This is news? What are they doing, throwing juniors into server rooms and expect them to learn through looking at blinking lights?
Yes
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.
Here’s Active Directory, you’ll figure it out.
My favorite was "here’s Exchange 2003, you’ll figure it out. We seem to be sending out thousands of emails every few minutes and are on all the spam lists. See you in a bit. ".
They are still doing that.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
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 important 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
And selfhosting your own homelab is primarily open technologies that are leagues better than the ancient CRM system at work.
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.
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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.
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.
What?!
Can you really hypnotize young people that they will die without using internet ?
wat
Just wat
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.
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.
