[pascalo]

Good article, and most of it sounds very familiar. I went through the apprenticeship system in Germany after dropping out of Uni (I guess I wasn't cut out for German literature and philosophy after all).

At the time there was a true disconnect between the real industry and the schooling part of things, mainly due to the fact that unlike baker of carpenter, front-end programming was such a new thing, so it got thrown into the same basket as print publishing, and thus I had to spend my once-weekly days at school memorizing various paper-fold patterns and Colorspace and DPI settings which were highly irrelevant to what I was doing throughout my days building websites at a digital media agency.

Like the OP, I got taken under the wing by a guy called Thomas, who was a pretty decent coder, and to whom I owe a lot.

Germany wasn't doing so well economically at the time, so shortly after I migrated to the UK. My three years of industry-relevant experience gave me a great base to build my career upon, for which I am thankful to this day.