Submitted 3 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/27/tech_career_paths_apprenticeships_needed/
I love how the trend in tech seems to be to shift 100% of responsibility for professional development to the employee.
“Just get some certs on your own and build a homelab.”
Yeah, I have 2 degrees and a bunch of certs, of which many require CEU or renewal costs. Everytime I ask for professional development it’s “yeah there might be some budget for this one specific thing next quarter”.
It’s really cruel because no amount of education will prepare people for the inevitable first year it takes to actually learn all the ass backwards ways they have of doing things that only that specific workplace does and everyone does it differently.
Every impoetant piece of tech has a borderline unworkable backend that is 20 years of hack jobs taped together that you can’t change or improve or it all collapses.
But yeah they expect college to prepare you for that lmao.
Yep, oh my god what a shock it was. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing
This has always been the case, but in the US, basically no tech employers actually treat their junior employees as apprentices, they treat them as temporary contractors, and are thus unable to maintain any consistent kind of institutional knowledge.
They’ve basically brought over the broken ladder of the management track, over to the technical track of increased technical expertise (without necessarily increasing management/administrative responsibilities).
Currently, each generation of executives doesn’t come from within the company. There’s no simple path from mail room to executive anymore. Now, you have to leave the company to go get an MBA, then get hired by a consulting firm, then consult with that company as a client, before you’re on track to make senior management at the company.
If the technical track is going this way, too, then these companies are going to become more brittle, and the current generation of entry level workers are going to hit a lot more career dead ends. It’s bad for everyone.
Currently, each generation of executives doesn’t come from within the company.
This in particular I find to be just the most astonishingly duplicitous, completely full of shit thing about American Tech Corps.
They are masters of lying to you and telling you that if you work hard, perform well, blah blah, you’ll adcance through the ranks.
All outward oriented ‘how to be a good employee’ type media propaganda says you need to be loyal and stop job hopping.
All these motherfuckers job hop all the fucking time and they know they do!
And unions
This. Unionise people. It’s a benefit for all
This is already literally how it works in Germany. You can also get in with a college/university degree, especially for software dev jobs, but nowadays it’s pretty unusual that people who enter the field just have no related education at all.
What you mean with things that advance continually but also every business uses a different solution you can’t expect someone who have a perfect understanding of 6976 different possible solutions used coming out of college? What are we even teaching these kids if not every possible current and legacy software of any possible IT application and the differences between each version of each. Geez.
Token ring networks is what they spent quite a bit of time teaching us about, in 2016. Perhaps fair enough to mention it as a thing that existed but they taught this stuff to us like it was current.
That’s the biggest problem with learning tech from a college: developing, vetting, publishing, and adopting curriculum all take a good chunk of time. More time than it takes for new tech to arise.
It’s not hard to see going to trainings/expos/etc. on new/current/upcoming tech while working at a business is going to be a lot more useful than learning 5-20 year old tech in college.
I had a similar experience where we had an entire class for Novell Directory Services. The reason our teacher gave for keeping the class in the curriculum? We MAY run into it in the workforce.
This is sort of how I got my start as a network engineer in the US, a dozen or so years ago.
There was a large skills gap in the area (still is, IMO)…so the company started hiring people that had no training but had a good technical aptitude with the intent to train them directly.
I know a lot of really great engineers that got their start through that program.
The company has since been bought, and bought again. We’ve all mostly scattered to the wind. But I still run into some of them every now and then as vendors for my current employer…our current VoIP consultant came from that program, and honestly I don’t know anybody who knows IP Telephony better than him.
Over 15 years ago I proposed to a number of universities what could best be described as an apprentice program. Our clients were interested but because there was no defined income stream to the university (they wanted us to pay them to allow us to teach their soon to be graduates) nobody bit. We have been sounding the alarm about Gen-X retiring for years, but nobody wants to hear it. Now a lot of my colleagues are starting to leave the sector or move out of the US to and scale down their hours. Covering their roles is going to be a struggle.
I read a mini rant from someone here recently about how software shops all fired their elder mentor employees because they didn’t close enough tickets, and spent all their time growing others’ skills. Similar theme.
But there is one problem here. When people possess a rare skill, they often don’t want to pass it on to anyone else. Keeping the skill rare is how you keep it valuable. And young employees who acquire a skill somewhere will immediately put it on the open market to maximize their pay.
So is it the right thing for the world to have apprenticeships? Sure. Is it the right thing for employers to invest in them? Yes, but they don’t because they are short sighted but also because they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty. Is it the right thing for veterans with a certain skill to pass it on? Dubious, unless they have some guarantee that the apprentice will support them somehow in exchange.
Basically everyone acts in their self interest against the interests of the whole. And it’s not just employers doing so. It’s us too.
Co-ops and collectives can help bridge the gap between management interest and worker interest.
they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty.
