Apprenticeships, genuine or not?

Depressing but not totally surprising.

At the more academic end there is a related problem, and I'm thinking of electronics and equipment procurement, once upon a time (cold war mentality, big engineering contracts running over years) graduates arrived, all knowing in theory but often more than a bit impractical, and could be the 'gopher' to a big job, which had the slack to carry someone senior doing what would now be defined as 'mentoring' and the next wave the ones being mentored, and some time could be spent at the black or white board, depending on the era, explaining the whys and wherefores of the thing we are doing. The junior engineer then got to design the power supply, and help in the review and layout of the bigger parts, steered as required to things designed by more experienced hands (the 'design authority(ies)). This led after a few such projects to a well rounded engineer and a (surprising number of otherwise solid designs with power supply issues in the A model, but that is a small price to pay).

Nowadays the oldsters appear too expensive, so in some cases the graduates are given a suit and a card that says 'consultant' and launched/lunched at the customers with almost no preparation. The results are projects and plans that from the outset fail to meet the time line, budget and in some cases are not even what was really asked for. (Govt IT scheme anyone ?)

The saving grace is that the fresh graduate managers are also equally ill prepared, so are not likely to spot the problem immediately, and there is a lot of work for those that can in re-organising things that been have started at half cock to keep the oldsters from redundancy.

At some point we will realise that you get what you pay for but there are a lot of smoke and mirror operations.



There is also not really any such thing as 'right first time'  design if you think there is, the thing you are doing  is not really novel, but that is a different topic for a moan...

Depressing but not totally surprising.

At the more academic end there is a related problem, and I'm thinking of electronics and equipment procurement, once upon a time (cold war mentality, big engineering contracts running over years) graduates arrived, all knowing in theory but often more than a bit impractical, and could be the 'gopher' to a big job, which had the slack to carry someone senior doing what would now be defined as 'mentoring' and the next wave the ones being mentored, and some time could be spent at the black or white board, depending on the era, explaining the whys and wherefores of the thing we are doing. The junior engineer then got to design the power supply, and help in the review and layout of the bigger parts, steered as required to things designed by more experienced hands (the 'design authority(ies)). This led after a few such projects to a well rounded engineer and a (surprising number of otherwise solid designs with power supply issues in the A model, but that is a small price to pay).

Nowadays the oldsters appear too expensive, so in some cases the graduates are given a suit and a card that says 'consultant' and launched/lunched at the customers with almost no preparation. The results are projects and plans that from the outset fail to meet the time line, budget and in some cases are not even what was really asked for. (Govt IT scheme anyone ?)

The saving grace is that the fresh graduate managers are also equally ill prepared, so are not likely to spot the problem immediately, and there is a lot of work for those that can in re-organising things that been have started at half cock to keep the oldsters from redundancy.

At some point we will realise that you get what you pay for but there are a lot of smoke and mirror operations.



There is also not really any such thing as 'right first time'  design if you think there is, the thing you are doing  is not really novel, but that is a different topic for a moan...