Comment by steve_adams_86
Comment by steve_adams_86 4 days ago
I’ve thought we should mirror skilled labours in many ways for a long time but I don’t think we’ve made an inch of progress.
The way newcomers get “mentored” haphazardly by random coworkers and google/youtube/stack overflow/AI is absolutely bizarre and exceedingly unprofessional given our work has real world implications. Some sort of apprenticeship model and at least a degree of oversight would make so much sense, but… Well, we’ve got this mess instead. It’s strange.
Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time. My experience of learning from someone who’d earned their tickets was sooo much better than the self-teaching and cargo-cult leadership I endured in tech.
Despite that, I’m extremely grateful to the people who served as good mentors in my career. It made an immense difference. And while I enjoy self-teaching a lot, it’s awful to need to rely on it because your industry is practically structureless in that regard. So many days of trial by fire that could be avoided.
> Maybe I only feel that way because I came from skilled labour before I started programming full time.
No, I expected things to work the way you think it should and I don't have a background in the trades. It's just bonkers how bad the industry training is.
I suspect (but definitely do not know) that it stems from a "Why pay to train them when someone else (or maybe they, themselves) will do it for us?" mentality that also just so happens to result in it being hard as fuck to find entry-level work.