Week 7. Post 2.

 

How has your perception of work changed since you started the internship?

What happened today during our normal Friday demo presentations where we present the work that we have done during the week was something that never happened to us before. Before we would create "tickets" or tasks in the Jira platform and then once these tasks are done and presented to the manager, he decides if our work meets the acceptance criteria and if we can move the task to the "Done" column. Today was the first time that one of our tasks did not get accepted by the manager because the feature that we added did not work during the demo presentation. I and my co-worker finished that validation feature on Wednesday and Thursday all day we have been just preparing for the demo presentation and cleaning up the code. However, Friday morning before the presentation we discovered some bugs that prevented us from showcasing our feature. 

I discovered that bug 10 minutes before the demo and my first reaction to this was: "How did that even happen? The validation has been properly working all this time and now just suddenly decided to throw errors?" I was surprised and panicking. I immediately went to my co-worker and ask him to present my part with the validation. However, when we went to the live demo, his validation has not been working too. I felt very disappointed and sad that we could not showcase our work to the manager and felt kind of guilty as it seemed like we just wasted the whole week on something that ended up not working. 

Before coming to this internship, my perception of work was slightly different. I thought that once you are given the task and the deadline for it, you must complete it perfectly; and if you don't - that means that you are not a good worker, you are not bringing value to the workplace and you should feel guilty about it. However, after today's demo, my perception of work has changed. Even though our ticket was not accepted by our manager and the feature was not working the way it is supposed to, our manager told us that we still accomplished a good chunk of work and should feel proud of it. His words gave me a new insight that sometimes things might not work perfectly, but the fact that you tried your best and learned a lot during the process is also an accomplishment and that you should not treat tasks as "Done" or "Not Done" but take it more as a learning process. 

Next time, I will try to make sure that I react normally when things do not work perfectly because, in the world of software development, bugs appear all the time especially when building something gets very complicated. Next time I will make sure I objectively evaluate the work I have done and do not feel guilty for not getting things to work perfectly all the time. Sometimes the process is more important than the result and I should be considering that next time.