Hello and welcome back to Benderson’s blog! This week we will be discussing another apprenticeship pattern that I have found that talks about being the new person on the team and how you should approach the situation. This apprenticeship pattern is called “Sweep the Floor”, which is basically saying “work your way up and build trust”, or at least that is what I got from the title of the pattern. Before reading it, I thought of it as like you may start off barely doing anything interesting and not like your job at first because of the lack of oppurtunities or being put on tasks that aren’t what you want to do but you got to stick with it because you’re the new guy and you got to work your way up the chain.

Sweeping the floor is a very boring job that no one really wants to do, being the new guy on the team is also something people don’t really want to be. You got to start somewhere though and being the new person on the team maybe terrifying to you but you will get through it. This pattern talks about growing from being the new guy to being a big contributor to the team. It talks about showing the team that you can contribute and work hard and get things done so they can trust you more as the time goes on. You may be stuck with the boring jobs of programming such as maintaining a build system, production support, responding to maintenance requests or even bug fixing code. These won’t be fun but they will get your shoe in the door of gaining the trust of your colleagues. You may feel like that you spent four years of your life working hard in school and that you deserve a better to start after all your education that you have received but you got to work your way up, you can’t start at the top. An example I could think of where this pattern is relevant is with a guy that runs the Xbox department of Microsoft. He started at a low part of the company and wasn’t really known until he stayed with the company and became a loyal employee and when his opportunity came years later, he took it and everyone trusted him to take it over because of all his hard work through the years at Microsoft. So far, in my opinion, he has been leading Xbox in the right way after a huge personal relation bust that happened before their latest console launched which was with another guy being the head of the Xbox department who later retired. That is what I hope my story is, I want to work for an up and coming company and eventually after striving for a long time, I want to make the company huge and lead it to become one of the best and most liked companies in the country. Huge goals I know, but you got to aim high to get high. With that last inspirational line, I will send you off this week, thank you for joining me at Benderson’s blog, I’ll catch you next week!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Benderson's Blog by Benderson's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.