If "industry is crying out for more people", then it should be investing in that in the same way it does in every other part of the supply chain.
They should be hiring and training programmers, not externalizing their costs.
Today neither employers not bootcamps would be able to take on risk/exert control over the apprentice's career to the extent optimal from a strictly economic point of view. You can look at the service-for-education deals offered by the military (for both low-skilled and highly skilled people) to get an example - no other organizations would be allowed to restrict a trainee's liberty to the same extent.
While I don't agree with the moral spin that is sometimes put on this of 'greedy juniors' getting trained up and then abandoning their benefactors for higher salaries, this is a real collective action problem, not just shortsightedness in behalf of employers.
I don't think they have. I've seen reports which claim they are mostly used as a subsidy to training which was already taking place, as a workaround to pay workers less, and generally in low-skilled jobs.
Like the grandparent post, the UK model is guilty of assuming that the word "apprenticeship" together with a sort of folksy appeal to a golden era of apprentices will solve the hard problems of training and education.
In general I also think a lot of the praise for apprenticeships is misplaced and viewed through rose tinted lenses.
The title "journeyman" refers to the right to charge a fee for each day's work. :
> In parts of Europe, as in Late Medieval Germany, spending time as a wandering journeyman (Wandergeselle),[6] moving from one town to another to gain experience of different workshops, was an important part of the training of an aspirant master.
So I guess at least in some times/places journeymen also did actually journey? Whether wandering or not, I'd think the right to charge a fee for each day's work is also the right to leave at the end of the day if you'd like, having gotten paid. Unlike an apprentice who is tied to his master and does not get paid for a day's work, if he leaves he's out of work entirely.
Why waste $$ training juniors, when for a fraction of that $$ you can poach a ready-trained senior from the company next door?
Every company wants someone else to take apprentices and carry the burden of on-the-job training
Of course, the most skilled juniors quickly left for higher paying jobs elsewhere around when they started to actually make back their salaries in billing. There were no hard feelings, the company knew that could happen and could afford it, and of course, why wouldn't they? (I mean, I guess it was hoped that sometimes they would prefer working for the consultancy for a while). But it was a kind of experiment, and indeed the experiment showed it was not really a sustainable model, I think they stopped doing that.
I wish there was a realistic solution to this problem other than bootcamps, but I don't know what it could be.
Unless you are Netflix and can attract and afford world wide talent, if you have no bonus or stock compensation you are much better hiring contractors for software.
As it is, I'm not surprised companies are reluctant to bet on the potential of untrained engineers, _and_ the chance that they'll stick around long enough to make the investment worthwhile.
I'm sure there are a lot of inexperienced, uncredentialed engineers out there who would take a low-paying job with a significant chance of getting fired in 3 months. I was one of them. The alternative is to not get hired at all.
For example my brother is a talented person with devops/sys admin/cloud skills. As someone who is more in the pure coding side of things, I go to him often with questions in his area. He has been tech oriented since a young age. He is also 30 with no comp sci degree and no work history besides driving Uber. No company would take a chance on someone like that if they have to pay a huge salary for it. But for a startup it would be a perfect moneyball opportunity to pay like $25 an hour or whatever. If he works out great you got a smart productive person for a cheap salary. It is a huge win. If not, dump him and try with someone else.
At a certain price-point they are.
> Learning to program is more like an old fashioned trade than a profession
Sure. Learning to code is pretty much a trade at this point. Engineering isn't. There's a pretty big gap between a real engineer and someone who "learned to code" in high school.
What's this phenomenon called?
"Spoiling the market"? "Shitting the bed"?
Basically, when inauthentic activity so increases transaction costs that the authentic market is harmed.
My aunt once had a pretty good cottage business selling bespoke wall paper stuff on eBay. Over time, inauthentic entries crowded out her real product. SEO, fakes, knockoffs, misnaming stuff. Her customers could no longer find her products thru eBay, even when using exact match search terms.
Sound familiar?
Using terms like "fraud" and "scam" seems grossly inadequate. I'm provisionally using "authentic" vs "inauthentic", which suck, for lack of better terms.
A parting thought: Somehow Amazon managed to become worse than eBay, for both vendors and customers. Amazon boosts their own brands. And has a separate payola lane for "sponsored" entries.
Tangential, but this is pretty much emerging in the cryptocurrency/digital assets/decentralized finance (defi) space. To your point, out-right or borderline scams are a-dime-a-dozen there right now and there are plenty of incentives to cut corners in order to get growth, but there are a lot of ethical and promising projects as well.
The rational part of me does not want BTC > $30k (or <~10k) within the coming months.
But sure, it’s a common problem in a market economy. Presumably issues of information asymmetry should be alleviated in the days of the internet.
Part of the problem is the students themselves who see six figures and think "I want a piece of that" without necessarily being interested. The code bootcamps take full advantage of this.
Holiday accommodation for example, much less complex than coding bootcamps, is far from a solved problem.
Through threads like this. Many people thinking of entering Lambda school will google it, find bad reviews and critical discussion threads and reconsider.
"Alleviate" does not mean "eradicate", surely it's easier to evaluate schools and holiday homes nowadays, compared to 1980?
The good code bootcamp wont be able to compete in the sort term. The scam version will first attract more customers in short term and destroy overall trust in the long term.
My point is just that a project's economic viability doesn't depend on the relative merits of other projects.
I'm not sure this is true - certainly the opposite of this statement is the central thesis of most investment activity.
Of course when choosing between several projects, such as starting a school or launching a scam, then yes you would look at relative profitability (_and_ absolute of course).
Few people will hopefully find themselves choosing between those two options.
Here we can see that there are lots of people who are prepared to make significant personal sacrifices to work in the software industry. The industry itself is crying out for more people and new people. But it literally doesn't make economic sense, either for universities or for new players such as bootcamps, to train people properly. It's vastly more lucrative to confuse them and then rip them off. It's hard to see a simple market mechanism which can resolve this, as opposed to rebuilding something similar to the gatekeeping and signalling functions around universities, commonly regarded as broken nowadays.