taking significant advantage of their bonded juniors. I mean... if you think this is a good model, revature is out there.
> Apprenticeships in a trade tend to be such that with sufficient hard work and determination, anyone can fill the trade requirements. The problem solving skills of software development don't seem to fit that model - there are some people, no matter how much you train them, don't seem to be able to move beyond "follow instructions" to "give tasks" when it comes to developing software.
The trades face the same challenge. Over the past decade, I've gotten along well enough with my HVAC guy (one-man shop who brings on a rotating cast of apprentices) to talk with him about this. He reports the same experience ("no matter how much you train them, don't seem to be able to move beyond...").
This isn't a case of "can / cannot solve problems", either. For hobbies they delve in, that cohort appears to problem solve extremely well. I suspect the challenge is finding ways to communicate a mental model of the same problem domain that "clicks" with different personalities.
I'll start off with apologizing the "trade" comment - in my mind I was more thinking the landscape / basic construction. I hadn't really thought about the mental model of hvac.
The "skilled trades" with hvac, electrician, plumbing, carpentry and such where the apprenticeship is more appropriate do have that issue again.
There are people, for whatever reason, can't accept a different mental model than what they've got in their head. Software development is about twisting how you think to that of how a computer works.
I've presented this very light model of "levels":
A junior follows instructions
A mid completes tasks
A senior solves problems
There are people who plateau at each level and never go beyond that for whatever reason. In many cases it is a failure of putting the proper problem solving / learning skills in place to be able to think in a way that isn't the easy way.
Which is more a symptom of bad apprenticeship and i believe we don't acknowledge enough that there are too many shops doing a bad job on training the apprentice.
* How do we ensure that a non-predatory apprenticeships are able to keep their staff for a long enough duration that they're not losing out?
There is a part B to the first question on preventing predatory apprenticeships. There was an anecdote told on reddit of a person who was trying to get out of tech support and so signed with Revature for becoming a software developer, went through their bootcamp and then got placed at a company. That company found that he was rather skilled at doing tech support (rather than as a junior dev) and so moved his contract over to do tech support... getting paid less than he was getting paid doing tech support prior to joining Revature. Furthermore, the locked in two year contract meant that he did tech support for two years. At the end of this, he's got two more years of tech support on his resume that paid him less than what he was making before and no additional software development accomplishments.
So yea... Predatory apprenticeships are a problem.
The way that the "stay around long enough" of old was a signing bonus. When I started in '96 with Taos ($54k/y), I got a $5k signing bonus and $1/mile moving bonus (Mapquest was a new thing - HR was amazed at how much easier that was going to make their job in calculating the moving bonus). If I left before a year was up, I'd have to pay it back.
That works reasonably well enough when salaries are about balanced overall. But it works poorly when there are some jobs that can either offer a much larger bonus or the new pay can quickly repay the bonus. If you're making $75k/y and have a $10k bonus to repay and then get a job for $150k that bonus can be repaid within a month or so (by the time accounting sends out the "pay us back" the bonus is ready to be paid back with the increase).
