This question about when to call oneself a Senior Software Engineer contains a fantastic answer by one user which suggests bringing back the term ‘Journeyman’ into Software Engineering. This got me interested, so I looked up Journeyman on Wikipedia. It turns out that the term ‘Journeyman’ comes from the days when medieval guilds tried to contain secret knowledge within their ranks. Journeymen were one level below masters and above apprentinces – they were called ‘journeymen’ because for a term of seven years, they would wander from city to city working in different factories of their trade, gaining in experience as they learned different means of doing things from different masters in different parts of the country.
This idea caught on to the point that a similar tradition existed for some medieval priests – there was such a thing as spending years reading in the libraries of various monasteries in different countries to gain in experience – sort of like going on sabbatical today.
This got me talking to a former boss, now a very successful tech lead at a large bank, who told me that when he was starting out, he used to change jobs every year, working for various startups. And this got me thinking that maybe on some level, the thought of traveling to various places and learning their trades isn’t so outdated as we think it is. Of course, we hear a lot nowadays about how companies want to hire you for the long haul, so it’s best not to switch jobs too often, so you can show that you have a track record of company loyalty. But at its heart, the idea of going to different places of work to learn the various ways of doing things until you become a master still seems to make a lot of sense. Perhaps this is why another former boss of mine always talks about how much he learned while he was working for startups.
This, in turn, got me interested in another custom of the Journeymen: that they always carried a book with them laying out the rules by which they had to abide as practitioners of their profession. Each city they entered would stamp their book as a record that they had practiced there, and at the end of their seven years, they had to show this book to prove they had completed the Journeymen Years.
So my question is, how can I do a modern-day equivalent of this? I thought I could buy a nicely-bound, blank book at a department store, but I can’t figure out how I would convince each city I entered to place their official stamp on it.
Also, while we’re at it, what are your thoughts about the value of working in lots of different places early in your career, as opposed to staying at a single place for two or three years?