In fairness, this is also down to companies having no loyalty to their employees. I would be more than happy to never have to go job hunting again, if career jobs, with appropriate incentives, were still a thing that actually exists. I am substantially less enthusiastic about the prospect of spending my entire working life dedicated to a single company that will not give me annual raises that beat inflation or any sort of pension as a reward for my loyalty, while my working conditions and benefits will likely deteriorate over time at the whims of a rotating group of petty tyrants in management, and the prospect of getting laid off because some dipshit in the C-suite implemented a terrible idea that anyone with the least amount of experience doing the actual work could have told them was doomed from the start and saved everyone suffering the consequences of their dumbass vanity project to pad their resume for when they pull the cord on their golden parachute and jump ship to sink another business.
I suspect a lot of people would be quite content at having the stability of such a position, if only the trade-offs weren’t so terrible for them in pretty much every other way. The vague possibility of a farewell party at the end of 40+ years of work doesn’t cut it.
Yep you’re right about all that. It’s a tough situation because it not only requires both employers and employees to behave correctly, it also requires all companies to be doing so at once. If one company makes big investments in skills and gives steady raises annually, but another company offers a little more salary right now, guess where employees are going to go. It may not even be in their long term interests to do so but we sometimes think short term too.
It’s going to be tough for any company to offer all the long term stability things and the short term higher salary. TBH this is what you get at the top tech companies right now and everyone hates them for being exploitative monopolies. But that’s also how they stand head and shoulders above others in order to be able to do this stuff. 🤷♂️
BTW when I say they offer long term stability I guess there are no guarantees with that, but they do offer equity vesting that makes staying with them long term much more rewarding. Right now I’m totally locked into the golden handcuffs and even through my short term prospects at work suck really badly and I hate my day to day, I’d basically be cutting my income by half if I left to get a job on the open market. That ain’t a long term employment contract or pension but it is compelling.
One annoying thing I’ve noticed about certifications is that you have to get them for certain jobs but only use 20-30% of the subject matter you have to study in order to obtain them for the actual job…
Certifications are there to assure the employer that A) you know something B) you are able to be trained. The reason you use 20-30% is because few jobs on the planet require you to know everything. The certification assures that you are least well read on whatever 20-30% is thrown your way.
Literally the only thing i really used on a regular basis from Sec+, is extremely basic PKI (private/public keys). I got it to meet 8570 requirements.
I learned far more useful skills on the job.
As a hiring manager, I don’t give a shit about certs. AWS certs, for example, serve primarily as marketing material and free money. Soft skill certs like agile methodology (of which I have several) are equally bullshit in that everything is a pattern not a prescription yet many people miss that and shoot their teams in the foot. There are some security certs I do value, such as CISSP, because they can be required for certain industries and actually do carry some gravitas. Even those, though, aren’t necessarily valuable for the things I actually need my security folks to do.
I’d say the market is maybe 30/70 split with folks like me and ATS or idiot hiring managers thinking your ability to memorize the specific GCP settings no one uses will actually make you understand why prod blew up. I refuse to get any; I actively support my team getting them as long as they know what they’re getting into.
I’m mildly horrified that Alexis Bertholf is viewed as the voice of tech on this issue
💯
I’m currently working with a team of a few seniors and the rest mid-levels. I’ve helped get a few juniors hired but they’ve buckled under the pressure after 6 months.
They studied development at school and did great with their classwork but perhaps they thought they knew a lot and ended up realizing that they barely scratched the surface.
Though not required to learn deeper aspects of development, having a team, partner or mentor goes a heck of a long way. It’s like learning the piano. You can hit all the right notes but it doesn’t mean you have musicality.
I’m also looking forward to working a couple of days a week, training and coaching young developers.
0x0@programming.dev 3 months ago
This is news? What are they doing, throwing juniors into server rooms and expect them to learn through looking at blinking lights?
activ8r@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Yes
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s what they did to me 20-odd years ago. I did my best to train up the guys that came after me, but I am only one guy. I hope they’re not still doing that.
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
They are still doing that.
mr_jaaay@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Here’s Active Directory, you’ll figure it out.
i2ndshenanigans@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Pretty much. If you can’t Google it you’re screwed in a lot of situations. Too many tenured IT folks have been through the forced self learning and insane hours figuring things out that they think training and documentation is not needed. I’ve definitely been there. In the late 90’s early 2000’s most orgs didn’t pay for IT shit so you just had to deal with it. It’s definitely better now but there are still people and companies that act like it’s 1999 still. I took over IT for an org a year ago that had their only IT employee die and they never recovered some of their data out of AWS because the dbag used personal accounts and didn’t document shit. This was a company with 500+ employees and that had 1 IT person. They also had a 2003 server that was implemented in 2005 that was never updated and was used in production until a month after I took the contract.
rishado@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That is exactly what they’re doing buddy