
The traveling German carpenters - luccastera
http://blog.intellum.com/2011/04/traveling-german-carpenters.html
======
dylanz
My good friend is a journeyman, and I always wished there was a US equivalent,
especially in the realm of software engineering. I'm sure a lot of people
would enjoy coding with brilliant programmers and traveling around the
country.

Anecdotally speaking: My friend has a "wunderstick", which is a hand made
walking stick. When we go into bars in Germany, he taps it, and the bartender
gives us free drinks. Before we leave, he taps his stick again, and says some
big speech in German (about how grateful he is, etc). Most bars and hotels
cater to the journeymen quite well. While we were in Berlin, he also had girls
run across the street to him and kiss him on the cheek or lips. I guess it's
good luck to kiss a journeyman.

~~~
robyates
Actually, there are journeyman software developers. Here are some links:

1\. Corey Haines: <http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/>,
<http://www.coreyhaines.com/>, <http://www.coderetreat.com/>

2\. Journeyman Programmer Description: <http://teamdoty.us/journeymanwp/?p=4>
(from <http://www.thejourneymanprogrammer.org/>)

3\. Software Craftsmanship:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_craftsmanship>,
<http://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.org/>,
<http://www.softwarecraftsmanship.org.uk/>

------
ugh
This article talks only about journeymen and women who are truly exotic and
rare but it doesn't really emphasize that vocational training — the
alternative to college — still is alive and well in Germany. You usually don't
got to college if you want to become a hairdresser or a mechatronic engineer.

After they finish school, the apprentices work three or four days per week at
some company and go to a vocational school the rest of the time.

~~~
zwieback
The German system indeed has a lot more options between a full blown academic
career to learning a craft in a structured 4 year program all the way to being
an unskilled laborer with 10 years of school.

The drawback is that career paths are also more structured than in the US and
take a long time. Want to start a painting business? Better get your
Meisterbrief first and that will take a good while.

Here in the US things are more fluid, which leads to people changing careers
and going back to school at a later age more willingly. The flipside is that
almost everyone is an amateur and quality of work varies wildly.

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zinssmeister
Yeah I experienced this growing up as a kid in Germany. I remember these
people from other towns in their "strange" outfits. Over the years they got
less and less but you can still find a few.

Now living here in the U.S. I wonder how something like this would maybe
translate over to coders and designers in startups. Seeing that we have these
startup heavy areas across the country. Why not have people work a year in the
Valley, then move a year to NYC, followed by another year in Boston or Austin.
Would be a fun and rewarding program for young talent.

~~~
nir
No need for a program - you can just do it. Even go outside the US (some
countries have a work/holiday visa program, eg Australia). It's a great
learning experience.

~~~
zinssmeister
Yes of course one can just do it. But having a bit of an umbrella organization
around this would help get the word out.

~~~
plastics
What would we need to create one?

~~~
zinssmeister
I think the most critical step towards success of such a thing is getting a
few bigger companies in each of the startup areas to offer exclusive
intern/entry/mid-level positions to these kinds of people.

~~~
plastics
I guess a lot of hacker news reader work in said startup areas. So is anybody
willing to give it a shot?

I am located in Munich, Germany, not exactly a startup hup, but I have some
connections to Berlin and would be willing to annoy my contacts there until
they agree.

Also should the plans for my own company work out in the next months, I would
be willing to offer exclusive intern/entry/mid-level positions.

~~~
eru
I'm in Cambridge, UK, but come from Germany and have seen the Walz. I'd be
interested.

~~~
zinssmeister
I was born and raised in Germany as well but am now in Dallas getting ready to
move to Palo Alto.

Besides this digital Walz it might also be interesting to start a small
network for "Global German Tech Talent" or something. I know there are a few
germans in the Valley.

~~~
eru
That might actually work in practice. But in principle selecting on the basis
of nationality always sounds silly to me. (But I guess I'm just being a good
German here. Where not even our President is a patriot.)

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intellectronica
It's worth keeping in mind that the travelling carpenters are a souvenir from
dark times in Europe, when economic progress remained extremely slow because
craftsmen were evaluated by their belonging to a guild and would not compete.

~~~
gwern
It's worth noting that those 'dark times' were periods of perfectly ordinary
economic growth compared to the rest of the world and all the millenniums
previous.

Comparing those times to the Industrial Revolution that came shortly after is
a little unfair - _no_ tradition or souvenir compares well.

~~~
roel_v
Eh, no. The first explosion of efficiency and economic prosperity was in Roman
times, when there was peace in much of Europe and cities flourished, complete
with sanitation systems, elaborate transportation networks etcetera.

When that crumbled, city states took over, and economic life was once again
dictated by the whims of rulers who in reality depended on keeping the ruling
classes of the cities in their empire happy; in these cities, tradesmen
classes operated in rigid, protectionist and mercantilist guild systems. There
was stagnation and in many fields enormous regression until the Enlightenment
and the Industrial Revolution (when freedom brought back the drive for
progress).

~~~
arihelgason
Exactly.

Economic activity centered on agriculture where efficiency increases were
minuscule. Because of this economic activity did not grow much.

See this diagram for an idea of just how little growth there was:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_GDP_Capita_1-2003_A....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_GDP_Capita_1-2003_A.D.png)

~~~
gwern
On a small base (like a graph where the initial datapoints are less than
1/27th the ending datapoints), even large percentages can be hard to see. And
I'm not sure how you can be agreeing 'exactly', since the Roman empire was as
agriculturally based as anything else around (latifunda, panem et circenses,
the Egypt grain tribute etc.).

