James McGovern quotes ittoolbox:

I personally would like to see fresh developers spend a year or two writing unit tests. Learning to break code and learning to thoroughly test before they were ever allowed to write stand alone code. The result would be better, well tested code code and developers who understood what testing took and knew how to do it.

And responds:

I really hate when folks throw out suggestions such as the stuff above as it can't ever possibly happen due to economic reasons. Do you see any company regardless of their size (except possibly a software company) hiring a fresh developer and then not allowing them to code for a couple of years and only writing test cases? I wonder if folks ever acknowledge that the vast majority of software is not written by software vendors but by enterprises attempting to maintain code specific to their industry vertical?

It kind of depends on what you want. Do you want poorly working software out the back end that's hard to use and hard to maintain? Then keep doing things the way you are now. You want something that works better? Consider that advice, and see if there's any way to adapt it. Simply throwing rocks at it as "impractical" is foolish.

Most large firms have maintenance staff and development staff. An easy modification would be to rotate new hires through maintenance for a period of time before you let them loose on new stuff. Heck, it might not be a bad idea to rotate seasoned developers through support for awhile - I've thought about rotating staff through external consulting every so often simply to ensure that they retain some basic contact with "the real world".

The immediately dismissive hand waving would be a good thing to stop.

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