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".

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, which then reinforces the loop of relying for contractors for everything a small level of hierarchical steps under C Suite.

The CIO said 'Why do we need a wiring closet, we're a cloud first company'."

you have to laugh, because otherwise you'd cry

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.

And unions

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.

Not surprising where the only way to get tech jobs is to have 5 years experience or work service desk and hope someone whos job you want gets hit by a bus.

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.

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...

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 employers are reluctant to invest big in their training.

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.

I'm mildly horrified that Alexis Bertholf is viewed as the voice of tech on this issue

Maybe young people will abandon internet like we are slowly abandoning newspapers, radio and television. It's just a matter of time when new generation will say they don't want to use tech and want to spend their time elsewhere and nobody will force them not to do it.

All of internet concept is based on belief that without using internet you are missing something. People are hypnotised on missing of the information or message. But does it really matter ? Can you really hypnotize young people that they will die without using internet ? That they will be stupid without using AI ? What if some generation during evolution process will develop anti internet gene. We are living organisms not robots.

100 years ago nobody would believe that you will earn a living by sitting in front of tv with a typewriter yet here we are.

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.