I have often felt that programming would do well to have a guild-like system. Current job titles and years of experience do not really help to differentiate the quality of individuals. There's also the intangible benefits of trust and quality that come from the system. I'd love to write "craft" code, that is about producing quality code that elegantly solves real problems. Especially in comparison to the current trend of writing code as quickly as possible, with very little regard for quality from folks outside of the dev team.
wirrbel 163 days ago [-]
In Germany there are programs, its a 3 year program and one works in a company and attends classes in a school for theory aspects. So for 3 years you are apprentice, after that journeyman. I assume that you cannot become Master (Meister) for that career path, but probably you are then qualified to attend a college to get a Computer Science or a Software engineering degree.
One should not underestimate how the "Journeyman -> Master" step is overall also one of gate-keeping. My cousin did his "Meister" as a car mechanic and it was costly (compared to for example getting a university degree in Germany which basically is for free) and he needed to do it, so that he could own his own repair shop (otherwise he would have had to hire a "Meister"). In his Meister-Training he was also exposed to a lot of legal regulations and some training in book-keeping etc, which of course is valuable to someone to whom math never was intuitive.
kqr 163 days ago [-]
> So for 3 years you are apprentice, after that journeyman.
What's nutty is that journeyman usually means "capable of a day's work without supervision" (hence the name: journee-man) and I doubt three years of work is really sufficient for that in complex fields like software development.
Granted, I worked with unusually skilled people for much of my early carreer, but I didn't stop feeling like an apprentice for at least seven years if I include education.
tracker1 163 days ago [-]
I think it depends heavily on what you are working on. The vast majority of software development is effectively web forms connected to a simple backend/database. The web equivalent of MS-Access or Lotus Notes development.
I mean, you can do a lot more, and many are... It just cannot be underestimated how much low hanging fruit software dev there is in practice.
southwesterly 163 days ago [-]
I kinda like the idea of apprentice —> journeyman —> master. Especially applied to crafts, but more mechanical / technical aspects too.
marcus_holmes 163 days ago [-]
There used to be (and maybe still is?) an apprenticeship scheme for software development in Germany. By reputation it produced some excellent developers.
The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
hnbad 163 days ago [-]
I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
Computer Science is Informatik in Germany. Prior to the Bachelor/Master system it was a Magister study meaning you'd usually have to take a second major and a minor or two minors alongside it. Typically you'd either study Wirtschaftsinformatik (business computer science), which was focussed on computer science applied to business processes, Technische Informatik (technically used to be a Diplom study I think), which was more focussed on interacting with hardware, or Theoretische Informatik, which is more similar to the pure abstract computer science and more concerned with higher mathematics than applying the knowledge to build real software.
There is also a recognized trade called Fachinformatiker (I think there's another one called Anwendungsinformatiker which is more similar to Technische Informatik) which is a job training of applied computer science, involving a mix of classes in English, computer science, mathematics, business and other subjects. This still exists and IMO it's the best way to build a foundation for a career path as an application developer.
The university studies are more useful for specialist jobs or larger corporations that insist on university degrees. If you have broad knowledge despite having a university degree rather than the job qualification, it's mostly because of things you did outside the university track itself.
There is no apprenticeship track I'm aware of like there is for traditional trades that have an apprentice/journeyman/master (Lehrling/Geselle/Meister) distinction, e.g. carpentry, mechanics, hairdressing.
tstenner 162 days ago [-]
The two specializations for Fachinformatiker are FI/AE (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklerung, i.e. software development) and FI/SI (Fachinformatiker Systemintegration, that is as you already guessed system integration).
nairboon 163 days ago [-]
> There is no apprenticeship track I'm aware of like there is for traditional trades that have an apprentice/journeyman/master (Lehrling/Geselle/Meister) distinction, e.g. carpentry, mechanics, hairdressing.
Something like this kind of exists in Switzerland, even in two forms:
One track goes like:
normal Lehre -> EFZ, as a Geselle -> eidgenössischer Fachausweise and later -> eidgenössisches Diplom (Meister)
or in case of a Lehre with Berufsmatura: Lehre -> EFZ + BM -> Bachelor FH -> Master FH (Meister)
Tomte 163 days ago [-]
> Prior to the Bachelor/Master system it was a Magister study
Maybe at some universities. Usually it was a diploma study, with a minor (often mathematics or electrical engineering — I did linguistics).
hnbad 159 days ago [-]
It depended on the focus, I think. But I think you're right: I believe Theoretische Informatik was a Diplom study at my university, but there was a related study that used Magister (computational linguistics and humanities computer science, which of course had overlaps with the respective general fields).
wirrbel 163 days ago [-]
> By reputation it produced some excellent developers
It goes both ways, excellent developers, quite often people who would also have excelled in a computer science program (but failed because bad grades in foreign languages prevented them to get admitted, etc.)
But you also have those that struggle to adopt something other than the Visual Basic they learned in their apprenticeship.
> The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Is that different from Germany? Most devs have completed some kind of university degree (or "Hochschule").
If I think of the quality of Software-Engineering instructions I have seen in universities they were always so outdated, that I wonder whether its actually something that can be studied in such an institution in a way that makes sense.
