>So you've just written off internship, apprenticeship, or the possibility of any on-the-job training, because?

Nope, didn't wrote off any of those. In fact I encouraged them, saying programmers should educate themselves (and all of those are ways to do that).

What I did write off was letting selling ineffective staff by interns, apprentices, on-the-job trainees ship to customers...

Do customers pay for a quality product or to have whatever done by cheap or unpaid internets shipped to them?