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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why more tech companies don't do apprenticeships straight out of highschool. You can pay a high school student with some programming experience a fraction of the salary of a college graduate and it probably doesn't take that much longer to get them productive and they won't be saddled with student loan debt.

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Poor return on investment given risks involved, you're better off offloading that cost of education/training to the individual and then just hiring them when they signal they are worthy of employment.

At least part of this is because we devalued the high school diploma. We were concerned that many people weren't getting that high school diploma which made it difficult for them to get jobs. Now we lowered the standards and shoved everyone through to the point that 20% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Now a high school diploma is no longer a useful signal to potential employers.

I have hired high school drop-outs and academics, both the best and the worst performers came in roughly equal proportions from both groups.

That's because your interview process is already biasing the result. To get a fairer comparison you should take a random sample from both groups (out of all the applicants) and see (although self selection bias is still in play here).

That is because the signal that college is supposed to provide has also been devalued to an extreme degree. It's simple - a bachelor's degree will soon be the equivalent of a high school diploma.

That is why for a lot of roles a motivated, smart high-school dropout is a better hire than a college student.

I don’t know what you hired them for, but if it was a skilled labor task they had some sort of signal in their resume they could do the job (github repo). We are talking about basically taking HS graduates with nothing except grades/extra curriculars and investing N months in training them for some job you have no certainty they will be able to do, and no assurance they won’t just go to your competition afterward.

>>You can pay a high school student with some programming experience a fraction of the salary of a college graduate

Lol. Pay? A tech company willing to open its doors to highschool students need not fork over actual money. Just ask. You will be deluged with resumes. Running an internship program isn't about the money. It is about the hassle of administering it. Regardless of the economic numbers blasted on the news, getting a decent tech job is cutthroat. Highschool kids will kill to get tech company internship on their pre-collage resume.

Or you could do what Hollywood does and get the older, multi-year interns to supervise the junior ones.

The people you would recruit that way would be way different than the people you recruit from college; it doesn't work very well.

How do I know this? My country has an apprenticeship system and software developer is actually an option, but nobody does this because it doesn't work very well. My company tried it; the person failed to produce even very rudimentary programs.

College really isn't about the education it provides; it is all about signalling that you can deal with deadlines, people and semi-complex problems. That signal often doesn't work though.

YMMV The company I work for has taken on a few people through a apprenticeship scheme straight from high school and they've all been superb.

That's interesting, did you have any kind of pre-selection? What area was the job in? In my case, it was development of tooling in Java and C++.

It's not that I can't imagine it working - in fact, had I done an apprenticeship instead of a university degree, I doubt my output would be much different; it's just that it really didn't seem to work in our case.

I wasn't directly involved in the selection - but I know the team doing it were pretty selective. The folks involved also did a lot of training over a year or so.

Perhaps one reason is that job-hopping is very common in the tech industry. I wouldn't expect many apprentices to hang around long enough for there to be a payoff to the employer.

True this. I don't want to teach a high school graduate (or college grad) what interfaces and abstract classes are.. or basic good design of code. My job depends on making progress, not training.

That said, my org supports up to 4 concurrent interns (typically we have 2-3 at any given point), and they could work for 4 months to 2+ years if they want, 15-40 hours/week -- adjustable for summers, etc... But they need to be at a stage where code review is going over application of theory, not telling them about when to use functions.

We lose a lot of interns after 3-5 months, but if they came in knowing the basics, we usually get something out of it (though the cost-benefit is usually negative). We want to support internships, though, so we keep doing them.

I've always found it challenging to give programming projets to someone who is only here for a few hours and days a week.

Where with clerical tasks you can just have them get back to that pile of paper tomrorrow

The trick is to give them either very small tasks, so they can do them in a sitting, or let them work on independent, but speculative tasks -- so time to completion isn't a big deal. Ex: many years ago, we had an intern working on a Google Glass interface, it didn't work out, because Google Glass, but it was a cool project for him, and it prepped us for thinking about secondary displays like smartwatches.

> My job depends on making progress, not training.

You could say the same thing about a professional taking an apprentice in any trade ... and yet they still take apprentices

My best guess is that is due to HR and mangement wanting to cover their ass when making hiring decisions. If a candidate is hired and they don't do well they can appeal to the authority of the degree the candidate had to make their decision seem rational.

I went straight from high school to a very entry level web development job. I didn't have any chance at getting a job at a larger company but small web shops provided an opportunity for me since I could be hired at a low wage and the owner of the company was the one hiring me.

Now I am grateful to have moved up the ladder over 10 years time and I have a much higher paying job and no student debt.

The degree opens doors, and it makes management people feel that it's a good predictor of outcomes but in my opinion from hiring, we found Curiosity, Ability to Learn, Ability to Listen to be the three best predictors of good outcomes.

HRs graduated from social and humanity sciences don't want to devalue their degree by hiring a non degree person.

For as long as I've been on tech interview loops, it's not HR but the manager who makes the call with (sometimes strong) advice from the interviewers. Maybe the recruiters don't take the self-taught as seriously as they should …

I can imagine that graduates with the insecurity of student loan debt are more loyal to a secure job. A high school student that has been made productive can easily leave for a (riskier) more lucrative position.

Because no one wants to work with 18 year olds. Post-Secondary education is time for individuals to mature and learn how to fit in.

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