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Upskilling initiatives suffer from the greenfield problem, and nowhere is it more pernicious than in tech. Instead of teaching and assessing competencies based upon real world, messy, brownfield stacks and processes (which require debugging, authentication, version control, container orchestration, and\/or virtual machine setup), the education portfolios of both vendors and vendor neutral foundations (often distributed by means of bootcamps, certifications, and badges) are sterile, rudimentary, best-case, and, well, green<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with some definitions. By greenfield I mean a new project developed from scratch. It is a term adopted from the financial sector: \u201cThe term \u2018green-field investment\u2019 gets its name from the fact that the company\u2014usually a multinational corporation (MNC)\u2014is launching a venture from the ground up\u2014plowing and prepping a green field<\/a>.\u201d Folks in IT use greenfield and brownfield to differentiate projects that are built upon (brown) existing code, infrastructure, and other resources from (green) new systems. Unsurprisingly, most organizations are loath to throw out the baby (business logic) with the bath water (legacy infrastructure), meaning that brownfield engineering tasks are more plentiful than greenfield. Updating a CMS by integrating new modules is surely preferable to building and implementing a new CMS—that is, until it becomes unusably aged.<\/p>\n For hiring managers, the greenfield problem is the most significant barrier to legitimizing nontraditional educational programs (certifications, bootcamps, badges). Although prominent Silicon Valley voices also question the value of accredited 4-year degrees (consider Peter Thiel\u2019s The Thiel Fellowship<\/a> and Marc Andreesen\u2019s comment \u201cthe value of that four-year education program is primarily in the signal of the diploma, as compared to the actual education<\/a>\u201d), directors of engineering continue to be skeptical of nontraditional upskilling avenues. Structured curriculums will always focus on theory rather than messy scenarios taken from real life, but, for good or ill, economists like Beth Akers<\/a> have shown that companies prefer to hire candidates with undergraduate educations.<\/p>\n This is a significant problem as vendors like to trot out their educational portfolios as a means to overcome the skills gap<\/a>. Certifications are frequently cited beside statistics concerning the dire lack of technology practitioners in the workforce. According to the Future Jobs Report issued by the World Economic Forum, by 2025 half of all employees will need reskilling<\/a>. Companies’ efforts to train up new developers are delivered as feel-good stories. They are often included in ESG reports or as part of the opening remarks during a vendor\u2019s flagship conference. They are also usually, although not always explicitly, tied to DEI initiatives, and feature people of color and women.<\/p>\n The learning paths offered by many organizations in the tech upskilling space\u2014however well thought out\u2014tend not to align with the rigors that employable positions in engineering departments (devs, sysadmins, DBAs, etcetera) demand. Indeed, practicing in sandboxes and multiple choice exams leave all junior developers (recent CS grads, bootcamp grads, and certification recipients alike) unready to grapple with a tangled, legacy hairball. That’s what job onboarding is for (a subject my colleague KellyAnne Fitzpatrick and I are speaking about at this year’s GlueCon)<\/a>, and onboarding failures deserve their own post. At worst, educational assessments demonstrate a candidate’s ability to get to \u201cHello World,\u201d only with additional steps, overhead, and cost.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n pic.twitter.com\/VUqgzx17GC<\/a><\/p>\n — Fireship (@fireship_dev) November 22, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\u201cNobody Hires Junior Developers\u201d<\/h2>\n
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