Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

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I have a guy who’s worked on my assembly line for 3 years now. He can dismantle and rebuild anything, he can understand how complex mechanical things work with a quick glance and a short tinker, he knows the internal workings of a car engine as well as any formally trained mechanic and he has a wealth of practical electronics assembly that surprises me regularly. He should be a lead engineer at his age given his aptitude, not working on an assembly line for a fraction above minimum wage.

In his younger years someone should have given him some guidance, realised his ability and set him towards that path, instead he was missed by the school, his family were in no position to help him realize his potential and a couple of bad choices in his 20s has left him with a chaotic home life and unfulfilled potential that I don’t even think he realised he had.

I worked hard to do well in school but I had a supportive family, teachers to guide me and ultimately a personality (and background) that suited the education system in the 1990s and early 2000s. One size does not fit all and when I find myself surprised at another insight from this employee I wonder how many other people out there who fell through the cracks of the education system, through no fault of their own and how poorer our society is for it.

In his younger years someone should have given him some guidance

I've had many jobs and these are all software development jobs. Even in a relatively privileged field like software, I never had any kind of mentorship, ever. The days of older folks mentoring and helping younger folks are gone, because most older folks themselves are struggling with their own careers/lives. Unless young people specifically seek and forge good relations, put effort into finding mentors - it isn't going to happen. By the time most young people (me included) realize this, it is too late. Some people get lucky with good teachers and parents, but many don't.

This is what happens in a system where profit is put above everything else, no-one has the time or interest to think about anything else other than this quarter's profits.

> the days of older folks mentoring and helping younger folks

I’m one of the older folks (mid-40’s) and I find myself increasingly surrounded by younger folks (20’s or so) who are looking for guidance and help - the problem with that is that the dominant corporate “prove you still deserve to have a job by closing as many tickets as possible and increasing your velocity and meeting impossible deadlines” ensures that any older folk (who, remember, are held to an even higher standard than the younger folk because they’re more expensive) who spend any amount of time trying to mentor younger folk will find themselves out of a job after a few months.

That seems odd to never gotten mentorship. I was at one time a very good coder. I obviously wasn't born that way, but became that after many years of working alongside [often much] better coders and, in one case, quitting a job when I was ~4 years out of school and realized I wasn't going to get any better at that particular job.

Did you never work with better coders? Did they never talk to you or never do a code review? If they did, that's mentorship.

Mentorship is hard to come by or even give when the common advice for ambitious people is to job hop every year or so basically - what kind of a professional relationship can develop within maybe just a year that is of substance? This is easy enough to do in an area with a lot of good tech companies and community to develop a stronger professional network but is really unlikely to happen in a lot of places with maybe a handful of employers with any decent size (software) engineering organization. I lived in Asheville, NC (about as isolated as any rural area in the US) for a bit and I was a little surprised to see I got more LinkedIn job recommendations for mechanical, chemical, or other “hard sciences” type of engineering jobs because Greenville, SC was the closest metro area evidently and even the Google and Apple datacenters were pretty darn sparsely staffed. Most of the software community there worked remotely as can be expected, but I was glad to see how talented and passionate everyone I met was. Thing is, almost everyone there had developed their careers before moving - staying put in an area that can’t reward you is obviously not good for a career but this begs the question of why decently talented people do not move to better opportunities.

But really, moving makes it super hard to build a good professional network and you have fewer opportunities as a result which causes a downward spiral of lack of improvement in skills. I’m really not that much better at anything besides rote memorization of some trivial technical facts than I had 10 years ago because I never have been challenged technically in that time period. This causes atrophy no different than lack of physical exercise. And unless you work another 20-30 hours / week outside of work you’re not going to catch up with those that do spend their time at jobs that appropriately challenge them and help them realize their full potential. Hence, location is among the more important factors as someone early in a career I’ll stress and is precisely why moving to some high cost area is worthwhile... if you can make use of what they have to offer.

Most of the advice I give to my juniors isn’t about code itself as much as larger design and architectural patterns that can cause years and years of effort to go down the tubes or require millions of dollars of human effort to correct. These are the decisions that cause major rifts even for architects. Heck, some older programmers I’ve worked with refused to write tests because they thought they’re a waste of time / crutches - does this mean I am a bad student or something? Not necessarily.

Good points. I liked how you put "job hopping" which is #1 advise on HN for improving your wages against "lack of mentorship" which people here often complaint about.

Maybe it's high time we realize that the problem doesn't exist outside of us and maybe we are part or significant part of the problem.

You say he's working on "your" assembly line- what are you doing to help him get the opportunity he missed earlier in life?

After a series of conversations and false starts on upskilling and broadening his skill set he said that the best thing I can do is be a refuge from his home life. He is a hard worker and he cares about what we do but getting to work on time more than 5 days in a row is an achievement with what he has going on, we have a long way to go.

In the military, leaders deal with this all the time, but in the corporate world, managers dance around the issue and ignore it like it’s not relevant to the success of the business. Leading your people means being the one person that they can trust in their life. If you want to suck every bit of creativity and value out of your people, you have to rescue their energy from the other parts of their life that are draining your profits. Hire a psychologist or life coach, maybe confront the issues yourself if you have to. Your business is your people. Manager talk is not enough. You have to fight for them. You seem like one of the good ones. Do what you know is right.

Funnily enough I went to a military sixth form college (16-18) and had a place secured at Sandhurst after graduation (turned it down after some long reflection) - I think my management style (if you can call it that) is influenced in part from the leadership training we received at that college.

> Do what you know is right.

Exploit him for financial gain?

This is actually something I have been thinking about a lot recently because I was considering switching jobs and it led me to reflect on my position in life.

My dad was very similar to the person described. Smart as all get out, just never presented with the right opportunities, and ended up working an assembly line for his entire working life.

The difference between a factory job and a more professional field like software is that in a professional field, your employers benefit from you growing. It is worthwhile for them to invest in you because it makes business sense.

In a factory, you're a cog in a machine. Often the management goes out of their way to ensure you know your place. A lifetime of being put down like that leaves scars that are hard to get past.

"What you know is right" means working to get past that baggage and the other baggage in his life, because the person has the potential to be more than he currently is but has been conditioned their whole life not to see it.

Your dad should've been presented with help because he needed it, not because there was some un-mined surplus value.

If we're going to help people based only on need, there's probably a long queue of folks who need help more than he did.

At least part of the way people manage people is that they perceive that the less they know the better they can be certain they cannot discriminate. Everyone is afraid of being case #1 of firing a guy while his wife is pregnant.

You can sit back and give someone time to improve and mentor them but what if during that time you find out they’re pregnant. Now you can’t fire them without going through an entire process.

Now I’m not saying this is a legitimate fear, but I’m sure at least some people believe this to be one. For my sake, I wish I were able to waive many of the protections employee rights give me so I can guarantee interactions desirable to me.

Those doing manufacturing work should be celebrated, as should those providing manufacturing jobs!

Not everyone with potential wants to fulfil their potential and it is not anyone else's responsibility to push them down a path. We should however keep such paths open, and encourage employees when they do want to grow.

It is pretty cool that you and your company (Radfan) are creating manufacturing jobs in the UK.

You sound like a really good boss, we need more bosses with the personal touch.

Thanks, I try my best.

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