> For example, there’s one machine where you typically need to wait five to 10 years in machining before touching that piece of equipment. But we let our entry-level people work with it after 1 1/2 months. There’s this guild mentality in the manufacturing industry, that this person needs to prove themselves. I do think in certain ways that you should let people document their skills and earn certifications. But we need a more lightweight system. You don’t need five years to become a machinist.
The guild/apprenticeship model in the 20-21st century has always felt to me like a thin veil over a seniority-based structure that places strong barriers of entry on newcomers to protect the jobs of the senior staff. Want to do that job? Sorry, you can't, kid, until you "pay your dues". Want more money? That's based on how old you are. It's pretty backward and broken for a capitalist system that should pay market rates for providing value regardless of age or guild-proven experience. These types of things irked me as a child.
How much innovation would we have in technology if you had to spend five years on a starter Internet, or were forced to just use phones from the start? What if you were only allowed to program in certain languages and weren't admitted to download a specific compiler?
It doesn't take years to learn how to use expensive machinery. There's a bunch of stuff you can touch at TechShop - and potentially break - with a few-hour class and a review that you actually know how to use the thing.
Techshop is a hacker space, not a commercial machine shop. A machinist with a few hours training could bankrupt the average manufacturer within a matter of days, if not hours.
Based on my experience, equipment at Techshop is, on average, an order of magnitude or two cheaper and a decade or two older than what you'd see at a commercial manufacturer.
There are ways to help avoid many types of failures & machine crashes that beginners encounter, but solutions tend to involve physical and software integration that most machine shops just don't have the expertise to build or margins to justify spending on.
The amount of institutional knowledge and experience that a truly veteran millwright or machinist has amassed over the years can be breath-taking, though.
The real shame is when businesses let those people retire without bothering to adequately train a replacement.
You might be right but evidence seems to suggest you are wrong thus far. The German manufacturing model seems to beat the American one and it puts the guild mentality in the center of things.
Also 5 years to be a machinist, I don't think that is true anywhere. I don't know the German system in detail, but I live in Norway which has a similar system. You take 2 years of high school to prepare for say a machinist and then 2 years as an apprentice. That seems totally reasonable to me. That means vocational training is only 1 year longer than somebody taking 3-year high school to prepare for university study.
In Norway we have seen what has happened with the professions not being as regulated, like construction work. We have vocational training for this field but the applications to this study has fallen through the floor. Years of influx of polish construction workers have pushed the wages, benefits and status down. Initially the polish immigration was god send because we had serious shortage of construction workers. However now it turns out this was almost like peeing in your pants to keep warm. Should polish workers not stay, we are screwed. We are losing our native competency in this area and we have a lost a whole generation of native Norwegians.
More regulated professions like plumbers still see strong recruitment. They got higher wages and status. That means schools retain teachers, equipment etc. Getting rid of the guild mentality might make sense in a pure economic sense. But only in the short term IMHO. In the long run you shoot yourself in the foot, because you reduce the attractiveness of the profession. Remember the main problem in the west today isn't that people aren't able to train for these professions or that the barriers are too high. The problem is that too many chose to not get vocational training because it doesn't have high enough status. People want to be college educated.
If you kill the guild like approach, you also kill the status. If anybody can do it, without any papers, then the profession commands no respect.
One of the key reasons Germans kick the shit out of the UK in manufacturing is that being a craftsmen is highly respected in Germany, while it is not in the UK. Perhaps not an accident that this is because the medieval guild system lasted much longer in Germany than in Britain.
The guild/apprenticeship model in the 20-21st century has always felt to me like a thin veil over a seniority-based structure that places strong barriers of entry on newcomers to protect the jobs of the senior staff. Want to do that job? Sorry, you can't, kid, until you "pay your dues". Want more money? That's based on how old you are. It's pretty backward and broken for a capitalist system that should pay market rates for providing value regardless of age or guild-proven experience. These types of things irked me as a child.
How much innovation would we have in technology if you had to spend five years on a starter Internet, or were forced to just use phones from the start? What if you were only allowed to program in certain languages and weren't admitted to download a specific compiler?