My good friend is a journeyman, and I always wished there was a US equivalent, especially in the realm of software engineering. I'm sure a lot of people would enjoy coding with brilliant programmers and traveling around the country.
Anecdotally speaking: My friend has a "wunderstick", which is a hand made walking stick. When we go into bars in Germany, he taps it, and the bartender gives us free drinks. Before we leave, he taps his stick again, and says some big speech in German (about how grateful he is, etc). Most bars and hotels cater to the journeymen quite well. While we were in Berlin, he also had girls run across the street to him and kiss him on the cheek or lips. I guess it's good luck to kiss a journeyman.
This article talks only about journeymen and women who are truly exotic and rare but it doesn't really emphasize that vocational training — the alternative to college — still is alive and well in Germany. You usually don't got to college if you want to become a hairdresser or a mechatronic engineer.
After they finish school, the apprentices work three or four days per week at some company and go to a vocational school the rest of the time.
The German system indeed has a lot more options between a full blown academic career to learning a craft in a structured 4 year program all the way to being an unskilled laborer with 10 years of school.
The drawback is that career paths are also more structured than in the US and take a long time. Want to start a painting business? Better get your Meisterbrief first and that will take a good while.
Here in the US things are more fluid, which leads to people changing careers and going back to school at a later age more willingly. The flipside is that almost everyone is an amateur and quality of work varies wildly.
There is even a mixture between the two. It was called "Berufsakademie" and recently renamed to "Duale Hochschule".
It's basically a 50/50 split between studying at a college and working at a company. The company usually pays the study fees and public transport ticket as well as a somewhat limited but ok salary. The split is usually divided into 'sprints' of ?5? weeks of work followed by ?5? weeks of university.
Here's some of their marketing material:
DHBW possesses the unique characteristic of consistently and deliberately
combining academic study with applied learning in the professional
world. With this strategy, DHBW provides a route to sought-after academic
qualifications while enabling students to gain extensive practical
experience. This foundation equips DHBW students and graduates to
take on challenging tasks early in their professional careers, helping to
launch them on successful career paths.
Yeah I experienced this growing up as a kid in Germany. I remember these people from other towns in their "strange" outfits. Over the years they got less and less but you can still find a few.
Now living here in the U.S. I wonder how something like this would maybe translate over to coders and designers in startups. Seeing that we have these startup heavy areas across the country. Why not have people work a year in the Valley, then move a year to NYC, followed by another year in Boston or Austin. Would be a fun and rewarding program for young talent.
The software craftsmanship movement is starting to get this sort of thing going. At least the idea of apprentice, journeyman and master are taking shape, and a number of software development companies have done craftsman swaps.
Corey Haines http://www.coreyhaines.com/ in particular has done a lot to actually live like the software equivalent of these carpenter journeymen.
No need for a program - you can just do it. Even go outside the US (some countries have a work/holiday visa program, eg Australia). It's a great learning experience.
I think the most critical step towards success of such a thing is getting a few bigger companies in each of the startup areas to offer exclusive intern/entry/mid-level positions to these kinds of people.
I guess a lot of hacker news reader work in said startup areas. So is anybody willing to give it a shot?
I am located in Munich, Germany, not exactly a startup hup, but I have some connections to Berlin and would be willing to annoy my contacts there until they agree.
Also should the plans for my own company work out in the next months, I would be willing to offer exclusive intern/entry/mid-level positions.
I was born and raised in Germany as well but am now in Dallas getting ready to move to Palo Alto.
Besides this digital Walz it might also be interesting to start a small network for "Global German Tech Talent" or something. I know there are a few germans in the Valley.
That might actually work in practice. But in principle selecting on the basis of nationality always sounds silly to me. (But I guess I'm just being a good German here. Where not even our President is a patriot.)
I've got the feeling that it's getting more frequent in the last few years. Just like you see more people dressed in traditional garb (in beer-related festivities here in Bavaria for ex.). I think for a while anything "traditional" was regarded as way too conservative, but we're moving beyond that. Tattoos and Lederhosen...
But yes, some kind of umbrella organization would be quite neat, some organized internship outside of colleges. A "communist" consultancy…
It's worth keeping in mind that the travelling carpenters are a souvenir from dark times in Europe, when economic progress remained extremely slow because craftsmen were evaluated by their belonging to a guild and would not compete.
At this time, to create an incentive against the culture of secrecy that prevented the sharing of technical progress, a system of temporary monopolies called _patentes_ has been invented.
Its descendant--now spellt _patent_--is today used precisely to prevent technical progress from spreading.
It's worth noting that those 'dark times' were periods of perfectly ordinary economic growth compared to the rest of the world and all the millenniums previous.
Comparing those times to the Industrial Revolution that came shortly after is a little unfair - no tradition or souvenir compares well.
Eh, no. The first explosion of efficiency and economic prosperity was in Roman times, when there was peace in much of Europe and cities flourished, complete with sanitation systems, elaborate transportation networks etcetera.
