[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 :)

[UK-AL]

I would not call source control "backup". More like a standard requirement for collaboration.