For this week’s blog, I chose the Sustainable Motivation pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. The Sustainable Motivation pattern is about keeping your motivation while working in the industry. While working in the industry, things can get tedious, real projects are more rigorous and can be exhausting and often frustrating. As an apprentice, you will encounter these problems while developing your technical skills. You will often find yourself working in the messy specified projects for customers with the always changing demands.
Of course, there are times when you love your job, and your ability to write code seems too good but they will not be your ordinary days. Most of the time there are going to be nasty problems, bugs, and to add to that, your manager wants it soon. That is why you gotta stay calm and focus on the long road. You will most likely stay in the craft because of money and would try to endure the long road. While sticking with it, you then find your love for programming returns. It is going to be a cycle of love and hate relationship. Many programmers get trapped by their motivation. Learning something new gets harder and you see no point in doing so when you are already getting paid for the things you already know.
I totally agree with this pattern. There are going to be an up and down moment while working, I’ve already experienced this problem with my current internship. As an intern, they do not really expect you to do a lot. They do not expect you to actually contribute much to anything they do but expect you do to what is minimally expected of you, and most of it is learning. In my internship, I usually finish the task that was given to me earlier than expected. I would always try my best to finish it without wasting time, and always check with my supervisor if it is what they wanted, but sometimes they are also busy or are not around so I am stuck there with nothing to do. What I do in such situation is go to another department or another employee, then I would always ask if there is anything I could help them with and try to learn new things.
From the blog cs-wsu – Computer Science by csrenz and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.