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Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

codemanship.co.uk

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Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#31

Post by arethuza »

nickthedart wrote: post #27
eftpotrm wrote: post #4

Agree absolutely. I'd long ago decided that even with the £3,000 per year fees (which Labour said they wouldn't do in their election manifesto, got an overall majority then did anyway - remember that Aaron Porter and others slamming the LibDems at the moment), the investment in a degree before a career in software just didn't seem to add up. Realistically a £25k debt against a 3 year delay in starting a career - you…

Agree with this. With £27k debt for tuition alone, plus other debts for living costs, in a field that changes so fast as Computer Science, you'd be paying off this debt long after much of what you'd have learned would be obsolete. Far better to go straight into work, and study part-time (if employers will take you without a degree that is, which they might if they realise that 18-yr olds can be smart and cheap). It'l…

I graduated with a CS degree in 1988 - very little of what I learned is obsolete. Of course it was rather theory and maths based... (with a hell of a lot of development, mostly in C on Unix boxes of various breeds).

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#32

Post by brudgers »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #26

Here's my rough criteria when selecting applicants for technology roles: 1) What have you done lately that is like what I want you to do? 2) What is your attitude like? (past references very important here) 3) Have you taken some test or certification (or can we give you one) that demonstrates skills in areas we might be concerned about? From there, perhaps you can start learning , that is, it might be worthwhile to…

What a college degree does is that it provides a more equal opportunity for people to obtain a minimum qualification. Let's face it, Ben Franklin's apprenticeship as a printer for his brother more or less typifies the way in which people have obtained apprenticeships - through close personal connections between the master and the apprentice. This is unsurprising when one considers the degree of upfront investment by the master entailed in taking on an apprentice. Those who can and are willing take a street waif under their wing are few.

I will add that calling mentorships and internships "apprenticeships" does not make them such. And an apprenticeship requires a formal written commitment not only to teach the apprentice how to do their job, but to teach them how to be a master.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#33

Post by timtadh »

shmageggy wrote: post #24

I suspect there are countless CS graduates who can describe Binary Search theoretically but couldn't hand-roll a binary search implementation to save their lives If this is the case, and I doubt that it is very often, then your CS program has failed you miserably.

I believe Knuth says in his article on Binary Search in the art of computer programming that it took some ridiculous number of years from when Binary Search was first described to a implementation free of bugs.

I find it highly likely that the majority of programmers would produce a buggy version of Binary Search on their first attempt. Why? History indicates programmers often make small mistakes even when writing simple algorithms. A survey of 26 papers on variations of binary search found that 6 of the papers had serious errors in the published algorithms.[1] 4 of the errors were "design" errors. That is the algorithm they designed had a fault. 2 were implementation errors (1 in assembly, 1 in cobol). All of the errors were published in a peer reviewed publication. Therefore, even peer review does not always spot errors in a "simple" binary search algorithm. Why would you expect recent graduates to do any better?

[1] http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/2/154.abstract

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#34

Post by ohyes »

ig1 wrote: post #18

Imagine you offered a job position of "software apprentice" and say you got a thousand responses. How would you identify the ones that would be worth gambling on ? - there would be little to nothing to differentiate candidates. By and large you'll have candidates who didn't do well at school (because those who do well at school tend to go to university), have never done anything to show that they're capable of long t…

How is that different from any other job application? The job will clearly go to the boss's nephew, who is totally great at computer stuff because he plays so much WoW. (Though it is a well known fact that the best middle management comes from Eve Online).

Seriously, you will generally want to look for people who are intelligent and good at abstract thinking. In my biased opinion, you should be shooting for the best humanities majors (In disciplines like English, music, philosophy and math), as the targets of such an apprenticeship. Not high-school graduates.

Until it catches on, your competition for employing them will be Starbucks and grad school which means they will be a steal compared to programmers trained at Stanford or MIT (TM). A liberal arts major would be pleased to be making 30-40k a year out of school. Also, you can always fire them if they don't work out.

If it then catches on, you might be able to expand to people who are interested in making programming a career, then you might be able to catch some of the

Currently, CS courses at top universities have very little to do with the business of actually programming, they are more based on mathematical theory. SE courses tend to look more like 'software engineering management.'

In each discipline, you learn important skills... but they tend to have very little to do with the craft of sitting down at a computer and making your thoughts into working code. (I have a master of science in computer science, I learned many things that made me a better coder, but the degree didn't teach me to code, work experience did).

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#35

Post by eiji »

CptMauli wrote: post #28

A "Fachinformatiker" (for some reason translated as specialist by google translate) you can become through an apprenticeship in Germany for some time (there where predecessors to it with different names) see http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=... oder auf deutsch http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachinformatiker so it is nothing new at all.

As a fellow german, but not a Fachinformatiker, I suspect colleagues without a degree still have a hard time to work their way up into more advanced management roles or just into the higher income brackets. I wish that would not be the case though.

What I find intriguing, although I'm surrounded by "Programmers", almost no CS! We have physicist, mechanical engineers, mathematicians, historians and english majors even.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#36

Post by a5seo »

brudgers wrote: post #32
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #26

Here's my rough criteria when selecting applicants for technology roles: 1) What have you done lately that is like what I want you to do? 2) What is your attitude like? (past references very important here) 3) Have you taken some test or certification (or can we give you one) that demonstrates skills in areas we might be concerned about? From there, perhaps you can start learning , that is, it might be worthwhile to…

What a college degree does is that it provides a more equal opportunity for people to obtain a minimum qualification. Let's face it, Ben Franklin's apprenticeship as a printer for his brother more or less typifies the way in which people have obtained apprenticeships - through close personal connections between the master and the apprentice. This is unsurprising when one considers the degree of upfront investment by…

One of the best decisions I ever made was to hire a high school dropout into a de facto programming apprenticeship.

