Ask HN: Why Aren't More Companies Starting Apprenticeship Programs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754822

by zachgersh • 13 years ago

6 9 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We've all seen the complaints around lack of good development talent. Lack of developers is usually due to the companies strict hiring standards.

Why aren't more of these companies bringing on developers and then developing them into the employees that they want? Is it due to most company cultures not accommodating this sort of thing?

AldousHaxley• 13 years ago

Effectively a lot of companies already do something approaching this, particularly larger ones that can afford to invest the time in an employee.

When I started at my current position I was pretty good at hacking away at whatever coding task they gave me, but as far as the intricacies of working with a cross functional team of dozens of developers and business people, balancing priorities, coordinating timelines, independently identifying needs, taking initiative, and so forth, I had to learn all that on the job.

To actually respond to your question, though, I think the need for apprentice-style programs is gradually becoming more apparent. The day to day of an average working developer is way different than you might expect from going through a university CS program. Really, on the job training is already happening, the cost is just being absorbed with the first n months of a junior developer starting a job, so it's currently hidden.

zachgersh4• 13 years ago

I can definitely see this as factored into the cost of a first year dev. I wonder how much more talent companies would recruit by just making that investment more apparent?

mooreds• 13 years ago

Internship programs also fulfill a similar purpose. See http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html for more.

zachgersh4• 13 years ago

I think internships are slightly different. Paid apprenticeships where you are expected to delivery production ready code for clients and work along side developers is what we are after.

Most internships I have seen generally treat the intern as the grunt; no good projects / most of their work can be discarded at the end of their internship.

codeonfire• 13 years ago

Lack of developers are due to lack of developers. If you loosen standards even a little you get faker developers who don't code and are planing to exploit 'political inneficiencies' rather than build products. If someone is not already coding at a high level I can guarantee their intentions are not to code, ever, if they can get away with it.

zachgersh4• 13 years ago

The suggestion wasn't to loosen standards it was to start cultivating developers that are up to your standards. If you put them in an apprenticeship program because you see something in them it is an investment that will lead to higher standards.

ayers• 13 years ago

7digital [1] decided to do something about this issue and started their own academy.

Companies that do not have a heavy internal tech focus will be far less inclined to invest in this sort of thing.

[1] http://about.7digital.com/jobs/academy/

lsiebert• 13 years ago

I wish there were. That is what I feel like I need.

This used to be how every company worked. Manufacturers trainedt people. But companies have pushed the cost of training onto workers. Now there are tons of positions requiring training going unfilled. NPR had a story about this not too long ago.

I think that there is also an issue with training people, then losing them to successful companies that don't have to train people. H1-b visa holders are the obvious exception... Cheaper than Americans. And they need an employer sponsor to stay in the country which makes leaving for another job difficult.

I think training programs that feed into jobs ala hacker school are at least a step in the right direction.

Ultimately, I would like to see companies form coalitions to support training people. I think that that could work. Get some economies of scale combined with attempts at innovation. Have tracks for devops, testing, project management etc. Do research on how to train people. And do it cheaper and better than an academic institution by teaching both concepts and implementation and having certification to industry standards, not academic ones.

zachgersh4• 13 years ago

Sponsored training programs that have multiple companies supporting them sound like a good idea.

Ask HN: Why Aren't More Companies Starting Apprenticeship Programs?

Related Stories