Besides prior training, I found the success or failure of introducing and using published patterns in the workplace have a lot to do the the culture and personality of the team.

I met a development team led by several Swiss programmers, they did everything by the book, Java and Java patterns all the way. Practically everything they code is according to some associated published pattern. They're like airplane engineers and their codes are very robust.

On the other hand, a lot of Web development houses seem to be a bit more on the artistic side than engineering side culture-wise. Many of them kind of abhor the idea of using someone else's ideas (i.e. patterns, reusable solutions). They prefer self-innovation.

But every programmer uses "patterns" unknowingly anyway, the minute they reuse their own solution they used before, whether or not they have a name for it. Nothing inherently good or bad about patterns. It's just a way to solve problems.

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Incidentally, a Perl programmer happened to review an application written by those Java programmers. He called the application "overdesigned" since there're some 200 Java classes (the ones they wrote on their own) sitting on top of slightly less than 20 database tables. Quite a contrast on design philosophies they have.