[socrates137]

I’m quite intrigued by the number of SWEs you’ve trained through an apprenticeship. I think there’s often this tension between those who have been trained at some university and now have a CS degree and those who have “learned on the job” or by some other means. I think that tension also exists elsewhere in other careers - it is not unique to software. I’d like to think the reality is more nuanced and complicated. Everyone has their preferences for learning. But I wish apprenticeships weren’t so undervalued and under appreciated. This is how we often trained specialized experts for thousands of years. I don’t mean to suggest it doesn’t have its own problems, but I think if it became more normalized it would be an overall positive change.

[JackMorgan]

There definitely is that kind of tension between the two camps. Generally though it's safe to assume a CS degree is optimized to prepare a student to become a CS professor or researcher. A CS graduate typically seems to graduate about 2/5ths of the way through my program, needing 300 extra hours to be at the same level as my graduates. This is not true for all of them, just most of the ones I've interviewed. There's definitely been some though who are way ahead of my students, usually because they went to an extraordinary university and also put in a lot of extra time outside of their coursework.

It's not cheap though, I do it as a charity. I've recently started my own business, so as of this summer I'm able to actually pay them which is epic. Still the program as a whole operates at a loss. So I do it because I want to pay it forward.