He taught a C++ course which basically was C (with printf and scanf having been replaced by std::cin and std::cout). Of course it was outdated material and if someone had cared enough they could have created new material, but at what pace and at what frequency?
It makes much more sense to teach concepts, that that's what computer science curricula do, then add some engineering concepts in the mix (requirements engineering, validation / verification) and you have someone who can pick up tech on the job quickly.
marcus_holmes 162 days ago [-]
I didn't do an undergraduate degree - I taught myself to code and then just got a job as a developer, and moved on up the ranks. Effectively a DIY apprenticeship, I guess. This used to be a lot more common than it is now.
The same outdated academic thing is true in other disciplines where the cutting-edge is being developed in industry rather than academia. And yes, teach concepts, but that doesn't produce graduates who are able to start writing decent code the day after they graduate.
bane 163 days ago [-]
In the U.S. at least, the standard undergraduate degree is typically 4 years. Most universities offer a range of degrees in the field outside of C.S. which are very popular as they are now seen as both easier to obtain but also more relevant in the workforce. These include software engineering, systems engineering, information technology, and increasingly just plain old software development.
ragnaruss 163 days ago [-]
I think they key part of this is it provides a foundation for having a Licensing Board for our industry. Combining requiring someone licensed to sign off on work where they take actual legal responsibility, with changes to liability laws and insurance for business when they don't use them would go a long way to improving the quality crisis in our industry.
tracker1 163 days ago [-]
I'm not sure business would largely tolerate the rigor (and expense) that would come from such liability assignment in practice. Too many businesses will take short cuts, or decide on shortest path, and too many mid/jr devs with senior titles who don't necessarily know the difference.
Nothing more fun that having a security audit of a codebase and seeing how many relatively dumb security issues are present... from SQL injection, to authentication bypass in a "modern" application.
danjl 162 days ago [-]
Like any certified engineering discipline.
eddd-ddde 163 days ago [-]
I love the idea.
I think some people may fear the concept that their years of experience are just not equal to someone else's same years of experience.
Aeolun 163 days ago [-]
That’s no surprise. If I were not very good after 30 years of experience I’d also hope to not be judged by that.
tracker1 163 days ago [-]
I've seen more than a handful of "senior" developers with a decade or more experience that were just Jr/Mid with a senior title. I think the problem is that relatively tight pay bands combined with certain expectations of title create practical issues in practice.
sgt101 163 days ago [-]
This structure is good for engagements that have long duration (like >3mths) and high intensity.. a lead, an heir and a spare covering a key "role" means that you have continuity if someone goes sick or gets another job. The project can just keep rolling along!
repelsteeltje 164 days ago [-]
Of course, the tag line for the classic Pragmatic Programmer book originally was not your journey to mastery, but from journeyman to master.
Journeyman sounds very much like a postdoc. (the traditional costumes are rare, but I've seen a few journeymen all togged out* for going "auf der Walz" over the last couple of decades)
Universities began as medieval guilds (Latin universitas = guild corporate body) around cathedral schools, composed of teachers (in the northern cathedral schools) or students (in Italy). The university’s grant of a masters degree would allow you to perform as a teacher (Latin magister) in any other cathedral school.
The most interesting point in this article for me lies towards the end: "the role of the Guild was not to form rules, mores, regulations, and laws with respect to their crafts; their role was to introduce a system of art or craft to a new individual, to instill in them the idea of standards, quality, consistency, and perfection".
A common complaint nowadays is that it is very difficult for juniors with no experience to get hired, unless they have a degree from a prestigious university, and even then that's not often a guarantee. It seems that companies are more averse than guilds to take the risk of training someone up to industry standards.
I believe that it would be very beneficial to society to create schemes that encourage learning with a similar system. Mentors can sometimes accomplish this role, but that relation is far more informal.
Wytwwww 162 days ago [-]
> their role was to introduce a system of art or craft to a new individual, to instill in them the idea of standards, quality, consistency, and perfection".
I always thought that their goals was controlling the supply of goods and services to maintain high prices and to prevent competition from ruining profit margins (of course not necessarily universally bad for consumers since guilds generally still maintained some sort of minimum quality standards).
> than guilds to take the risk of training someone up to industry standards.
Because as an apprentice you were effectively bound to your master and had to work him for a paltry wage for a number years just to get a chance to advance your career. Since workers are now free to leave whenever they want and have no obligations to the company that spent money/resources to train them those companies have few incentives to do that.
> I believe that it would be very beneficial to society to create schemes that encourage learning with a similar system.
We might as well bring back indentured servitude while we're at it? Otherwise who is going to pay for this?
ImageXav 162 days ago [-]
I don't really see why a leap to indentured servitude is necessary here. There are obviously many other ways of implementing a training relationship - see the other comments re. how it is done in Germany.
The point I'm making is that society as a whole is worse off if companies are too risk averse to hire and train juniors up to a certain level of quality. This results in too few people capable of doing a specific, presumably valuable, job well. The consequences of this are a society that underperforms it's true potential in the long run. In monetary terms, as you raise the question, that means that less taxable value is generated. So society as a whole pays the consequence.