The guy dropped out for family reasons, went to work in factories, got a job in IT eventually, but was really bright and hard working, but stuck in a dead-end help desk job. One of our other devs knew him and suggested we give him some programming projects on contract- like $10/hr. So we did. He did a good job, so we offered him an entry level job, working closely with the dev who referred him.

So he moved across the country on the promise of a $15/hr 6 month apprenticeship, and in that time, learned everything you'd hope about building a Java-based web app that handled a lot of traffic, and after 6 months he was full-time at full entry level salary. After a couple years, he became one of our leads. After we got acquired, he went on to the acquiring company, then joined another startup as their first employee.

But, I would not have taken the risk unless a) he had a sponsor, b) he had some distinguishing credential.

In his case, yes, he dropped out of h.s., but he was also taking AP Calculus at the time. To me that was a sign that was enough of a time that he had the horse power to making it worth taking a risk on him.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#37

Post by timtadh »

> Let's face it, the best experts aren't the ones who knows all the answers, but the ones who know where to look for the answers.

In many ways I feel like this is exactly what a degree in Computer Science or a related field gives you. Becoming an educated member of society isn't about learning the "correct" answers it is about learning to ask the right questions. It is about learning some questions outlive their answers. Universities enable students to glimpse the horizon of human understanding. A glimpse of the infinite unknown.

I understand people feel burned by: their experiences at university, hiring practices of corporations, poorly performing well credentialed hires, and the cost of education in general. However, let's not toss the baby out with the bath water here.

@brudgers said it best:

> Modern higher education has grown because it offers such a powerful solution to many of the problems created by apprenticeship particularly lack of equal opportunity, exploitation of apprentices, diversion of resources to training and away from profit making activities, and long term commitments to particular individuals who may not be suited for the profession.[1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2899059

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#38

Post by argv_empty »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #26

Here's my rough criteria when selecting applicants for technology roles: 1) What have you done lately that is like what I want you to do? 2) What is your attitude like? (past references very important here) 3) Have you taken some test or certification (or can we give you one) that demonstrates skills in areas we might be concerned about? From there, perhaps you can start learning , that is, it might be worthwhile to…

I freely admit that we apprenticeship supporters wave our hands around a lot while yelling "apprenticeships! apprenticeships!" without providing necessary detail.

A lot of those details could be worked out along the way. I'd be more excited to see the supporters provide actual apprentice programs than details on how everyone should operate such a program.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#39

Post by gaius »

ohyes wrote: post #34
ig1 wrote: post #18

Imagine you offered a job position of "software apprentice" and say you got a thousand responses. How would you identify the ones that would be worth gambling on ? - there would be little to nothing to differentiate candidates. By and large you'll have candidates who didn't do well at school (because those who do well at school tend to go to university), have never done anything to show that they're capable of long t…

How is that different from any other job application? The job will clearly go to the boss's nephew, who is totally great at computer stuff because he plays so much WoW. (Though it is a well known fact that the best middle management comes from Eve Online). Seriously, you will generally want to look for people who are intelligent and good at abstract thinking. In my biased opinion, you should be shooting for the best…

Also, you can always fire them if they don't work out.

I'm guessing you're in a right-to-work state, in the UK and EU firing someone for anything other than gross negligence is very, very hard. Hiring someone who "just doesn't work out" is a huge risk for an organization that can't afford to shuffle them off into a "VP of Paperclips" position.

Re: Apprenticeships - Employers Must Get Past Degree Snobbery

#40

Post by ajkessler »

Many employers use a university degree as a proxy to judge whether or not you're employable, not whether or not you are qualified. As the article rightly points out, it's easier than ever to get a college degree, both because there are more universities offering them than ever before, and because the requirements to get those degrees are lower than ever before. Obtaining a degree merely shows whether or not you have the minimal foresight and work ethic required to be admitted to a university, and the even more minimal determination and resilience to actually get the degree. Thus, many employers think "If you can't muster a degree, in this lax environment, you're probably not going to be a good employee."

That said, if you can prove you have that determination, work ethic, and competence to do the job, many employers wouldn't give two shits if you never got an otherwise meaningless degree. The problem is, there's not a lot of other great proxies to demonstrate those qualities, especially proxies that would save your resume from getting tossed immediately.

As to the "degree snobbery" thought, it makes a lot of sense for some employers to use universities as their recruiting system. Think about law firms that only hire Harvard law grads. Snobbery at its worst, right?

Well, say Harvard Law gets 10000 applicants each year. This group is already self-selected to a certain extent, because most people who don't have a shot at getting in don't even apply. Next, Harvard only selects the most elite candidates (those with perfect scores only have about a 50% chance of getting in). So, anybody who makes it out of Harvard, even if they're at the bottom of the class, has already been screened extensively. If an employer just picked totally at random from this Harvard pool, he's got an excellent shot at picking a great employee, because the barrel he's choosing from has already been screened for him. This can hugely reduce the amount of effort an employer needs to put into making a hire, and so, even if lots of qualified candidates are overlooked, such a system might still make great sense.

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