Apprenticeship Patterns by David H. Hoover and Adewale Oshineye: Ch. 1 and Introductions for Chs. 2-6

I’d like to talk about my thoughts after reading the portions of Apprenticeship Patterns by David H. Hoover and Adewale Oshineye assigned to our Software Development Capstone class. My first impression on reading the title was that this textbook would present different outlines of careers in software and information technology. After reading the introduction, however, I realized that the purpose of this book was to share different patterns and habits that would lend themselves to a successful apprenticeship in software craftsmanship.

The promotion of a growth mindset is one of the first themes established in the book. The authors talk about the growth mindset’s emergence from the research of Carol Dweck, the author of “Mindset: The New Psychology for Success”. The core belief of a healthy growth mindset is that a person’s intelligence is not fixed, and that a person can always grow their knowledge and ability through effort and learning. Through the growth mindset, people are encouraged to perceive failure as an opportunity for learning and reflection instead of as an indicator of inadequacy.

Maintaining an optimistic growth mindset is especially important for people working in software development and computer science. The volume of knowledge it seems to require to contribute anything of substance seems so overwhelming, it can be easy to tell yourself that you’re incapable of learning it all, or that you don’t even know anything as you are now. This emotional state of feeling incompetent or like a fraud despite your accumulated experience and talent is popularly referred to as imposter syndrome, and a survey conducted by Blind in 2018 found that more than half of tech workers report feeling like an imposter in their place of work. These responses came from people working with tech industry leaders like Google and Amazon, which shows that these feelings of self-doubt can exist in anyone, no matter how hard-working, efficient, or naturally talented. In a profession like software development, where the majority of a developer’s work is built on top of the sum of the work of many other people over many years, it’s essential to adopt a growth mindset to bolster your mental and emotional health despite the temptation to doubt yourself and invalidate your own accomplishments.  

In addition to the maintenance of a growth mindset, the authors propose other uniting values of a software craftsmanship community. Among them are constant adaptation, a desire for pragmatism over dogmatism, and the open sharing of knowledge. This software craftsmanship community would also value individual responsibility for one’s apprenticeship journey, and a willingness to experiment and be proven wrong.

The concept that interested me the most from the introductions of later chapters was The Long Road. I understood The Long Road as a metaphor for the lifelong journey of learning, and I recognized the necessity of the growth mindset the authors described earlier as a way to steadily propel yourself along that road. Without that mindset, the discouragement and confusion that naturally accompany learning can be too difficult to overcome.