Wytwwww 162 days ago [-]
> how it is done in Germany
Germany isn't exactly a huge centre of innovation these days or even remotely close to being a success story when it comes to software.
I do understand your overall point though and agree to a large extent, it just seems to me that this is primarily a natural outcome of workers having significantly more bargaining power than before. i.e. it makes little sense for companies to invest much into less experienced workers when they can't "force" them (directly or indirectly) to pay back all of those costs by working for depressed (i.e. compared to what companies which only hire experienced workers can pay) wages.
How can we bring this back without significantly reducing worker rights/bargaining power?
Government/etc. funded programmes might be an option but that would/should effectively be more of a reshaping of formal education to be more inline with teaching the specific practical skills/etc. that would allow workers to be immediately productive (not necessarily a bad thing but not quite the same).
OTH if tech mega-corporations continue growing at the same pace and consuming all competition we might end up in a situation where investing into junior/inexperienced workers will makes sense again because they wouldn't have any other choice but to stay and to work at the same company that hired them for the remainder of their career.
ggm 163 days ago [-]
Michael Polyani is quoted as making a comparison to guilds and scientists by Richard Rhodes in his book on the Atom Bomb. You become a scientist when other scientists accept you as a scientist. The publication side of things is a bit of a formalism, the critical point is acceptance into the craft. A quite a-scientific approach in some ways.
That was of course in a prior age. Last century, in the dawn of Particle Physics, but I think he wrote of science in general in that time, not just Physicists.
Simon_ORourke 164 days ago [-]
These are still very much in use in Germany today. I met a few of these guys in Berlin looking for a couch to crash on for a few days, all carpenters and very funny guys.
I believe that German education is more pragmatic than (for example) British. The Germans invented the polytechnic, designed to teach practical skills. The British converted most of their polytechnics to universities, to their detriment. They now have a bunch of low functioning universities and have lost all their trade schools.
hnbad 163 days ago [-]
That used to be the idea. University used to be much more broad with students often being encouraged to join courses in other disciplines to broaden their knowledge. Then came the Bachelor/Master system and suddenly you had to take exams at the end of lectures, participation was tracked and you'd be failed with no recourse for missing more than twice, everything had to fit into the narrowly defined "modules" you had to pick from (if there was any choice at all) and it all just started feeling like a continuation from school rather than a genuine gateway to scientific expert knowledge. I hope things have improved but the university system is a lot more school-like compared to the free-for-all it was twenty years ago.
Meanwhile because of degree inflation trades for a long time had such a bad reputation they can't find any apprentices but also can't afford the lucrative wages and perks promised by international megacorps.
There's also a very strong cultural and class divide between the three tracks of "highschool", especially Gymnasium (the highest tier -- doesn't have anything to do with sports) and the other two as only the former allows you to graduate with an Abitur which allows you to study at a university (unless you want to take night school classes to earn the same qualification with more time and effort). It's kinda like public vs private schools, except less explicitly about wealth and heritage.
Daub 163 days ago [-]
> the university system is a lot more school-like compared to the free-for-all it was twenty years ago.
Agreed… it is. This is a loss and a gain.
In the 1980s, as a foundation (19 yo) student of a certain London art school, I was taken to Hyde Park for ‘drawing lessons’ and given drug-laced cake by my lecturer, without my knowing. Student-staff sexual relationships were common and it was not unusual for lecturers to be absent the entire semester yet still be paid. Staff rollover was practically non-existent: a job was Ipso-facto a job for life, regardless of your performance. Pertinently, the program was pass/fail.
As a university lecturer, I now work in a credit-based system. Everything is accountable and the layers of administration have quadrupled.
Neither system is perfect. In the end, I believe that it is the faith and energy of those who deliver the system to be the deciding factor.
foldr 163 days ago [-]
> I hope things have improved but the university system is a lot more school-like compared to the free-for-all it was twenty years ago.
I agree with this point, but all of the specific things you mention were already well in place twenty years ago (e.g. modular courses).
hnbad 159 days ago [-]
I formally enrolled in 2005/2006 and at the time these things were definitely not in place in the fields I studied. There were some mandatory introductory courses but even with those you usually had a wide range of options and one of the requirements for moving on was literally just N "weekly hours for a semester" in total of courses (primarily lectures) with no further restrictions. If it said 20 you could spend 20 hours by attending 10 lectures for a semester or spread it out over multiple semesters or you could take courses including courses from other faculties if they didn't have any restrictions on them (you'd only need to demonstrate attendance which was often not recorded for lectures so the only evidence necessary was having enrolled in it - until the BA/MA switch happened and lectures would only be considered if you had written an essay or passed and exam at the end of it, which nobody did).
I ended up dropping out for many reasons including the move to focus on self-employment but part of it was that I passed the deadline for graduating under the old system and that the switch meant a lot of my effort had been for naught as I would have had to write dozens of essays about lectures I attended over the years and the combination of courses I picked didn't neatly fit into the required modules.
