Dig deeper is a very important apprenticeship pattern to remember throughout your career and especially one to pay close attention to early on in your career. It stresses that just writing a solution that you found online or just guessed until it worked is not good enough. It is important to know why the code solved the problem that you were having. You should also look as to why was this the chosen solution, why code A over code B. This will help you stand out at work as someone who is a more effective problem solver. This will also help so you don’t submit a project that is only half complete; maybe the question that was answered on stack overflow did not include a test that was specific to your work. If you do not dig deeper into your solution you may not realize this and turn in an unfinished project. When you only scratch the surface and just barely do enough to get by or even less than that work falls to others. There is a set amount of work that needs to be done for each project. Just because you do less doesn’t mean less work needs to be done, it just means that you are putting a bigger burden on the rest of your team that needs to complete their own work and pick up your slack as well.
When moving on from school I intend to make it a point to set aside time to review all the work that I complete as well as try to fully understand other parts of the program that I have a chance to see before submitting my work. I think this will be beneficial for a few different reasons. First it will help set an impression with both my peers and superiors that I am a thorough worker who puts extra effort into my code. More importantly though it will allow me to expand my knowledge and provide the best possible solution for the problem that I am presented with. It will help a well rounded tool kit that I may not only use immediately but could be applied in the future too. Doing this early on will create a solid foundation to build on for the foreseeable future.
Tim's Blog 