This broad-brush, 'all cadets are crap' nonsense that pervades these pages really annoys me. It all depends on where they've been trained, the philosophy behind that training and, of course, the individuals.
Flying with a certain, well known, British carrier I have flown with more than my fair share of cadets and can put my hand on my heart and tell you to a boy and a girl they were all good and I would have absolutely no compunction about flying with them on a dark and dirty night. That airline's philosophy was to to train 'captains of the future', not FOs, and that distinction is significant. In other parts of the World the emphasis is definitely training someone to operate the radio and sling the gear to order and this really shows when they are then called upon to act as PF in less than ideal conditions. The same could not be said of those cadets that were trained by the well known British airline. Their thinking was totally different, they operated just as an SFO would and their training was that of a pilot, not a radio operator.
My first commercial job followed many years of multi-transport military flying; I found the conversion hard work and can barely fathom how these cadets manage
I think this says far more about you than them. I'm not talking about you being a Truckie but the fact that, from day one, these cadets have had training relevant to the commercial field in which they're operating, whereas you had to 'convert' from Betty's Flying Club, no expense spared, providing a pretty lacklustre service for your 'customers', to civvy flying in a commercial operation with all that's involved in that. They've been brought up on FMCs, CPDLC etc, whereas you had to put up with 1950s technology and a flight deck full of specialists to make up for that paucity of decent kit. In short, it's not a big deal for them because the flight decks of today are just X boxes to them and they're learning the commercial side of things, just as you learnt the military operating side of things. Imagine if we said all military pilots have to join already trained to TWU standard (ATPL) and having already passed IOT (line ops)!
I will end by saying that a LOT of people that comment on cadets have never actually flown with them. Because they've had to do the 'hard yards' and have had to work hard to get where they are, they object to others who have been lucky enough to go an easier route. They pontificate with comments that flying a Cessna around darkest Africa has huge relevance to airline operations and how it helps make command decisions which, of course, is nonsense. I enjoy flying with these pilots because I find their stories interesting and their experiences are something they can cherish for life but people need to get off the 'pillory cadets' bandwagon. If they've been trained properly there's absolutely no need for them to have an ATPL to sit on the right seat of a 737 (or whatever) and having 1500 hours flying a 152 around the circuit does not them more or less useful when the chips are down.