I was also active in the department's student group so I got to see how they adapted to the new system and a lot of it was literally just rearranging the existing courses into modules based more on meeting formal structural requirements than actually developing a coherent lesson plan. I acknowledge that this is likely more of a quirk of the Magister studies than Diplom or Lehramt (for teaching professions) which always were more structured even before the transition.
foldr 158 days ago [-]
I did a BA in the UK from 2003-2006 and it was modular, as was every other university I looked at judging by prospectuses.
I personally prefer the modular system. In the traditional system (in the UK at least) you were assessed by final exams with more or less fixed content, so you actually had less flexibility to study what you were interested in.
craz8 163 days ago [-]
Ha! I went to a British polytechnic. There wasn’t a lot of very practical degrees ( there were some though), but there was a lot of hands on computer work in my Computer and Communications degree
It is strange on a resume listing a university I never technically went to, but now only Wikipedia remembers! And I was there before Thor destroyed it in a movie
lemurien 163 days ago [-]
This looks like the „compagnon du devoir et du tour de France“ in France.
They learn the basics and then they make a tour of France to refine their skills. They are required to move at least every six months.
I know a couple of them from my family and this looks impressive. If this existed for software engineering, this would be the best training.
YeGoblynQueenne 162 days ago [-]
>> Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master
Those are now more properly referred to as Apprentice, Journeyperson and Main.
CyberDildonics 162 days ago [-]
By who?
zoogeny 163 days ago [-]
It is important to note, especially given the positive view given to the guild system in this article, that it is written on a masonic philosophy page. The freemasons have a long and esoteric history that should be viewed with some skepticism. Secret fraternal orders have a sketchy history.
George Carlin has a famous comedy bit where he states "It's a big club and you ain't in it" [1]. My own feeling is that guilds of all sorts prioritize exclusivity for the purposes of bestowing power on some select few. As the article states "Master’s were few and far between". This is similar to how luxury brands maintain their high value: exclusivity. The standardization and guarantees of quality seem to be secondary to the pyramid scheme nature of ascension within these organizations (in the same way that the quality of luxury goods is often secondary to their exclusivity). It reminds me in some ways of the concept of "familiars" in vampire lore, humans who willingly toil away for their masters hoping one day to be elevated to the same level.
It is a complex topic because of the positives and negatives of these systems being highly intertwined. To this day in Canada there is an apprenticeship system for trades. However, it is no longer an inner circle of masters deciding who gets the special status, it is a regional qualification body with clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.
As a society we haven't at all gotten away from the degenerate aspects of guilds. Think of the association with the "golf/country club" crowd. Or things like the Skull and Bones [2] type organizations at elite universities. Or when people joke about the Illuminati. This article is arguing for that by presenting a rose-tinted-glasses view of the past.
Historically, guilds were first and foremost a tool to enforce monopoly power on the part of masters against anyone else trying to enter the market (and against eachother to maintain monopoly pricing and supply). Luddites were actually just doing what guilds normally did.
hnbad 163 days ago [-]
I'm not sure why you're bring Luddites into this. Ludd and his followers were opposing the industrialization of their professions because it meant they were losing their jobs to machines while the factory owners were continuing to build on the wealth they helped create. Technological progress is still usually spoken about in abstract and misleading terms of "increasing productivity" as if it were about reducing the workload of the worker when instead the worker's hours remain the same and a reduced workload just translates into "redundancies", i.e. the workers don't gain anything from being "more productive", they actually stand to lose their jobs entirely because fewer workers are necessary for the same output.
waveBidder 163 days ago [-]
The behavior of smashing their competitor's means of production was typical of guilds, and iirc it was one of the last instances of guilds acting to defend their interest in England. I'm more sympathetic to the Luddites than most guilds since it's around the time the labor/capital split in the productive class actually happened.
robwwilliams 163 days ago [-]
Agreed, but parent article makes the good point that the Hansa League and guilds also pushed back very effectively on the nobility in Germany snd Northern Europe (Bergen Norway was in the Hansa League).
And if you are willing to be more generous (as the author and I are) these protective societies of workers and merchants were an early step toward free market economies unencumbered by lazy landed gentry. Compare the history of Spain and France during this era to that of Germany and Holland.
zoogeny 163 days ago [-]
> guilds also pushed back very effectively on the nobility in Germany snd Northern Europe
If your argument is that exclusive initiatory societies were an improvement on hereditary nobility rule then you won't get much of a push back from me. However, are they better than constitutional democratic republics?
I don't actually have a clear answer to that question. I mean, I have a feeling that I have more chance of being initiated into a guild than I do being promoted to nobility. That potential for inclusion goes a long way, much like the oft-cited American dream where even the poor think they have a chance at being a millionaire. And our current democratic system doesn't seem to be adequately controlling the quality of our society.
As I mentioned, it is actually a very complex question. I just recommend people to be skeptical. Societies that form around keeping some thing secret except for initiated members for the purposes of exclusivity should be treated with a large dose of skepticism.
o11c 163 days ago [-]
According to people who complained about guilds, sure.
But let's not forget that fraud and incompetence are extremely common across history. And also that the very concept of universities derived from guilds.
