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Millstoning in Electronics?
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Gyro:

--- Quote from: Faringdon on February 18, 2023, 05:09:37 pm ---Thanks, but online Millstones can be ignored...

--- End quote ---

That's very kind of you, thanks.  ;D

I think what you are might be referring to here [Edit: It's hard to tell from your warped perspective] is staff development, where a company grows its employees and gives them a career development path so that they don't have to use useless millstone contractors.
dmills:
I have never heard of anyone attempting to clone a senior engineer by sticking them with a hopelessly uninterested junior one, sounds like a rather good way to end up with no senior engineer and just a useless junior.
If you have a **keen** junior it can however be quite a good way to accelerate the year or so that it takes the newly minted to become useful to you, and is not that annoying, but they have to want it going in.

While one does not always discover genius in the newly minted, and some of them don't last out the 6 months probation (Which is embarrassing, as it speaks poorly of your hiring practises), accidentally hiring the uninterested is a risk of doing business, especially if hiring straight from uni. Largely to catch this, I like to ask "Tell me about something you have built", the answers are revealing, sometimes in non obvious ways.

I have had to spend some of my time asking searching questions of the junior engineers and apprentices in various sorts of design reviews, and pointing them at various literature, but that is actually part of what they pay the senior people to do, part of the job is to teach (Or should be at any sane company). There is usually no margin in sitting on what you know like some kind of broody dragon on a pile of gold, far better to spread the knowledge, you can always gather more.   

Now we did have 'That Guy' who got passed around the engineering shop like a hot potato as EVERYONE found him to be a hard of thinking, impossible to work with, oxygen thief, but as I say a risk you take (And everyone screws up hiring sometimes), he was gone after 6 months.

Turns out when we fired him, that he admitted he just got so lucky with the interview questions exactly matching what he had read up on (And knew it) but the money was good while it lasted... 
Gyro:

--- Quote from: nigelwright7557 on February 18, 2023, 03:30:31 pm ---The answer to it is to refuse to do it. You are an engineer not a teacher.
If the "new" engineer wants to learn then go to Uni like the rest of us did.
...

--- End quote ---

Oh come on, what fantasy world are you living in? University gives you the basics. You recruit graduates on the basis of potential and train them up to useful and productive engineers. Staff development is the price you pay for your company having a future.
CatalinaWOW:
I am sure such relationships exist.  I strongly doubt that they are done for revenue enhancement, the situations where that will work are rare indeed. 

I would fall back to my belief that blaming something on incompetence is far more frequently correct than blaming on malice.  Management that doesn't recognize that the junior employee isn't up to learning the job is common.  Engineers with such poor people skills, communication skills and training skills that even a promising junior employee can't learn from them are unfortunately very common.  As are middling competence engineers who don't really understand their jobs well and so can't explain it to someone else.

Millstoning, whether done through malice or incompetence will not be common, because companies that practice much of it are not survivors.
Bud:
I've seen a sort of equivalent of it called "cross-training", when people from different teams or responsibilities are assigned to learn from each other. This typically is done in attempts to create role backups, but rarely works. If you are not full time on something, everything you learnt from a colleauges from other areas  will fade out fast.
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