Comment by jacobion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobion | Hacker News Reader

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The way apprenticeships traditionally worked is that the apprentice was bound to the master for a certain number of years, and his parents also often had to pay to have him taken on. The tension between needing trained labour, but not wanting your trained labour to walk out the door and seek employment elsewhere (literal meaning of 'journeyman') was resolved firstly by extremely severe constraints on the apprentice and his freedom, and secondly by pretty severe regulation of the master, to ensure quality of training, and prevent exploitation. In practice there still was a lot of exploitation.

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I don't think we need to look at apprenticeships through a lens that is quite out of date. For example you can look at the apprenticeship schemes in the UK:

https://www.apprenticeships.gov.uk/

This only works with a lot of government support. If you don’t have the government’s ok to take more of the trainee’s surplus in year three than you could if they could just leave why bother training them in year one or two when they’re bloody useless or of marginal value? Unpaid internships exist for the same economic reason; for a long time in many fields the training being provided is worth more than the labour of the trainee. If you can’t get a return from the training why bother? That’s where the government comes in, either by allowing those kinds of contracts or by mandating apprenticeships or levying industry wide “taxes” so everyone pays for trainees’ development and gets the return from it more or less equally. Otherwise the logical thing to do is let someone else pay for the training and then immediately hire away the trainees without paying the costs of the training.

Do you think that apprenticeships in the UK have been successful in motivating training for shortage jobs with highly technical skills?

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.

I’m just bringing it up to show that we don’t need to just consider one model and in particular one so out of date.

In general I also think a lot of the praise for apprenticeships is misplaced and viewed through rose tinted lenses.

I brought up the past model to show that apprenticeships in the past worked for a specific reason. Various models of apprenticeship/training/education fail today, because we have rejected what made them work in the past. We don't want / can't have a system where young people are completely under the control of an apprentice master for several years, unable to change jobs or live where they want. This is probably a good thing. But without it, the idea of apprenticeships makes little sense.

> literal meaning of 'journeyman'

The title "journeyman" refers to the right to charge a fee for each day's work. :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman#Origin

Interesting, the wikipedia right before your quote says that the "journey" "comes from the French journée (day)," as you say, charging for a day of work. But the next paragraph says:

> 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.

You are misreading it. The semantics that someone goes from place to place is captured in the word "wandering", and is not repeated in "journeyman", which still refers to charging for a day of work.

Indeed, we already have a form of this in PhDs. They teach people more advanced skills, but they are exploitative and gatewalled.

Yes, and despite this there is commonly resentment by academics of the time they spend mentoring graduate students who then leave for higher paid posts outside academia.

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