[shanelja]

I was an apprentice, fairly recently actually, only last year. I loved it - the crappy pay, the meaningless jobs and the terrible teaching aside - I found that I was in my element.

Half my life I've been fascinated with computers, for a quarter of it, I've been actively building programs to populate them, replacing the typical childhood experience with code and logic.

When I got my first job in programming I had been a hobbyist for a few years and I was a fresh mind to mold, but I felt used, I had a house and food to pay for and it was a hard experience.

It's more than a year ago now and I'm at another company, one which valued my skills in a better way, more money, better prospects and far better training, I feel like I learn more every week at my current job than my entire time at my last job.

To anyone out there who is young and jobless, or unsure of what they want to do, or sick of stacking shelves at Asda, I implore you, try one out, the job satisfaction and the change in your mentality will be more than worth the effort.

You don't need to program from your youth like me, most people start between the ages of 16 and 21 (so far as I can tell) and codecademy and other services are making it a lot simpler to learn these days - anyone else remember learning HTML from W3SCHOOLS?

I said this to my best friend a few months ago, when he had just had his baby and had no job: Why do nothing, when you can do something you will love?

[oliverhunt]

What country do you live in and what company did you do your apprenticeship with?

[shanelja]

I live in the UK, in the north, the company was tiny: www.cicsolutions.co.uk, only a small 3 person company, don't get me wrong, they were a great bunch of people, but the teaching style was all wrong - I was punished severely for infrequent mistakes (accidentally deleting a CSS file instead of renaming it, there was no backup system etc in place) - and the money was fairly horrific.

[walshemj]

err a 3 person company is in not in an position to support apprentices - this is the problem with the half assed Modern Apprentice system its abused to hell by tax dodging coffee shop chains and supermarkets to get cheap 1/3 the minimum wage trainees for non skilled work.

[shanelja]

I couldn't agree more, like I said, I was in a position where I was already capable on the day I walked in the door (I sat down on day one and head my first website live by day 6) - I dread to think how it would have turned out if I hadn't have been.

For a start, the college taught the most irrelevant of things - how to use Microsoft word, how to set up a router, what an email was - I mean, in what world should you seriously consider jumping in to the deep end of web development in a paid job if you don't even know what a fucking email is?

Then there was the poor time management, I was given only one afternoon a week for my coursework which I was to complete in work and not at home - I was royally screwed the first time I got behind and playing catch up after that, I could not be given more time, couldn't do any at home and no one really seemed to care.

I was on of only 2 technical people, and the other one was my boss, who almost never had time for my training from day one, in 9 months there, I had 3 lessons from him, one of them a one on one on how Joomla components worked, another a 15 minute tutorial on the class structure used in CodeIgniter and the third (and this was the only truly useful one) was a 2 hour lesson on Database design, not just "Well, that should use an ID and be an int(6)" but actual useful theory, not just how two tables interact, but why they interact, and what joins do. In 9 months, I only had one lesson where I walked away knowing more than when it started.

In a way I feel sorry for the person they replace me with, but in another way, having to do all the work on my own, to deadline and design was probably the best training I could have had.

[UK-AL]

Sounds like an awful apprenticeship, since you are unaware of what you don't know.

Did they use source control?

[shanelja]

No source control, anything I worked on came directly from my own machine, there were only two copies - the one on the server and the local copy, until my first major incidence, my own source control (in the form of automated backups) was none-existence as I had never encountered a situation where my beginners brain had deemed it necessary.

[bvdbijl]

In a few posts up he says they didn't have a backup system :)