Hacker News Reader

Comment by dozzie | Hacker News Reader

Not after twentieth question of similar construction and similarly easy to be answered by the one who asked if he actually read the friggin' docs.

Seniors like to help learn, not to be used as a walking manual.

View on HN

I think you're right when it comes to basic questions (like "how to do XXX in rails"). However, in my practice, 90% of the obstacles are not concerned with how to do something in the framework/language of choice, but rather "how do we do XXX in our code?" (state machines, search, billing, reporting, etc). These questions can be answered by digging into code and understanding the logic, however, it's better if someone senior explains how and why they do things the way they do, clarifies rationale.

When it's the first hit on Google you start feeling as though you are doing other peoples' work for them. Luckily I now have a fantastic manager: she aggressively defends the time of all her team members.

Being a wizard developer also requires a wizard manager that the developers can trust completely.

While I do sometimes have people ask questions that I can easily find the answer to, I rarely have people ask questions that they can easily find the answer to. Sometimes, it's the first search result for a term they didn't happen to know, for instance, and mentioning that term helps them. (Also consider the concepts of "inferential distance" and "illusion of transparency".)

And even the concept of "search for the error message" is a pattern someone needs to learn, once. Ideally it's one they'd learn very early on when learning. But I've found that very few people talk about or provide guidance in the processes of learning themselves. Which is why I'm glad that people write down advice like the page tweeted here.

> it's the first search result for a term they didn't happen to know

> even the concept of "search for the error message" is a pattern someone needs to learn

I suppose if we're talking about a graduate or intern this is okay, but when you have somebody that supposedly has a few years experience this is just infuriating.

There is also the point that you shouldn't be getting a graduate/intern to be doing work they haven't the capability to google the terms of ...

>but when you have somebody that supposedly has a few years experience this is just infuriating.

You know how sometimes programmers on Hacker news talk about toxic team mates who are hard to work with and bog the whole team down through arrogance?

Becoming furious when someone asks you a question and truly wishing they'd waste half a day deriving it from first principals themselves rather than just asking you and having an answer in 30 seconds makes you one of those toxic team mates.

Modern software development is a team game. The average speed of the team is what matters, not your personal speed.

And it's great to have a management chain that recognizes this: it's hard to find people who specifically go out of their way to build up a team around them, so recognize and reward those people highly.

Given the choice, I don't want a "10x" programmer who works alone or only wants to work with other "10x" programmers. I want a 2x programmer who turns everyone around them into a 2x programmer while becoming a 4x programmer, and who then turns all those 2x programmers into 4x programmers while becoming an 8x programmer, and whose newly minted 2x programmers turn everyone around them into 2x programmers while becoming 4x programmers.

Sir, I have worked with many a toxic team-mate who did nothing but wander around the office, making noise, and getting other people to do their work. Because they didn't do their work themselves they didn't have ownership of it, and it simply "didn't work" and when something inevitably went wrong with it others had to sort it out because it's the team that matters, not blaming an individual. This slowed the overall velocity of the team, despite our best intentions in giving these guys a dig out. I really see no need to smear me for having a countering opinion.

I have had co-workers claim that they think someone has gone in and altered their code overnight, as it was working yesterday (I ended up debugging the problem for her and fixing it in the end).

That sort of attitude gets seriously wearing.

As a senior level engineer myself, I always say, "I want to do my part, and part of that is to help you do yours better."

As long as someone isn't being willfully ignorant, I'm more than happy to help them, as them doing their job better helps me do mine better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com