Scott & Mark Learn To...A Public 1-1 for Software Engineering Preceptorship

All right. Do I look chiseled enough now? Yeah. No more than usual. That's the opener. That's the opener. Do I look chiseled enough now? All right. What are we doing here, man? Uh, I don't know. What are we doing? Well, the paper's out, even though we were pressing it six months ago. It's available now. Yeah. So shout out to our partners at the ACM for making that happen. LinkedIn got good pickup, a lot of good reboosts or whatever.

They're called on LinkedIn. What business? Yeah, what are they called? I think they're just likes and posts. Repost. Reposts, repost, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're ahead of me t as of today still. Yeah, I jumped on it immediately. Yeah. Up everybody knows Sunday afternoon is the time to do all of your LinkedIn videos. Is it really?

No, it's not. Yeah, it's funny. There's a whole group of people out there that'll tell you like the exact moment to do the exact thing and they'll tell you when to post and I just post. I don't even think about the time of the day. I think of like not posting on the weekend because nobody's paying attention. Nah. It's gonna go viral. It's gonna go viral.

All right, what's our topic for today? Uh I don't know. Do you want if you want to do the paper? Have we talked about the paper before? I think we've talked about the t topic many times now. Well, let's just talk a little bit about the paper. Let's give it like a little ten, fifteen minutes to talk about the paper.

Okay. So I'll actually I'll bring the I'll bring the paper up. We'll do a little bit of uh of screen sharing here because that uh it adds a little bit of visual interest. And if my machine blows up, it's because uh I've been I've got a a bug on this NVIDIA driver that I'm running. Okay, so this is the paper here. It was done for the ACM. Uh we've been associated with the ACM for quite a while. And uh I'll look at the PDF version of this paper here.

And uh uh is this gonna be like printout? Can we get this a copy of this and put it in our bathroom as well? Eventually, yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Uh oh I didn't see the is that the actual I think that's the cover. Are we on it or not? I don't think that doesn't look like us. Uh give that to AI and ask it to uh enhance and see if we're on it. Enhance. Yeah. Enhance. Enhance. Nope.

Uh No, we're not even listed. Wow. Man, oh man. It's really disappointing. Yeah. I'll be sure to call them and ask them if they know who you are. So um the idea is oh and actually you know what we should do? We should go through some of the comments. This one I thought was really good.

This assumes organizations that are large enough to fund a preceptorship, right? So our theory. Yeah. So what do you do when you've got a small team and there's basically one senior who's just a little bit more than a little bit of a talk with you about should we have our one on one on the show? Uh oh. Actually I've come I'm coming to the conclusion that universities need to actually

It needs to be funded through universities to get to scale. Okay. That's interesting. Because we and you and I both have associations with a number of universities. Because you need to a few things to actually implement a praise program, assuming that, you know, universities are dropping out.

they're producing early in careers using the same approach they've been using so far. They come out with some skills, they have no experience. Is that Only the company needs to have a structure in place, enough senior people, enough money, enough HR support. enough incentive. Like what is the incentive?

Really what a lot of companies would do is just say, you know what, I'm not gonna worry about it. I'll just hire seniors and if I need more seniors, I'll go poach them from some other place that has got a praise program, you know, that gets this early in career To senior level and I'll just take them from there.

So how do you stop that from happening? Everybody going, I'm gonna take advantage of everybody else. I think

the whole thing just won't work. Like Microsoft is the one training juniors and everybody else is hiring them from us, for example. So that's what takes me back to I think it needs to be university driven where you go into school and then uh there's some incentive for companies to take in these early in careers and and even the minimal investment, but it needs to be really minimal to make it Worth their while.

I mean the universities are kind of running the preceptor programs inside of companies that these people go to. Yeah. And they're still paying tuition and maybe they're getting some nominal Employment from the So whi which direction does this flow though? Like the people flow out of college. Does there are you saying that the school pays to get the kit people in? Schools are already expensive though.

