Comment by contrarian1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by contrarian1234 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the interruptions in a group setting have huge disastrous effects as nobody really ever gets into a good flow state.

I'm sure it's useful for training and mentorship, but that's frankly not your employer's problem these days. People switch jobs every year, and if you train up staff only their next company is really going to reap the benefits. If learning on the job raises retention then it's only marginal. If anything it makes people "worth more" and they more easily find the next gig that comes with a pay bump

You can easily skill up by:

- watching conference videos on YouTube

- during code review

- go on your lang subreddit or forums and read about how other people skin their cats

What you want is basically unstructured interruption based code review ~ which is nice for the junior but horrible for productivity over all

I highly, highly disagree. Getting advice on the spot is often critical. And rarely will you get good practical advice like "always do a dry build locally from the command line" on the forums.

I can't even count how many times I had to tell other engineers, that they have to run a clean build locally...

Not to mention, that mentorship can be useful just for the processes that are present within the company.

Too much interruption is bad, I agree, but there are some type of skills / mindset that are 100x times simpler to gain by contact with colleagues than by training on your own (even when looking at forums). Especially on the things that you wouldn't not think about improving.

I had the luck of working with a dude who was extremely good at analyzing data, simply by loading json files in sublime text, doing a mix of pretty-printing, multi-cursors changes (with usually 1000+ cursors), regex-foo, playing with buffers and other linux commands. It was a weird set of skills that was truly magic to behold, and not amount of Youtube conference or code review could have replaced that.

There are some coding livestream that can help with that, but it's not as efficient as being in the room as talented peoples.

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