I've worked with quite a few people who had "15 years of experience" which would be better described as "one year of experience practiced 15 times".

The main thing that such an internship-apprenticeship system guarantees is that the newer generation is well-versed in the ways of the old generation, and will likely have a similar record.

In a conservative industry, such as civil engineers building bridges, roads and buildings, and electrical engineers building high-voltage electrical distribution systems, this is what you want -- those industries have converged on good safety records. You want a few people who innovate, but otherwise much prefer to delay the future by 10-20 years than to the potential risks of bringing it sooner.

If the same was prevalent in software, we'd likely still be coding in COBOL on IBM mainframes.

Tesla is a very interesting case study - actually managing to bring the future sooner (with relatively small accumulated damage so far) in a field where being conservative is considered a virtue.

If you'd rather work with the apprenticed person, this model still exists in banks, who are willing to pay big bucks to maintain their cobol backends.

I didn't refer to the apprenticeship model. I referred to the bullshitting 'hacker' type referring to themselves as a ninja and acting like the work he's doing is beneath them. I wouldn't want to work with that guy.

And it taking 5 years of work experience for you to call yourself an experienced engineer does not mean we'd be stuck with COBOL. It usually takes that long where I work and it's not a bank. You're very likely to use our products right now.