I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora but I’m increasingly concerned at the cost of higher education for young people from families that are not wealthy. I had parents who would have sacrificed anything for my education but I had clever friends who were not so fortunate. The system is bleeding talent into dead-end jobs. Below, I consider other models of training as I hope it might start a conversation in the technology community and the political infrastructure that trickles money down into it.
Through learning about ‘Agile’ software development, I became interested in related ‘Lean’ thinking. It borrows from Japanese cultural ideas and the way the martial arts are taught. I think the idea is that first you do, then you learn and finally you understand (as illustrated by the film ‘Karate Kid’.) That requires a ‘master’ or ‘Sensei’ to guide and react to what s/he sees about each individual’s current practice. It seems a good model for programming too. There may be times when doing is easier if you gain some understanding before you ‘do’ and advice and assistance with problem solving could be part of this. I’m not alone in thinking this way, as I see phrases like “kata” and “koans” appearing around software development.
I’ve also seen several analogies to woodworking craft which suggests that a master-apprentice relationship might be appropriate. There is even a ‘Software Craftsmanship’ movement. This could work as well in agile software development teams, as it did for weavers of mediaeval tapestries.
A female Scrum Master friend assures me that the word “master” is not gendered in either of these contexts. Of course, not all great individual crafts people make good teachers but teams with the best teachers would start to attract the best apprentices.
If any good programmers aren’t sure about spending their valuable developer’s time teaching, I recommend the “fable in novella form” Jonathan Livingston Seagull, written by Richard Bach, about a young seagull that wants to excel at flying.
Small software companies ‘have a lot on’ but how much would they need to be paid to take on an apprentice in their development teams, perhaps with weekly day-release to a local training organisation? I’d expect a sliding scale to employment as they became productive or were rejected back into the cold, hard world if they weren’t making the grade.
On The Outside 