So in a sense we do still have, and rely on, a guild system today.
hnbad 163 days ago [-]
In a way it's also simply a network of trust. Sure, you didn't have many masters but journeymen carried the reputation of their master and that transferred when seeking employment elsewhere as well as when eventually becoming masters themselves.
The concept of having the number of businesses artificially limited also isn't gone in modern Germany: notaries and medical practices are allocated licenses based on regional population densities. As I understand it, taxi medallions are another example in the US (not sure how this works in Germany). Of course the idea in this case is to encourage specialists to spread out throughout the country rather than bunch up in the most lucrative population centers.
detourdog 163 days ago [-]
My mom started a "guild" in 1970 with a linguist. This was the counter culture optimistic term for a collective of like minded people bonded by craftsmanship and commerce.
Late Carlin got far too misanthropic for my taste.
Like all things, we need balance. This is a good argument against guilds, but there are positive aspects of the system too. Imagine a world that was truly a free for all -- one in which there were no trusted authorities in any field. I believe such a society would quickly devolve into a dystopia and collapse.
From my perspective, the big problem is when there is no competition among guilds and the guild leaders wield disproportionate societal power. That is how you end up with oppressive oligarchy, which honestly is a reasonable description of the global order right now. My hope though is that we are better able to organize and compete against the current oligarchic order.
zoogeny 163 days ago [-]
> I believe such a society would quickly devolve into a dystopia and collapse.
The main argument in favor of totalitarianism/authoritarianism is pretty much always law & order. And the main argument against the prevailing power structure is pretty much always freedom (e.g. from oppression and/or protection of fairness in competition). So the question is often, what is more important to you, order or freedom? How much freedom would you give up for order, and how much order would you give up for freedom?
However, guilds aren't the only way to promote structure/order. As I said, the system in Canada is regionalized through state run organizations which are answerable to a democratic process. It is not through some secret cabal of "Masters" who make arbitrary decisions. We can achieve order without requiring esoteric fraternal societies. For all of their flaws, constitutional democratic republics offer a much better system of accountability.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 163 days ago [-]
> My own feeling is that guilds of all sorts prioritize exclusivity for the purposes of bestowing power on some select few. As the article states "Master’s were few and far between".
One possible reason could simply be there's a lot more future impact to granting someone the final title. If you proclaim someone a "Maestro of C++," then suddenly all the other C++ laborers will get a clear signal that whatever that person is doing is implicitly also what they should do, if they want to move up the ladder.
Beyond that, the top jobs usually comes with required work to train the next generation. So this person would heavily contribute, both implicitly and explicitly, to the future of the C++ guild.
Considering that impact in combination with how hard it would be to undo the decision, it's not surprising that many organizations might be cautious about deciding to hand someone that title.
> clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.
This makes sense, too. For any organization that wants to stay in the business of handing out these titles for the long-term, meaningful transparency is a good way to go about it.
Wytwwww 162 days ago [-]
> the top jobs usually comes with required work to train the next generation
Not for free. The reason the system worked back then is that apprentices were basically just a source of extremely labour if not indentured servants outright. They were entirely dependent on their master if they wanted to advance their career.
trollski 163 days ago [-]
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Daub 163 days ago [-]
I believe that the main function of guilds was as proto trade unions: to protect those with a craft.
The differentiation of craft and art originated in Italy. It was they who developed the academies as a panic response to a perceived lack of Italian geniuses (this was following the death of Michelangelo). Following that France developed their own academies as a means to develop a national style separate to Italy.
nairboon 163 days ago [-]
> George Carlin has a famous comedy bit where he states "It's a big club and you ain't in it"
Just for the record, the club that Carlin is referring to, is not some professional guild. Those were difficult, but not impossible to join.
He's referring to a very tiny minority of ultra-rich people. That's the club that usually doesn't take new members.
motohagiography 163 days ago [-]
not sure what the issue is unless someone had fallen down the rabbit hole of anti-masonry. FOSS projects could learn a great deal about how to run sustainable organizations from fraternities, and their hierarchies and lodge structure is likely a more stable and sustainable form than 501c non-profits.
if you want to know about freemasonry, consider the quality of their enemies.
zoogeny 163 days ago [-]
I think there is "anti-masonry" and what I suggested as skepticism. For example, nepotism and cronyism aren't de-facto bad (e.g. a father handing the family business to his son or a person hiring a trusted and loyal friend). But if someone is a member of the "cronyism promotion society" and they write an article extolling the benefits of cronyism then that opinion ought to be digested with a large grain of salt. It is worth pointing out that there are some negative aspects to cronyism, just as there are negative aspects to secretive initiative societies.
At it's core, this article is a stealth motte and bailey argument. It points out the benefits of guilds (where there is a legitimate argument to be made about skill transfer and quality of work) to support a deeper ideology about hierarchical structures of society. If one wants to make the argument that the ritualization present in free masonry is a net benefit to X, then present that argument directly.
ESTheComposer 163 days ago [-]
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splitstud 162 days ago [-]
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geertj 164 days ago [-]
These levels are are still used in the US today for eg electricians and other licensed trades. Interesting that they survived for so long.
