I haven’t seen a career field yet where early-career employees are not abused.
Doctors? Residency
IT? Support or DevOps
Lawyers? “Partner track”
Our current education system at all levels is fundamentally broken in many ways. We don’t even agree on what education is for- most people think it’s for preparing you for work but many people think that it’s for training you to be well-rounded or to inculcate cultural mores and values or to propagate ideology.
In general, to prepare people for work (to enable them to self-support and to be net benefit for society rather than net cost) you need some basic education (reading, arithmetic, etc) and then some skill training.
I think all sorts of careers would benefit from having apprenticeships that incorporate whatever mix of classroom training and practice, but there are several problems:
1. Most businesses don’t want to bear the costs of training employees, and don’t care to be vested in their success in that way. They’d rather pick drop-in rock stars, compensate them as little as necessary to attract and retain them, and cut them loose the second their performance starts to drop.
2. Gatekeeping - the people who would train apprentices might feel threatened by apprentices, mostly because who wants to compete for their own job, so why not limit the number of entrants and either assimilate or eliminate ones that could pose competitive threats. many organizations, eg the AMA (American Medical Association), cosmetologists, moving companies(!) capture government licensing mechanisms and either limit entry to the field or impose ridiculous burdens of effort and cost for entry.
3. Power dynamics. TFA discussed this at length, but many people happily exploit those under their power for labor, sex, or money.
So the bottom line is that we’re screwed; there’s so much entrenched interest at every single level, and so much negative human nature involved, that there will never be some kind of systemic solution.
Is this a cultural problem? I've never experienced abuse of junior employees, generally they get a "buddy" and are encouraged to find a mentor. Here in the Netherlands PhD students get a proper salary and are encouraged to finished in 4 years, I wrote my thesis with only 1 paper published (of 5 chapters). It was a nice time, I learned a lot from my friendly prof that cared about my well being and loved being in the lab with me.
It's not all bad. Sure, the whole graduation ceremony is an elitist clown-show with a weird dress-code, but it was fun.
Doctors? Residency
IT? Support or DevOps
Lawyers? “Partner track”
Our current education system at all levels is fundamentally broken in many ways. We don’t even agree on what education is for- most people think it’s for preparing you for work but many people think that it’s for training you to be well-rounded or to inculcate cultural mores and values or to propagate ideology.
In general, to prepare people for work (to enable them to self-support and to be net benefit for society rather than net cost) you need some basic education (reading, arithmetic, etc) and then some skill training.
I think all sorts of careers would benefit from having apprenticeships that incorporate whatever mix of classroom training and practice, but there are several problems:
1. Most businesses don’t want to bear the costs of training employees, and don’t care to be vested in their success in that way. They’d rather pick drop-in rock stars, compensate them as little as necessary to attract and retain them, and cut them loose the second their performance starts to drop.
2. Gatekeeping - the people who would train apprentices might feel threatened by apprentices, mostly because who wants to compete for their own job, so why not limit the number of entrants and either assimilate or eliminate ones that could pose competitive threats. many organizations, eg the AMA (American Medical Association), cosmetologists, moving companies(!) capture government licensing mechanisms and either limit entry to the field or impose ridiculous burdens of effort and cost for entry.
3. Power dynamics. TFA discussed this at length, but many people happily exploit those under their power for labor, sex, or money.
So the bottom line is that we’re screwed; there’s so much entrenched interest at every single level, and so much negative human nature involved, that there will never be some kind of systemic solution.