But you are right that the annual growth due to _efficiency_ was relatively
small:

> Indeed generations of English schoolchildren have read, probably with bored
> bemusement, of the exploits of such supposedly heroic innovators as Jethro
> Tull (author in 1733 of An Essay on Horse-Hoeing Husbandry), “Turnip”
> Townsend, and Arthur Young. But this agricultural revolution is a myth,
> created by historians who vastly overestimated the gains in output from
> English agriculture in these years.4 The productivity growth rate in
> agriculture was instead modest, at 0.27 percent per year, lower than for the
> economy as a whole. But even these modest gains represented considerably
> faster productivity growth than had been typical over the years 1200–1800.
> Figure 12.4, for example, shows wheat yields per seed sown in England from
> 1211 to 1453. Medieval agriculture seems to have been totally static over
> hundreds of years.

(Clark remarks elsewhere that agricultural productivity growth is more like 1
or 2%, and the Chinese had easily double England's agriculture efficiency, but
because farming is a war against entropy, with land being damaged and local
pests adapting etc., the net productivity growth is small.)

Economic growth came mostly from population growth and exploiting additional
natural resources.

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wazoox
In France there is a related system, "les Compagnons du devoir". However, it
exists for carpenters, masons, sculptors, bakers, etc. Almost all hand crafts,
in fact. They must travel around the country to learn their craft, and present
a "masterpiece" as a proof they master it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France>

------
vidar
Reminds me of a proverb from Nassim Taleb: "Skills that transfer: street
fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don't:
school, games, sports, laboratory - what's reduced and organized."

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arjn
Back when I was in undergrad, I met a German exchange student who mentioned
something about this. He may have been part of it at some point. They have a
special belt buckle or something which identifies them and he said it was
almost a status symbol (the belt buckle). I believe he was a roof-shingler and
not a general carpenter though.

------
Luc
I really wanted to see those beer-giving sticks, and found that the magic
google word for more pictures is 'Wanderschaft':
<http://www.google.com/images?q=Wanderschaft>

~~~
jsilence
Sorry, but "Wanderschaft" is a rather old fashioned word for hiking. It is the
noun version of the verb "Wandern" (to hike).

The stick is called "Wanderstab" or "Stenz".

~~~
DanielH
"Wanderschaft" is the German noun used especially for the carpenters journey.

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bobbywilson0
Corey Haines has done this with software development. In a similar fashion
working for room and board. Which turns out to be a great deal for the company
and I assume great experience for Corey.

~~~
kragen
He has a blog at <http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/> but I don't see where
he talks about programming for room and board.

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mrspandex
Did anyone else read that title as "time traveling German carpenters?"

Does the internet make this less relevant for those in the software field?

~~~
plastics
The "Walz" is not for building primary skills (i.e. in our case Software
Development or in their case Carpentry). It is assumed that carpenters doing
it are already quite skilled in their respective profession. The reason of the
"Walz" is to teach self reliance, soft skills and to round out ones primary
skills by being exposed to practices of their craft that have
evolved/developed differently from those they learned during their
apprenticeship.

In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational
tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an
employee any longer (so in our case to become a founder).

I think the internet undermines these goals, because, well IMHO it is becoming
more and more a gigantic echo chamber (we all read the same blogs/books,
admire the same persons, use remarkably similar tools etc.)

I think it is astounding that a lot of very smart people assume that currently
hip and promoted best development practices, say for a Web 2.0 whatever
platform are relevant for other areas (e.g embedded, big iron, medical,
aeronautic, finance) because there is not much evident push back in the blog
sphere from practitioners in these spheres... which AFAIK is more a result of
these people tending to much less likely to blog or work on open source
software, than of the universal applicability of said practices (and if the
push back, the results I have seen so far have been highly embarrassing for
the hipster crowd).

~~~
mhd
_In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational
tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an
employee any longer_

Not just originally, for some professions you're _still_ not allowed to have
your own business without your "Meister" degree. Never understood why this
included hairdressers…

Totally agree with your assessment of the web subsection of the IT profession.
And it's quite splintered, with the "young turks" against academia against the
enterprise, with plenty of small areas of expertise vanishing in the cracks.
It does get a bit better if the forum of discussion is sufficiently abstract
and spread over different niches (e.g. programming languages that transcend
specific fandoms).

------
fleitz
Interesting article, it's one of the directions I want to take with Answer in
30. We're very people focused so I think it's essential to be out and about
with the 99% of people who aren't tech startups, getting work, getting to know
our customers and seeing how our product can make their lives better and
businesses more successful.

I want to take a van and travel North America working on the startup and
talking to our userbase and customers. What could be better from a community
management perspective than to get a visit personally from the founders. I
think it says a lot more than some silly badge you can display on your
profile.

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WA
Funny, I have seen these guys in a bar a few months ago (in Germany). I didn't
talk to them. However, that would've been interesting I guess. Anyways,
interesting story.

