From the BigCo perspective, mentoring is coming back. Mentoring/apprenticeship used to be the way all engineers started out, but it seemed to slowly fade away over time in a lot of organizations.

Now we're seeing more HR/management training people teaching that mentoring and coaching new hires (esp. those just out of school) is a better way to go. It gets them up and running faster and you can brainwash^H^H^H^H I mean teach them they way you want them to do things.

Personally, I think it's a good thing.