163 days ago [-]
penguin_booze 163 days ago [-]
> The word Hansa is Low German for “convoy”
Ah, so Lufthansa (the German flag carrier) means Air Convoy.
xkcd1963 163 days ago [-]
In many ways guilds were also difficult to deal with.
As example, in some towns peasants were not allowed to smith their own tools and had to travel to the city and buy the expensive tools from the guild.
acenes 161 days ago [-]
This system is very much alive in academia: a graduate student (apprentice) trains under a professor (master) to become a member of the guild (academia), after which they can go off and find their own work as a postdoc (journeyman) and eventually start their own lab (shop) to have their own trainees.
One should not underestimate how the "Journeyman -> Master" step is overall also one of gate-keeping. My cousin did his "Meister" as a car mechanic and it was costly (compared to for example getting a university degree in Germany which basically is for free) and he needed to do it, so that he could own his own repair shop (otherwise he would have had to hire a "Meister"). In his Meister-Training he was also exposed to a lot of legal regulations and some training in book-keeping etc, which of course is valuable to someone to whom math never was intuitive.
What's nutty is that journeyman usually means "capable of a day's work without supervision" (hence the name: journee-man) and I doubt three years of work is really sufficient for that in complex fields like software development.
Granted, I worked with unusually skilled people for much of my early carreer, but I didn't stop feeling like an apprentice for at least seven years if I include education.
I mean, you can do a lot more, and many are... It just cannot be underestimated how much low hanging fruit software dev there is in practice.
The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Computer Science is Informatik in Germany. Prior to the Bachelor/Master system it was a Magister study meaning you'd usually have to take a second major and a minor or two minors alongside it. Typically you'd either study Wirtschaftsinformatik (business computer science), which was focussed on computer science applied to business processes, Technische Informatik (technically used to be a Diplom study I think), which was more focussed on interacting with hardware, or Theoretische Informatik, which is more similar to the pure abstract computer science and more concerned with higher mathematics than applying the knowledge to build real software.
There is also a recognized trade called Fachinformatiker (I think there's another one called Anwendungsinformatiker which is more similar to Technische Informatik) which is a job training of applied computer science, involving a mix of classes in English, computer science, mathematics, business and other subjects. This still exists and IMO it's the best way to build a foundation for a career path as an application developer.
The university studies are more useful for specialist jobs or larger corporations that insist on university degrees. If you have broad knowledge despite having a university degree rather than the job qualification, it's mostly because of things you did outside the university track itself.
There is no apprenticeship track I'm aware of like there is for traditional trades that have an apprentice/journeyman/master (Lehrling/Geselle/Meister) distinction, e.g. carpentry, mechanics, hairdressing.
Something like this kind of exists in Switzerland, even in two forms:
One track goes like: normal Lehre -> EFZ, as a Geselle -> eidgenössischer Fachausweise and later -> eidgenössisches Diplom (Meister)
or in case of a Lehre with Berufsmatura: Lehre -> EFZ + BM -> Bachelor FH -> Master FH (Meister)
Maybe at some universities. Usually it was a diploma study, with a minor (often mathematics or electrical engineering — I did linguistics).
It goes both ways, excellent developers, quite often people who would also have excelled in a computer science program (but failed because bad grades in foreign languages prevented them to get admitted, etc.)
But you also have those that struggle to adopt something other than the Visual Basic they learned in their apprenticeship.
> The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Is that different from Germany? Most devs have completed some kind of university degree (or "Hochschule").
If I think of the quality of Software-Engineering instructions I have seen in universities they were always so outdated, that I wonder whether its actually something that can be studied in such an institution in a way that makes sense.
For example I had a lecturer who was ADAMANT that in every software-engineering organisation, Nassi-Schneidermann Diagrams were drawn prior to implementation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi–Shneiderman_diagram ).
He taught a C++ course which basically was C (with printf and scanf having been replaced by std::cin and std::cout). Of course it was outdated material and if someone had cared enough they could have created new material, but at what pace and at what frequency?
It makes much more sense to teach concepts, that that's what computer science curricula do, then add some engineering concepts in the mix (requirements engineering, validation / verification) and you have someone who can pick up tech on the job quickly.
The same outdated academic thing is true in other disciplines where the cutting-edge is being developed in industry rather than academia. And yes, teach concepts, but that doesn't produce graduates who are able to start writing decent code the day after they graduate.
Nothing more fun that having a security audit of a codebase and seeing how many relatively dumb security issues are present... from SQL injection, to authentication bypass in a "modern" application.
I think some people may fear the concept that their years of experience are just not equal to someone else's same years of experience.
So much more apt.
https://pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-pragmatic-programmer-2...
* eg https://www.wirholzbauer.ch/de/magazine-online/detail/?tx_hb...
more on the topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman_years#:~:text=In%20... (EDIT: or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159370 )
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUslm_F0niA
A common complaint nowadays is that it is very difficult for juniors with no experience to get hired, unless they have a degree from a prestigious university, and even then that's not often a guarantee. It seems that companies are more averse than guilds to take the risk of training someone up to industry standards.
