Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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I completely understand where he's coming from in writing that. Sometimes it feels like my entire day is spent training new hires, repeating the same things over and over again. In jobs where being an expert is a requirement, it's very frustrating to see the company hire employees fresh out of college and expect the senior employees to feed them 10 years of experience in a matter of weeks. And then either they take that knowledge and leverage it into a higher paying job or they get discouraged that they were hired for a job they are woefully unprepared for (through no fault of their own) and they leave. And then the company hires more college grads for pennies on the dollar and the cycle repeats.

There's a real danger as a senior level employee that if you go out of your way to mentor younger coworkers, you become the go-to training guy. Your coworkers stop asking their peers or their manager for help and start asking you directly. Other coworkers send the new hires directly to you so your manager doesn't even see the amount of questions you're answering. And all the while your actual workload isn't getting any lighter. And if you complain, you look like an asshole. What kind of person won't help train new employees? Why are you so anti-social? Why aren't you a team player? It's just one or two questions here and there. And when it comes to performance reviews, your mentoring counts for a hell of a lot less than the number of projects you finished on time, so now when the company isn't doing so well, your output per dollar is a heck of a lot lower than the people you trained, so you're out the door. No one sees that the new employees never would have finished their project without your help. Your name isn't on that checklist, it was their project. What do you mean you helped? We gave you two weeks to train them, why are they still coming to you for help? Did you not train them properly?

So either you get laid off, or you quickly realize that you have to start turning away questions and mentoring. I love training new employees. But that's not my job. My job is finishing projects. If mentoring gets in the way of shipping, guess which one I'm going to drop first?

The solution there is direct, open communication. With each new-hire you need to train if you don't have capacity you need to raise it with your management chain and let them know that you can either on-board or ship feature X.

The important distinction is that they make the call and you've both gained visibility into your workload and they own the outcome. If it's a bottleneck that's causing pain they'll quickly become aware of it.

My god this sounds exactly like academia: your job as a professor at a research university is to obtain grants, publications, and donations. Pretty much everything else is incidental. "Service" to a department, to students, etc. is "emphasized" in reviews, but if push comes to shove, the asshole with a bunch of big grants is going to steamroll the "nice" junior faculty who "mentors" the asshole's students. If you're teaching, preparing to teach, or holding office hours, you're not writing grants or manuscripts. And the odds are that everyone will say "thank you so much!!" as you get turned down for tenure, UNLESS you managed to satisfy your true primary responsibilities so efficiently as to leave time for the "fun" stuff (teaching, watching people discover, blah blah)

There's a balance -- you can do more with more hands, and they need to be well trained hands. But if they're not your direct reports, ultimately they're not your problem. (This also means that you will need to be responsible for the outcomes of those you mentor, and you'll need to learn how to let slow learners go. Oh noes, you're becoming management! It's almost as if there's a reason that good managers with domain expertise are hard to find.)

I guess it comes down to, are you going to be a "helpful" "mentor" or are you going to accept formal responsibility for the success or failure of mentees (vis-a-vis grants, contracts, successful projects, etc.)? Instead of being a martyr, it seems that explicitly accepting or denying responsibility for people who eat up your time (within reason) is the best long-term strategy. You can still succeed without doing this, and you can still fail while doing this, but the odds are in your favor if you demand accountability. (Also, there's nowhere to hide if you aren't as good as you think you are; I think that's a feature, rather than a bug, but opinions may vary.)

Just like academia the onus of learning is on the individual in all settings. The senior guy or the professor owes nothing to the junior folks or students, if they themselves don't care.

The issue in a corporate setting is you are expected to make up for other people. Same in college.

Sorry but almost all forms of failure have individual liability. Merely knowing this helps a lot of people take their situation seriously and do something about it.

Or lack of documentation/communication within the company.

When key information regarding how you're supposed to do this thing or where that thing is located or how you're supposed to test Y, or how should this particular bit that wasn't communicated in the user story but was talked about in a meeting you weren't at be tackled, or whatever is locked inside people's heads you need to consult with them to get that information out of there.

And yes having information locked inside of senior employees is a bad idea for the company overall, but that's been the case to some extent at pretty much every company I've worked for.

Other coworkers send the new hires directly to you so your manager doesn't even see the amount of questions you're answering

Well there's your problem, it's a classic multiple-bosses insanity when anybody can put a new task (hire) on your plate. Furthermore, it may also come as bad news to you if you've already been "promoted" to company trainer, informally.

Talk to your boss about how all of this is getting funneled to you. At the very least you should be keeping them informed as to how your day is spent.

This problem exists because companies and management are overly concerned and focusing on resource efficiency rather than for flow efficient. http://www.jrothman.com/mpd/agile/2015/09/resource-efficienc...

I enjoy teaching people who like learning. The effort required to teach those who aren't that curious saps my energy, and eats into time I need to advance my own skills. I didn't work super hard to learn what I've learned just to give it away to someone who is indifferent.

I think you are being a bit dramatic, however what you describe does happen to some extent. When it does, its either a management failure for not responding to the senior software engineer voicing concerns that his/her time is not spent in the proper proportion between work/mentoring, or, it is the fault of the senior software engineer for just sitting there, refusing as much as possible to help the less experienced co-worker, whilst not properly communicating it upwards. It is certainly not the fault of the one asking the questions.

The root problem here seems to be organization and task assignment. Unless the project is exceptionally complicated or badly designed, it should be easy or at least possible to separate easy tasks for less experienced people.

Irrespective of how small or isolated the task, you have to train them to do it. And more often than not with a junior hire, you have to re-do their work anyways, or baby-sit them the entire time while you tell them what to write.

Not to mention, that if it's something they can be trained in once and monkey-repeat ad-infinitum, then there is a near-100% chance that I can automate it.

If your responses to questions aren't well written and concise confluence/wiki pages (with an example or two) - you're doing it wrong.

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