I always thought my company wanted the autopilot on at minimum altitude and off at minimum altitude. I read a bunch of stories about how that's what the airlines wanted, so I went through all my sims turning autopilot on at 600ft and never had an instructor with the foresight to just ask me not to do that once. I mean it was in our profiles, on at 600! So that's all I knew for my 10 lessons and a checkride. So I get in the plane with my first ioe captain, he flies the first leg which is great because I'm still mentally back in tsa precheck line wondering why they are telling me to go to this kcm line. But then my leg comes, a departure with an initial altitude of 4000. So I depart, and at 600 agl I call autopilot on. The instructor just laughs at me and says no. I was not expecting that at all! I didn't think they'd want me to actually handfly! But with that said, 4000 came up very quickly and I ended up floating the lap projectiles I'm sure to catch that level off. The rest of the trip went well.

Fast forward a few years and one of my debrief items on my last recurrent was, "you know, turn the autopilot earlier while in sims, reduce your workload!" I laughed because as soon as I got in the box I was just in normal line flying mode and forgot to turn it on for a while.