I believe that it would be very beneficial to society to create schemes that encourage learning with a similar system. Mentors can sometimes accomplish this role, but that relation is far more informal.
I always thought that their goals was controlling the supply of goods and services to maintain high prices and to prevent competition from ruining profit margins (of course not necessarily universally bad for consumers since guilds generally still maintained some sort of minimum quality standards).
> than guilds to take the risk of training someone up to industry standards.
Because as an apprentice you were effectively bound to your master and had to work him for a paltry wage for a number years just to get a chance to advance your career. Since workers are now free to leave whenever they want and have no obligations to the company that spent money/resources to train them those companies have few incentives to do that.
> I believe that it would be very beneficial to society to create schemes that encourage learning with a similar system.
We might as well bring back indentured servitude while we're at it? Otherwise who is going to pay for this?
The point I'm making is that society as a whole is worse off if companies are too risk averse to hire and train juniors up to a certain level of quality. This results in too few people capable of doing a specific, presumably valuable, job well. The consequences of this are a society that underperforms it's true potential in the long run. In monetary terms, as you raise the question, that means that less taxable value is generated. So society as a whole pays the consequence.
Germany isn't exactly a huge centre of innovation these days or even remotely close to being a success story when it comes to software.
I do understand your overall point though and agree to a large extent, it just seems to me that this is primarily a natural outcome of workers having significantly more bargaining power than before. i.e. it makes little sense for companies to invest much into less experienced workers when they can't "force" them (directly or indirectly) to pay back all of those costs by working for depressed (i.e. compared to what companies which only hire experienced workers can pay) wages.
How can we bring this back without significantly reducing worker rights/bargaining power?
Government/etc. funded programmes might be an option but that would/should effectively be more of a reshaping of formal education to be more inline with teaching the specific practical skills/etc. that would allow workers to be immediately productive (not necessarily a bad thing but not quite the same).
OTH if tech mega-corporations continue growing at the same pace and consuming all competition we might end up in a situation where investing into junior/inexperienced workers will makes sense again because they wouldn't have any other choice but to stay and to work at the same company that hired them for the remainder of their career.
That was of course in a prior age. Last century, in the dawn of Particle Physics, but I think he wrote of science in general in that time, not just Physicists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman_years
Meanwhile because of degree inflation trades for a long time had such a bad reputation they can't find any apprentices but also can't afford the lucrative wages and perks promised by international megacorps.
There's also a very strong cultural and class divide between the three tracks of "highschool", especially Gymnasium (the highest tier -- doesn't have anything to do with sports) and the other two as only the former allows you to graduate with an Abitur which allows you to study at a university (unless you want to take night school classes to earn the same qualification with more time and effort). It's kinda like public vs private schools, except less explicitly about wealth and heritage.
Agreed… it is. This is a loss and a gain.
In the 1980s, as a foundation (19 yo) student of a certain London art school, I was taken to Hyde Park for ‘drawing lessons’ and given drug-laced cake by my lecturer, without my knowing. Student-staff sexual relationships were common and it was not unusual for lecturers to be absent the entire semester yet still be paid. Staff rollover was practically non-existent: a job was Ipso-facto a job for life, regardless of your performance. Pertinently, the program was pass/fail.
As a university lecturer, I now work in a credit-based system. Everything is accountable and the layers of administration have quadrupled.
Neither system is perfect. In the end, I believe that it is the faith and energy of those who deliver the system to be the deciding factor.
I agree with this point, but all of the specific things you mention were already well in place twenty years ago (e.g. modular courses).
I ended up dropping out for many reasons including the move to focus on self-employment but part of it was that I passed the deadline for graduating under the old system and that the switch meant a lot of my effort had been for naught as I would have had to write dozens of essays about lectures I attended over the years and the combination of courses I picked didn't neatly fit into the required modules.
I was also active in the department's student group so I got to see how they adapted to the new system and a lot of it was literally just rearranging the existing courses into modules based more on meeting formal structural requirements than actually developing a coherent lesson plan. I acknowledge that this is likely more of a quirk of the Magister studies than Diplom or Lehramt (for teaching professions) which always were more structured even before the transition.
I personally prefer the modular system. In the traditional system (in the UK at least) you were assessed by final exams with more or less fixed content, so you actually had less flexibility to study what you were interested in.
It is strange on a resume listing a university I never technically went to, but now only Wikipedia remembers! And I was there before Thor destroyed it in a movie
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Devoir
They learn the basics and then they make a tour of France to refine their skills. They are required to move at least every six months.
I know a couple of them from my family and this looks impressive. If this existed for software engineering, this would be the best training.
Those are now more properly referred to as Apprentice, Journeyperson and Main.
George Carlin has a famous comedy bit where he states "It's a big club and you ain't in it" [1]. My own feeling is that guilds of all sorts prioritize exclusivity for the purposes of bestowing power on some select few. As the article states "Master’s were few and far between". This is similar to how luxury brands maintain their high value: exclusivity. The standardization and guarantees of quality seem to be secondary to the pyramid scheme nature of ascension within these organizations (in the same way that the quality of luxury goods is often secondary to their exclusivity). It reminds me in some ways of the concept of "familiars" in vampire lore, humans who willingly toil away for their masters hoping one day to be elevated to the same level.