When that crumbled, city states took over, and economic life was once again dictated by the whims of rulers who in reality depended on keeping the ruling classes of the cities in their empire happy; in these cities, tradesmen classes operated in rigid, protectionist and mercantilist guild systems. There was stagnation and in many fields enormous regression until the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (when freedom brought back the drive for progress).
On a small base (like a graph where the initial datapoints are less than 1/27th the ending datapoints), even large percentages can be hard to see. And I'm not sure how you can be agreeing 'exactly', since the Roman empire was as agriculturally based as anything else around (latifunda, panem et circenses, the Egypt grain tribute etc.).
But you are right that the annual growth due to efficiency was relatively small:
> Indeed generations of English schoolchildren have read, probably with bored bemusement, of the exploits of such supposedly heroic innovators as Jethro Tull (author in 1733 of An Essay on Horse-Hoeing Husbandry), “Turnip” Townsend, and Arthur Young. But this agricultural revolution is a myth, created by historians who vastly overestimated the gains in output from English agriculture in these years.4 The productivity growth rate in agriculture was instead modest, at 0.27 percent per year, lower than for the economy as a whole. But even these modest gains represented considerably faster productivity growth than had been typical over the years 1200–1800. Figure 12.4, for example, shows wheat yields per seed sown in England from 1211 to 1453. Medieval agriculture seems to have been totally static over hundreds of years.
(Clark remarks elsewhere that agricultural productivity growth is more like 1 or 2%, and the Chinese had easily double England's agriculture efficiency, but because farming is a war against entropy, with land being damaged and local pests adapting etc., the net productivity growth is small.)
Economic growth came mostly from population growth and exploiting additional natural resources.
You over-estimate Rome. Sanitation systems? Harappa & Mohenjo-dara could boast as much! The Stone Age had elaborate transportation networks for trading rare commodities like tin, and Roman trading networks were not incomparably better than the Phoenician routes; the roads are very nice, but only a constant factor improvement, as programmers like to say. Rome was not the 'first explosion' by any means (if it was, then why didn't the Byzantines just reconquer and improve the West with their superior Roman economics?), nor any kind of paradigm shift like you seem to regard it as; but that's beside the point, since we're discussing what came after the inevitable fall.
> There was stagnation and in many fields enormous regression until the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (when freedom brought back the drive for progress).
Really? Again, your characterizations are unfair and draw on the tired old Whig myths of the Dark Ages and medieval periods. I like the Enlightenment & Industrial Revolution quite well, but I feel no need to exaggerate prior history. The periods of the guilds were no worse than most periods and better than some; from Gregory Clark:
> Figure 12.11 shows the estimated productivity level in book production by decade from the 1470s to the 1860s, calculated as the ratio between the wage of building craftsmen and the price of a book of standard characteristics.9 The rate of productivity growth from the 1460s to the 1560s was 2.3 percent per year, as fast as that for cotton textiles in the Industrial Revolution. In the next hundred years productivity grew more slowly, at only 0.6 percent per year. But this was still faster than the rate seen in most of the economy during the Industrial Revolution. From the 1660s to the 1860s there were apparently few further productivity gains in printing. But all this increase in the efficiency of book production had no appreciable impact on the measured efficiency of the economy before the 1660s, since books were such a tiny share of expenditures for most of the preindustrial era. In the first decade of the sixteenth century the average annual output of books was about twenty thousand volumes, about 0.02 percent of English national income. By the 1550s this had risen to a hundred thousand volumes, but because of the falling prices of books that was still only 0.11 percent of national income.
> Books were not the only goods that saw substantial efficiency advances in the years before 1800 yet had little or no impact on the overall efficiency of the economy because they represented such a small share of aggregate expenditure. Table 12.8 shows the price of nails by fifty-year periods, compared with wages, and the implied efficiency in nail production. A pound of nails in the early thirteenth century cost 3.3 pence, while a day’s wage for a craftsman was 2.4 pence. Thus a pound of nails cost more than a day’s wage. By the years 1850-69 the day wage had increased about seventeenfold, to 40 pence per day. But nail prices were only 3.2 pence per pound, so a craftsman could buy more than 12 pounds of nails with his day’s wage.10
When were the guilds shattered? By the 1700s, I think most would say, yet:
> Figure 10.2 shows, for example, income per capita in England by decade from the 1260s to the 2000s. After six hundred years of stasis, income has increased nearly tenfold since 1800. It continues its inexorable rise. Note, however, that though the conventional date for the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is given as the 1760s there is little sign of rapid growth of income per person until the decade of the 1860s.
> The years around 1300, before the onset of the plague in England in 1349, do show lower wages than in 1800. But wages in the early thirteenth century are close to their level in 1800. It should be stressed that this wage index incorporates the arrival of new goods such as sugar, pepper, raisins, tea, coffee, and tobacco. Even allowing for the gains in real income from the decline in prices of all these new goods in the years 1500–1800, workers in the late Middle Ages were still much richer. They received extra rations of beef and beer as part of their wages, which more than covered any absence of tea or sugar.
