[ender7]

The OP was incredibly lucky to find a mentor like Jurgen. Being handed a thoroughly "proofread" review of your work is perhaps the best way to improve at almost anything. Unfortunately, creating such high quality feedback demands more time than most people are willing to spend, especially if it's above and beyond their normal duties.

[seubert]

I wonder if a company that stressed a role like this up the career ladder as an alternative to a high-level architect role would see much success.

[xal]

we are actively pursuing this idea at Shopify.

[invalidOrTaken]

I don't know, but I can think of several things to make it more workable:

---you could probably pay less. Programmers' opportunities for meaningful, understood-by-the-recipient service are few and far between. I don't think it gets any more meaningful than this. One of my favorite gigs ever was tutoring Python for Tutorspree, and watching my students progress. ---It has a higher meaningful skill ceiling. The problem with "architects" is that every programmer is an architect, or should be. The title creates the idea of "one smart architect, many stupid implementors." But the 10x phenomenon means this is the last thing you want: you want a few smart developers, not a lot of dumb ones. So why waste your talent managing labor, when the labor is useless and what you need is more talent?

[vermasque]

In the US, I see an apprenticeship program not necessarily as an alternative to college (yet), but as a way for companies to groom junior engineers into senior engineers. If top talent is hard to find and costs a lot, it makes sense to invest in your employees to build them up. I can't see a 10x return from such a program, but just 2x would justify an investment. Like code reviews, it would reduce rework with more feedback to avoid future mistakes.

[icelancer]

We did that at my last company; we hired brilliant out-of-work mathematicians and physicists and turned them into developers and data scientists. We paid less for labor and got way better product out of our training program.

[xal]

I find that Github pull request style discussions are a good approximation of this ideal which strikes a great balance between effort required and social acceptability.