It is a complex topic because of the positives and negatives of these systems being highly intertwined. To this day in Canada there is an apprenticeship system for trades. However, it is no longer an inner circle of masters deciding who gets the special status, it is a regional qualification body with clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.
As a society we haven't at all gotten away from the degenerate aspects of guilds. Think of the association with the "golf/country club" crowd. Or things like the Skull and Bones [2] type organizations at elite universities. Or when people joke about the Illuminati. This article is arguing for that by presenting a rose-tinted-glasses view of the past.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso&ab_channel=SkyEc...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones
And if you are willing to be more generous (as the author and I are) these protective societies of workers and merchants were an early step toward free market economies unencumbered by lazy landed gentry. Compare the history of Spain and France during this era to that of Germany and Holland.
If your argument is that exclusive initiatory societies were an improvement on hereditary nobility rule then you won't get much of a push back from me. However, are they better than constitutional democratic republics?
I don't actually have a clear answer to that question. I mean, I have a feeling that I have more chance of being initiated into a guild than I do being promoted to nobility. That potential for inclusion goes a long way, much like the oft-cited American dream where even the poor think they have a chance at being a millionaire. And our current democratic system doesn't seem to be adequately controlling the quality of our society.
As I mentioned, it is actually a very complex question. I just recommend people to be skeptical. Societies that form around keeping some thing secret except for initiated members for the purposes of exclusivity should be treated with a large dose of skepticism.
But let's not forget that fraud and incompetence are extremely common across history. And also that the very concept of universities derived from guilds.
So in a sense we do still have, and rely on, a guild system today.
The concept of having the number of businesses artificially limited also isn't gone in modern Germany: notaries and medical practices are allocated licenses based on regional population densities. As I understand it, taxi medallions are another example in the US (not sure how this works in Germany). Of course the idea in this case is to encourage specialists to spread out throughout the country rather than bunch up in the most lucrative population centers.
The guild outlived her.
https://www.artisansguildgallery.com/history.html#/
The linguist was out of his mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
Like all things, we need balance. This is a good argument against guilds, but there are positive aspects of the system too. Imagine a world that was truly a free for all -- one in which there were no trusted authorities in any field. I believe such a society would quickly devolve into a dystopia and collapse.
From my perspective, the big problem is when there is no competition among guilds and the guild leaders wield disproportionate societal power. That is how you end up with oppressive oligarchy, which honestly is a reasonable description of the global order right now. My hope though is that we are better able to organize and compete against the current oligarchic order.
The main argument in favor of totalitarianism/authoritarianism is pretty much always law & order. And the main argument against the prevailing power structure is pretty much always freedom (e.g. from oppression and/or protection of fairness in competition). So the question is often, what is more important to you, order or freedom? How much freedom would you give up for order, and how much order would you give up for freedom?
However, guilds aren't the only way to promote structure/order. As I said, the system in Canada is regionalized through state run organizations which are answerable to a democratic process. It is not through some secret cabal of "Masters" who make arbitrary decisions. We can achieve order without requiring esoteric fraternal societies. For all of their flaws, constitutional democratic republics offer a much better system of accountability.
One possible reason could simply be there's a lot more future impact to granting someone the final title. If you proclaim someone a "Maestro of C++," then suddenly all the other C++ laborers will get a clear signal that whatever that person is doing is implicitly also what they should do, if they want to move up the ladder.
Beyond that, the top jobs usually comes with required work to train the next generation. So this person would heavily contribute, both implicitly and explicitly, to the future of the C++ guild.
Considering that impact in combination with how hard it would be to undo the decision, it's not surprising that many organizations might be cautious about deciding to hand someone that title.
> clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.
This makes sense, too. For any organization that wants to stay in the business of handing out these titles for the long-term, meaningful transparency is a good way to go about it.
Not for free. The reason the system worked back then is that apprentices were basically just a source of extremely labour if not indentured servants outright. They were entirely dependent on their master if they wanted to advance their career.
The differentiation of craft and art originated in Italy. It was they who developed the academies as a panic response to a perceived lack of Italian geniuses (this was following the death of Michelangelo). Following that France developed their own academies as a means to develop a national style separate to Italy.
Just for the record, the club that Carlin is referring to, is not some professional guild. Those were difficult, but not impossible to join.
He's referring to a very tiny minority of ultra-rich people. That's the club that usually doesn't take new members.
if you want to know about freemasonry, consider the quality of their enemies.
At it's core, this article is a stealth motte and bailey argument. It points out the benefits of guilds (where there is a legitimate argument to be made about skill transfer and quality of work) to support a deeper ideology about hierarchical structures of society. If one wants to make the argument that the ritualization present in free masonry is a net benefit to X, then present that argument directly.
Ah, so Lufthansa (the German flag carrier) means Air Convoy.
As example, in some towns peasants were not allowed to smith their own tools and had to travel to the city and buy the expensive tools from the guild.
Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473869