I have never seen such a thing actually work. The companies I have seen maybe formally had a mentorship program but that was only on paper. Usually it’s sink or swim for new people. And a lot of them get stuck at the advanced beginner level because as soon as they produce something useful all mentorship stops and they get thrown into the deadline machine.

Not sure which decade your time machine brought you from, but no, I would not say that "plenty" of companies do this.

Far more common is a sink-or-swim scenario where new hires are expected to learn from overworked and not particularly interactive senior-level folks, while everyone gets their noses pushed into a grindstone by project managers.

n=1, this is my experience too.

The senior embedded engineer here is reputed by our technical management and technical clients to be a pleasure to work with.

He is, whether as a client or as a junior engineer! And while he's willing to interact, people are reluctant to speak to him because he's in (too) high demand. So we grind our projects on our own and only reach out if we can justify interrupting his work.

I think this is a great way to develop some generalist breadth, but not a great way to develop specialist expertise, like an 'apprenticeship' might.

Also, on a less technical level, not having the 'apprenticeship' means people can more easily move around to roles/circumstances that may fit them better.

Sounds like your company needs to hire and retain more senior engineers. What happens if this person ever decides to leave the company?

In this system, learning a trade's practical aspects is mostly the job of a specific company the student is employed with (or rather "pre-employed"), and the theoretical/general aspects is the job of the country's education system.

It's a good alternative to a purely academical system like universities, or getting an extremely company-specific skill set only:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system

If that's the case, I'd say there's a massive shortage of 'decent' companies. Modern business strategy shuns apprenticeship because that's viewed as additional cost no one wants to pay that ultimately becomes a sunk cost. I'm not saying they're right/wrong, just that's the perspective I see.

Every business I interact with wants quick turn around/ROI and any respectable semblance of apprenticeship doesn't fit well in that framing. Even in research where it's assumed you're taking on new problems you've not seen before, the pressure is constant and budgeted/planned on the assumption everyone "hits the ground running."

I don't know how any of these environments promote apprenticeship which is slow, costly, and supports practices like long term investments in relationships between employer/employee. On top of that, if you do go into training new hires and your competitors don't but instead hire experienced workers, that puts you at a competitive disadvantage in the near term which may strangle you long before your new hires can help level the playing field.

I'm not sure how you reincorporate the concept of apprenticeship back into the current labor market. The big tech companies strategy is to simply start kids earlier by integrating some training materials into k-12 and colleges so tax payers and future employees will eat the training costs. They also get their pick of experienced folks when they want/need them because they can front the costs/expenses. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Traditionally there's been a balance of sharing the cost between apprentice and mentor. More and more that cost is pushed on the apprentence and who wants to pursue that pathway if so?

This seems to especially be a problem in tech over more traditional roles where apprenticeship is expected: medicine, engineering, trades like plumbing/electrician, etc.

While it's not completely either/or, this is a key point. When I first graduated, there were definitely companies that had formal 12-month or so training/internship/apprenticeship programs. We still have (paid at some level) summer interns, but extended rotations/on-boarding don't really exist.

And part of the reason is what makes sense for both employee and employer when 10 to 20 year employment tenure is pretty normal doesn't make sense if the new college hire will probably have moved on in a couple years.

That totally happens. Got hired straight out of college for a new team at Google. There were no senior people on the team, the closest was management which didn't have the time for that sort of mentorship. It sucked and meant nobody got anything done for a year.

In my experience, there's usually a few good senior people to learn from, unless you've joined a truly terrible company where everyone good has either left or burnt out.

However, it's almost always good senior people working against the system to help juniors, not the system supporting any meaningful mentorship (except through a bunch of box-ticking bullshit to burden everyone with).

That’s how I often feel. I still get measured only by results so when I help somebody I am reducing my own output. I still mentor people a lot and involve them as much as possible because I feel it’s the right thing to do. My direct manager supports me but with one level up or more I feel that it hurts my ratings.

It’s also kind of annoying that all new interesting stuff goes to new people or interns and the most senior people are stuck with keeping things going and doing mainly maintenance work.