While we're on the topic, the rulers were not nearly so economically despotic as your caricature presents them:
> However, the difficulties of collecting the tithe in kind, particularly on animal products, led to tithe owners collecting at a much lower rate. Tithe collections before 1800 averaged only 11 percent of land rents or 4 percent of farm output. So tithe income in preindustrial England was likely less than 4 percent of national income.10 Thus even allowing for the additional taxing power of the church, all taxes collected in preindustrial England before the Glorious Revolution were typically less than 6 percent of income.
And wages could change considerably for the better, even before the Industrial Revolution (a unique occurrence in world history, I will remind you, for whose absence in their time period the medievals you like to condemn are not responsible):
> Referring, for example, to figure 3.1, living standards of English laborers in 1450 were three times as high as in 1300, and nearly double the levels of 1800. This variation in living standards would seem to be explained mostly by variation in mortality rates at given levels of income. Thus the explanation for the very high living standards of Europeans in the years 1350–1600 was undoubtedly the arrival of the Black Death in 1347. Its first onslaught in the years 1347–49 carried away 30–50 percent of the population of Europe. But the plague continued to strike periodically thereafter for the next three hundred years. In England between 1351 and 1485 there were thirty plague outbreaks. As late as 1604, for example, the city of York lost at least a quarter of its population in one year to plague. Paris had twenty-two plague epidemics from 1348 to 1596.6
And that stagnation & regression? Well, the Roman Empire which only loosely controlled part of England must have done one hell of a job, all things considered:
> England in 1200–1800 had an income per person as high as, or higher than, large areas of the modern world. Countries with an aggregate population of more than 700 million people in the year 2000 had incomes below the average of preindustrial England. Another billion people in India had average incomes only 10 percent above those in England before the Industrial Revolution. Some modern countries are dramatically poorer. Hundreds of millions of Africans now live on less than 40 percent of the income of preindustrial England.
In France there is a related system, "les Compagnons du devoir". However, it exists for carpenters, masons, sculptors, bakers, etc. Almost all hand crafts, in fact. They must travel around the country to learn their craft, and present a "masterpiece" as a proof they master it.
Reminds me of a proverb from Nassim Taleb: "Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don't: school, games, sports, laboratory - what's reduced and organized."
Back when I was in undergrad, I met a German exchange student who mentioned something about this. He may have been part of it at some point. They have a special belt buckle or something which identifies them and he said it was almost a status symbol (the belt buckle). I believe he was a roof-shingler and not a general carpenter though.
Corey Haines has done this with software development. In a similar fashion working for room and board. Which turns out to be a great deal for the company and I assume great experience for Corey.
The "Walz" is not for building primary skills (i.e. in our case Software Development or in their case Carpentry). It is assumed that carpenters doing it are already quite skilled in their respective profession. The reason of the "Walz" is to teach self reliance, soft skills and to round out ones primary skills by being exposed to practices of their craft that have evolved/developed differently from those they learned during their apprenticeship.
In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer (so in our case to become a founder).
I think the internet undermines these goals, because, well IMHO it is becoming more and more a gigantic echo chamber (we all read the same blogs/books, admire the same persons, use remarkably similar tools etc.)
I think it is astounding that a lot of very smart people assume that currently hip and promoted best development practices, say for a Web 2.0 whatever platform are relevant for other areas (e.g embedded, big iron, medical, aeronautic, finance) because there is not much evident push back in the blog sphere from practitioners in these spheres... which AFAIK is more a result of these people tending to much less likely to blog or work on open source software, than of the universal applicability of said practices (and if the push back, the results I have seen so far have been highly embarrassing for the hipster crowd).
In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer
Not just originally, for some professions you're still not allowed to have your own business without your "Meister" degree. Never understood why this included hairdressers…
Totally agree with your assessment of the web subsection of the IT profession. And it's quite splintered, with the "young turks" against academia against the enterprise, with plenty of small areas of expertise vanishing in the cracks. It does get a bit better if the forum of discussion is sufficiently abstract and spread over different niches (e.g. programming languages that transcend specific fandoms).
well, one can certainly wander the internet, working with various people on open source projects; dunno about the not paying for food or housing part though :P
Interesting article, it's one of the directions I want to take with Answer in 30. We're very people focused so I think it's essential to be out and about with the 99% of people who aren't tech startups, getting work, getting to know our customers and seeing how our product can make their lives better and businesses more successful.
I want to take a van and travel North America working on the startup and talking to our userbase and customers. What could be better from a community management perspective than to get a visit personally from the founders. I think it says a lot more than some silly badge you can display on your profile.
Funny, I have seen these guys in a bar a few months ago (in Germany). I didn't talk to them. However, that would've been interesting I guess. Anyways, interesting story.
Anecdotally speaking: My friend has a "wunderstick", which is a hand made walking stick. When we go into bars in Germany, he taps it, and the bartender gives us free drinks. Before we leave, he taps his stick again, and says some big speech in German (about how grateful he is, etc). Most bars and hotels cater to the journeymen quite well. While we were in Berlin, he also had girls run across the street to him and kiss him on the cheek or lips. I guess it's good luck to kiss a journeyman.