Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

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May I add to this with a third: difficulty in creating a strong system of mentoring?

Many companies have a formal mentorship program but it is often in name only (at least in my experience at 3 companies).

In a formalized apprentice program, a worker can feel okay about not knowing things and asking the person for whom they are apprenticing. Despite formal mentors, I believe many junior devs do not have a person that they feel comfortable not knowing things. Moreover, plenty of senior engineers do not make good mentors (either don't want to or don't have the strongest of communication and mentoring skills).

You'll have a crop of engineers with 0-2 years experience that don't feel comfortable not knowing something because they feel it can be a sign of technical weakness. Perfectly valid questions go unasked and a young engineer may spend 3-4 days trying to answer something that his mentor could help him/her with in 15 minutes.

Great knowledge isn't transferred optimally in this scenario.

Oh man, I relate to this feeling tremendously. I am a junior dev on an apprentice program (just shy of 1 years experience to date) and the times I have struggled with something because I let my pride, or fear of bothering people with inane questions, have been the lowest points in the last year. I always get to the otherside wishing I just talked to a senior dev - because more likely they could have saved me a stressful week.

Few random thoughts as someone who mentored many junior engineers:

- don’t care about your pride. You’re here to learn, so do everything you can to learn. Imagine even the worst possible scenario - people get fed up with you - you’ll go and find different job (benefits of being in a booming industry). Your old coworkers won’t follow you but knowledge will

- don’t think about all the time you spent looking for answers yourself as wasted. Some if it was, but you learnt also tons of other things that may not be relevant now, but will be in a future

- ask your mentors not only for direct answers to your questions but also for reason and/or how they came to that conclusion. Most important skill for you to learn is how to think about problems and how to find solutions, not the actual solutions to few problems you came across

For whatever it might be worth, here is my advice to juniors about being mentored:

It mostly is true that the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask.

Please don’t ask the exact same question twice. Take notes if you need to. Asking for clarification or following up for more detail is fine.

If you have many questions and your mentor has other responsibilities, try not to keep interrupting them all the time. Discuss the best way to balance your needs and theirs, perhaps finding a time/place/medium where you can have a larger discussion and deal with several questions at once.

Assuming your mentor has accepted that responsibility voluntarily, they’ll probably be happy to help even with the basic stuff — we all had to start somewhere — but will appreciate it not taking over their whole day.

Also - make sure they understand your goals instead of your hyperspecific question - a lot of time can be saved by avoiding the XY problem.

http://xyproblem.info/

In my experience people with great knowledge generally have an urge to pass it on and they appreciate self initiative taken by the person learning. I have mentored a few people during my job and generally feel that my time was wasted only if they don't take initiative to learn themselves. Many a times I leave a crucial thing out of the answer and ask them to try to find for themselves as teaching is not about giving a ride but showing the way.

During the years I have found that it's not helpful to go into too much detail when teaching, as the people who are just starting won't be able to appreciate it and it may actually overwhelm them.

> In my experience people with great knowledge generally have an urge to pass it on and they appreciate self initiative taken by the person learning.

I wish my personal experience was the same, but it has been the polar opposite. In my current and previous roles, there is always too much work, which causes management to pressure development for deliverables, which results in juniors getting pushed aside. It's a terrible cycle and I have no idea how to improve it.

This is not necessarily the opposite. It is perfectly possible that the knowledgeable people you've worked with actually wanted to pass it on. They just weren't given the time to do it.

You should be angry about overtight deadlines and companies who live by those, not to the actual people. This also points to a possible solution for you: switch companies.

It's much worse than 3-4 days of wasted effort. A bad design can get so baked in it's nearly impossible to correct.

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