But it's just part of tuition, I think. When I And maybe the tuition drops when they go because the maybe the companies are paying some of it? Kids want to graduate from school with a guaranteed job.

And there's a bunch of kids that'll get out of college and then like in June of senior year and they're out, they're like, okay, I guess we start looking for a job. And then there are those that have been doing internships since sophomore year and they're gonna be better positioned to get into into gig. And traditionally the internship involves digging your way out of an internship. I did an internship.

When I went to Portland Community College, that was a reason I went to that school. They said, and we have a required internship. In order to graduate, you must do an internship and we partner with local businesses. That was like that made me want to go there because they were it was a guaranteed internship and they didn't have to I didn't have to go hunting for it. They like assigned me a company. And that's what I'm suggesting.

the model that I think we'll go to operates like, but it's not an internship, it's a preceptorship. Right. That you're getting placed into. And the univer but I think the universities are like you s consider um company like Microsoft, right? Microsoft can run a preceptorship program. Small companies don't have the resources to do it or skills to do it.

And yeah, there were only there was me and one other person at the place that I did in the ninety. But if the universities kinda ran the preceptorship program inside of a company somehow, I don't have the answer. No, I know, but we're figuring the answer out together, right? And I think it's great that Microsoft's piloting this because that needs to start somewhere. But I think that enough back pressure has to form from the industry to get schools to get this going.

'Cause right now I think if we went to a school and said, Start this thing I'm guessing we'd have trouble. Well, but at the same time, like I'm doing a thing at Cornell later this week and they'll you know, they'll email uh they'll they'll let they'll let us go and talk to them and then of course you'll get all the LinkedIns at one, like Hi Can you give me an internship and you put them into the internship program.

There's also the programs where they want you to pay, like they want Microsoft or the company to pay them twenty grand. to have someone come in and I don't have I don't have that twenty grand t to pay or whatever. I just made that number up. Yeah. But there seems to be m money flowing back and forth between big companies and

colleges to try to solve these kind of problems. Well I think if you did a joint a joint thing would be would us align incentives um where the where the company's paying for the student and the students paying the university Which is effectively paying the company. Okay. Through supporting the program in some way. And, you know, giving them this low cost individual that maybe can do something, but also grows into becoming

More capable and replacing talent. But but but to your original point, there has to be a reason because capitalism and right now, like I don't think I don't think the reason is there yet. And uh that's what I'm saying. I don't think the back pressure is built yet to incentivize this. Like when I did it, I felt like there was less people in the industry and they were looking for anyone who knew what they were doing.

Now there's a ton of people who know what they're doing. Like are is the industry right sizing itself? Are there like one person will tell you there's too many engineers and another one will say there's not enough. I'm not hearing there's not enough anymore. And I think that If we talk about the boost you're getting the senior people are getting, then their amount is gonna in the best case stay where it is.

And um again, the pressure's not only gonna start building when the pool of talent shrinks below, you know, the demand for it. And then people wake up and say, Wait a minute, we need to have preceptorship programs. Yeah. Th there's a really interesting uh program in South Africa. Uh there's a woman named Nyari Samoshanga who runs a place called We Think Code.

And it's a two year program that you graduate from and you have a guaranteed job at the end if you make it through the program. And the program is very hard. So there's like a it's not one of those things like we graduate ninety seven percent. Like people will not make it through the program.

But what's cool about it is that the companies, if I understand this correctly, because I visited them in person, the companies basically hire the people before they've graduated and they say, We're gonna pay for your tuition. We're gonna pay ahead of time for you. We'll give you a stipend. You're gonna come work for us.

