David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices

Finding a Good Mentor is Key

If you're a senior developer with years of experience under your belt, it may be hard to remember what it was like coming out of college with a newly minted CS degree, and entering the workplace. But as David Hoover argues, helping these newcomers to the workforce to succeed can be the difference between effective, motivated developers and confused, discouraged ones. Hoover is the author of the new O'Reilly book Apprenticeship Patterns, and he says that people coming right out of college may, in fact, be less motivated than someone who has been working for a while. "One of my theories is computer science education is really hard, and it's expensive. And so when you're done with it, you're ready to cash in and sit back for a little while. 'Hey, I just spent a lot of money. I spent a ton of time and effort and pain on four years of getting this certificate and okay, now it's time to make that pay off.' You're definitely going to be less incentivized to start a new job, and now realize that you've got so much more to learn still. As opposed to someone who's just coming up, who's going to be at a big disadvantage knowledge-wise, but is probably actually going to be at a big advantage motivation-wise because they're going to be hungry, and just assume that they have to learn everything on their own. Whereas, like I said, some computer science people are going to be disincentivized. They're going to be surprised that they've come into their first job and, geez, they have to learn source control and they have to learn unit testing and they have to learn about these different processes that we use. And some programs prepare you for that stuff; some programs are very theoretical and very outdated. And you just have a ton to learn in your first gig."

According to Hoover, one way to ease the transition into real life development is to use an apprenticeship model. His book draws on his own experience moving from being a psychologist to a developer, and the lessons he's learned running an apprenticeship program at a company called Obtiva. "We have an apprenticeship program that takes in fairly newcomers to software development, and we have a fairly loose, fairly unstructured program that gets them up to speed pretty quickly. And we try to find people that are high-potential, low credential people, that are passionate and excited about software development and that works out pretty well."

Hoover says that most developers have benefited from one or two key people in their career that helped them move along. "For people that had had successful careers, they only point back to one or two people that mentored them for a certain amount of time, a significant amount of time, a month, two months, a year in their careers." He also points out that finding that person may mean looking outside your company. "For me personally, I wasn't able to find a mentor at my company. I was in a company that didn't really have that many people who were actually passionate about technology and that was hard for me. So what I did is I went to a user group, a local Agile user group or you could go to a Ruby user group or a .net user group, whatever it is and find people that are passionate about it and have been doing it for a long time. I've heard several instances of people seeking out to be mentored by the leader, for me that was the case. One of our perspective apprentices right now was mentored by the leader of a local Ruby user group. And that doesn't necessarily mean you're working for the person, but you're seeking them out and maybe you're just, "Hey, can you have lunch with me every week or breakfast with me every other week." Even maybe just talking, maybe not even pairing. But just getting exposure to people that have been far on the path ahead of you, to just glean off their insights."

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