This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how we can do more of this at 37signals.
Switzerland has a great apprenticeship system in which you do three years of apprenticeship with 3 days of work and 2 days of school per week, after high school (and instead of college). This exists for a variety of jobs, and includes the option to do a degree that allows you to study afterwards, either during your apprenticeship (more complex school studies in the same time frame) or afterwards, as a one year, purely scholarly extensions of your degree.
If you do this study-ability option, you can go on to an applied university that offers a BA for a lot of degrees, although not all that 'proper' universities offer. Afterwards you can go on to an MA still.
In the entrepreneurship world, three years may be too much. But I can see a solution in figuring out a system where each company keeps each apprentice for one year, so each apprenticeship includes work at three different companies. This would allow the apprentice to get to know the world of start-ups and big companies alike, allowing him to make a differentiated decision when it comes to search for an employer afterwards.
While many companies in Switzerland will prefer a university graduate over an apprentice, I do think especially Silicon Valley would be open to look at (at that point) experienced programmers with a wide variety of start-up and enterprise experience under their belt, as well as a decent basic level of general knowledge due to the two days of school each week.
What I'm coming at is that I doubt you would have to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-organized examples of apprenticeship-systems around the world, adopt and adapt the best-fitting one, and make it work for your ecosystem. It's a great way to make more practically oriented people more valuable for society.
I think the system can and should be adopted for young programmers who would rather dive in than go to college, or even for college grads.
Structure it exactly like a kitchen in the fine dining world. Young commis chefs start with learning products and techniques by doing the low-level prep work. After that's mastered, they graduate to garde-manger where they generally are in charge of cold apps, soups and sometimes more. Not only does this expand their technique repertoire and palate but it introduces the concept of being responsible for your dishes, with no excuses. This continues around every station, with the cook learning more and being responsible for more as they continue.
While this is hard to reproduce exactly in a tech startup, it certainly wouldn't be hard to take on an apprentice who starts at the bottom and learns the basics under the mentorship of a more experienced developer while learning more and taking more on.
The University of Waterloo Computer Engineering department offers a "Co-Op" Engineering degree. My understanding is that the students take five years to graduate, rather than the traditional four, and alternate by semester between work and school. One semester in classes, the other semester at internship. The graduating students I've met absolutely dominate technical interviews and the like.
The Rochester Institute of Technology has also has Co-Ops as a graduation requirement for most technical and engineering degrees. The number of quarters required depended on the degree. For example, I had to do four quarters for my computer science degree.
It was a fantastic experience, and every job I've held has come to me in some way through contacts I made through that program. Plus, it was extremely valuable to come back after a co-op and connect what you were learning with the real world.
The school I'm attending now, University of Cincinnati, has a compulsory co-op program for the majority of technical degrees. I'm going into my last year of school having around a year and a half of work experience already. I've learned just as many things while working as I have from taking classes.
It's actually all Engineering departments. The Science, Arts and Math faculties also have either optional or compulsory coop degrees for their students.
Consider hiring minors through school vocational programs.
I had an apprenticeship between the ages of 15 and 18, at an ad agency that was using the newfangled computers to move faster than their competition. I was bored with high school and my neighbor's son owned the company. He liked to hire kids and teach them to program. I learned a lot, and got school credit even while almost-not-quite dropping out because of my school's voc-tech program.
It was a great experience, and I hope to set up something like that in the future.
Well, it was a small company, a Yellow Pages ad agency. At the time "cut and paste" mostly meant "scissors and glue". The owner's idea was to automate the process of designing, billing, placing, and accounting for advertising. He ended up with a program that scripted Photoshop and Pagemaker and created layouts on the fly, including rate cards and all the other paperwork then required. This was in the early 90s.
At the time I wanted to be an illustrator and calligrapher, if you can believe that. Half of the day I spent managing the phone book library. We had a subscription to every book in North America, something like 8,000 volumes.
The other half I spent more or less dicking around, doing creatives for the ads, special projects for sales, tinkering with layouts, reading manuals, and teaching myself about design theory and how to use the whole Adobe suite.
We were paid minimum wage for 25 hours a week, so I don't think us kids were a huge burden on the business. And we all turned in useful work. My high school had a program that gave us school credit for working, as long as we took core classes and stayed employed.
Ivan Illich called this "building education into the world" in Deschooling Society. The idea was to implement this on a universal level by having a government provide citizens redeemable education vouchers that private companies could accept in exchange for some apprenticeship.
jason, I need the same thing at our company. I am going to spike a quick prototype tonight and I was wondering if I could bounce some things off of you so it would have value in your eyes?