And we're gonna basically get guaranteed good workers. Yeah. But because they've been put through such a rigorous program. Well that's so it's kind of like an inverted boot camp. I think that what I'm describing as a version of that though, where the you know the the company's not necessarily paying the full salary because they're still a student. Oh yeah. Um and the school is effectively responsible for the preceptorship part of it somehow. Um

But this requires a much more tight connection between industry and schools. Yeah. Did you see Kent Beck's article? On the bet on juniors? I don't remember. So here's where he calls out what we called out. Everyone takes the knee-jerk action, slowing hiring, getting rid of juniors, canceling internships. The standard model says juniors are expensive. They ask questions, those darn juniors. They break things. They need code review. And he's like, No

You manage juniors for learning, not production. So it's very similar to what we just said. We've been saying. Yep. A junior is a bet. You're paying money today for productivity tomorrow. But then how do you solve that they become good and then they get They get poached. Well, yeah, this is what I'm saying. It's like why invest in I mean that this is exactly preceptorship. Exactly what it is. Yep. Yep. Uh yeah. But I so I I'm saying that uh

Connection between universities and industry bridges that gap there. Yep. But then look at this. He actually calls this out, which we didn't. Junior developers have high turnover. He says 36% leave before they become positive. So really interesting conversations that are happening around this. I mean, that that's the thing is the companies that'll just take advantage of the system that other people are paying for.

Right. So then When you do an internship or a journeyman sh or you know, you can become like a journeyman. I think there has to be some like part of your your you know, your compensation is tied to you staying for some amount of time. You gotta stick a golden handcuffs of of the of a kind. We'll pay for your school if you stick around for two to four years. And if you go, then you you owe it back to us, right? Uh yeah. Which which is a way that some of the early uh uh kind of failed

Um, coding boot camps used to do that kind of thing, except the boot camp made it about them rather than about the company. Yeah.

Anyway, so that's that's the thoughts that I was having uh as we're having this one on one in front of everybody and I wanted uh go back to Uh some of the schools we're talking to and see what they think. I was gonna write it up. I was gonna have AI write a paper for me on it. Are you really? Yeah. Yeah, we've got some schools. Um, I've I'm talking to uh uh an H B C U uh that I'm uh very lucky to work with later this week that we're gonna have I'm on the AI subcommittee.

And then um I've got a kid at University of Portland and they're gonna have a conversation around AI as well. And then I know you've got your alma mater and other schools that are very well thought of that you're gonna look at. So We want to try to solve this problem at scale. Like you can't just solve it onesie twosie. You gotta go all in. You need someone to make a big bet to make something like this happen. Yep. You need both sides of the equation.

equation to bake that bet uh together, I think. Yeah. But uh yeah, I mean if we want to get ahead of it, right? Because I think when it becomes a crisis and everybody goes, Oh, there's no senior talent, we're all fighting for the same pool and Yeah. You know. Then they're gonna pull us out of retirement to do visual basic. Yeah.

All right. Well I think that's an episode, uh, even though it may not be the most interesting episode it that it needed to happen because we were gonna talk about this anyway. Actually I did want to talk to you about going back to CMU and proposing that. Let's do it. All right. Like I I think that when we talked to them before they were excited, I think the challenge with all of these things is you gotta just do the thing. Yeah. But I I think proposing the

You know, universities are on the hook for preceptorship. Oh, okay. So flipping it and just making sure that they understand that we'll be here ready, but they need to own the pushing. What is your robot doing? Yeah, m when when something agentic happens Dude, relax. When when sorry, it's gonna fall off the t fall off the table. So I hooked in a loop. Dude.

Thank you. When when so when when it's got a r what's his name? He's really cute. Reachy. Like he reach he can't reach for anything. He can't reach for anything. So he I I've hooked up a a hook into the GitHub Copilot C L I so that when a session ends and he like gets all the tests passing or whatever. Yeah. I know that if you got your test passing that you would also have such a thing. A robot making noises.

Thanks for watching Scott and Mark. Uh learn to. Uh one of these days we'll learn to have a show of an appropriate length and we'll remember to stop and uh and set up for the next show. But we appreciate you and if you make it this far If you made it this far, go to the comments. Smash that smash the subscribe button. I've learned that that's what you're supposed to say now. Smash that bell. Like and subscribe.