[jiggy2011]

How much were you teaching him personally vs pointing him at the right resources and letting him mostly learn himself?

The biggest concern I think that a lot of people have about this approach is that your own productivity would suffer if you have to spend too much time handholding the apprentice with their own work. If the person is already a mathematician then they obviously have an advantage because a lot of the logical parts of programming will already make sense to them. I wonder how well this would work if you applied it to someone with only a basic education. Also people are used to school learning where they are micromanaged so might have problems shifting to this model.

This approach seems to work well in fields like plumbing where an apprenticeship will consist of 4 working days a week and 1 day of classroom learning at a technical college. The difference between plumbing and programming though is that plumbing is a far more standardised set of skills.

[FLUX-YOU]

Until there are widely accepted competencies, the hiring process will continue to be murky. That may not be solvable just because technology has such a huge scope.

Ideally you'd want someone to be able to take a test and have it spit back "Okay, this guy's a good enough junior programmer" and then have some certificate so that the job connections and interviews only are for personality. This would reduce the burden on companies having to do their own technical filtering and hopefully get more deserving butts-in-seats to get work done.

Right now it's all guesstimation, voodoo, and a few things that seem to work on both sides of the table.

[jiggy2011]

The issue is teaching them in the first place, a real apprenticeship program should be able to take someone with no knowledge of programming and convert them into a competent developer without taking up too much of the time of a senior dev who is billing $50/hr+.

The best way to do this is to outsource at least some of the learning to a classroom setting and ideally have the government subsidise this, but the government can't possibly subsidise courses in every single type of software development,