I worked for a boss once who essentially engineered this kind of problem to exist: he knew not having automated testing etc. was a problem, and instead of asking his (too junior) programmers to build up a test suite, he decided to let them fail and discover for themselves why writing up test suites is a good idea.
His reasoning (later revealed) was that you can't give people fish and expect them to become expert fishermen. They have to experience hunger and ask to be taught to fish. If people don't have the soul-crushing experience that teaches them why something is really important, they never really internalize why it's important. That the reason why we appreciate that this stuff is so important is BECAUSE we suffered through something that taught us that it was important, and that if we don't give junior folks that same kind of experience, then good practice just becomes something on the list of priorities and not a moral imperative.
There's something to that, but at the same time, it's basically a defense of institutional hazing on the investor's dime. So take it for what it is.
> His reasoning (later revealed) was that you can't give people fish and expect them to become expert fishermen.
I think you can, it's just not nearly as efficient. College and trade schools are essentially about mixing a very small amount of actual necessity (deadlines, tests, etc) with copious amounts of being told what's best and how to accomplish something. This works well because it's both more palatable to a wider audience of people, and it accounts for people's different interpretation of events. There may be multiple things to learn from any particular failure, and without some guidance you may come away having learned few or none of them the first time. Being told what to expect before hand, or what you could have done to mitigate problems afterward, goes a long way towards making sure you consider all the useful aspects of the problem.
Will you learn any one single lesson as thoroughly or as fast as you would in the real world when it affects you so much? Likely not, but then again, that assumes you actually saw a solution to the problem, and that still might just be one aspect.
His reasoning (later revealed) was that you can't give people fish and expect them to become expert fishermen. They have to experience hunger and ask to be taught to fish. If people don't have the soul-crushing experience that teaches them why something is really important, they never really internalize why it's important. That the reason why we appreciate that this stuff is so important is BECAUSE we suffered through something that taught us that it was important, and that if we don't give junior folks that same kind of experience, then good practice just becomes something on the list of priorities and not a moral imperative.
There's something to that, but at the same time, it's basically a defense of institutional hazing on the investor's dime. So take it for what it is.