Comment by yterdy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yterdy | Hacker News Reader

>As Bluth remembered, older technical tricks like the “shadows or the reflections or the double passes through the camera” were “evaporating before our very eyes.”1 The problem was bigger than that, too. Bluth and many of the other young trainees didn’t know how to make a movie, and they weren’t sure how to learn. According to Bluth’s colleague Gary Goldman, “We didn’t even know what questions to ask.”
>“We were learning to animate,” Goldman explained. “We were learning to in-between, clean up … and we said, ‘Wait, there’s so much more we need to know.’ ”

>That included writing, scene planning, editing and more. Even the Nine Old Men had “forgotten” much of what went into Disney’s older films, said animator John Pomeroy.

IME, this is an incredibly widespread problem in the Age of the Retiring Baby Boomer. Many of them jealously guarded their professional knowledge, for fear of replacement, or simply never documented it. When it comes time to pass it along to juniors, they either can't or won't; then, with little official notice, they're out the door, and you're left building from first principles or trying to make sense of process spaghetti. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the Boomers who stay on into their 70s and 80s - still refusing to train their juniors, but also preventing the advancement that would allow younger workers to even attempt to learn the position. ...No, I suppose retirement is better. At least there's some runway, instead of the incumbent simply dying one day and leaving everyone scrambling.

EDIT: >and there was a sense among the garage artists that Disney’s management didn’t care to implement most of the lessons from Banjo.

“All of our learning is only going to do us any good,” Pomeroy remembered thinking, “if the higher-ups will accept what we’re trying to make happen.”

And there's the other side of the deal. When you make people go off and learn things on their own, they often learn... that they can go off and do things on their own. Disney sort of won in the end, but Bluth was a thorn in their side for quite a while.

A lot of them are not hoarding knowledge intentionally - they'll tell you the big pieces but leave out the connective glue - because its muscle memory.

> When it comes time to pass it along to juniors, they either can't or won't...

Some are that way I suppose but as I was learning, many far more experienced, late-career gurus went out of their way to teach me. It does require asking good questions and showing some genuine interest and engagement in learning though. It's also important to be able to show at least some aptitude which helps convince someone to invest the time in you.

Over several decades and lots of hands-on experience, I eventually advanced to proven veteran status myself and I was pretty much constantly trying to teach the newer recruits the deeper work of not just how to do it but why and how to think about the overall process. I think I managed to do some good since several of the newbies I informally mentored have now become senior vets themselves. However, several times I was actually told by the division head to spend less time explaining to my staff and just do the work myself as quickly as possible.

Even though I'm now happily retired, I regularly volunteer as a guest lecturer at several university programs. Like many fields, full-time professors don't really have the breadth of practical experience or real-world skills themselves. The good ones realize this and rely on people like me who've successfully done it over decades to fill in the gaps.

>Some are that way I suppose but as I was learning, many far more experienced, late-career gurus went out of their way to teach me. It does require asking good questions and showing some genuine interest and engagement in learning though.

IME, reminding them of themselves is far more important than any curiosity, aptitude, or drive you may bring to the table (other than in that it reflects their self-image). That similarity often creates a pseudo-familial affinity which serves as the unconscious backbone of the relationship. This is the reason why cross-ethnic and cross-gender (and cross-class, cross-sexuality, etc.) mentorship seems to happen less often than when the mentor and prospective mentee are of the same gender and ethnic identity.

You got lucky and/or are a straight white dude in a field largely occupied by straight white dudes. What happens for the rest of us is usually one of two outcomes:

a) The mentor makes an effort to support the mentee, but holds them to unreasonably high standards per unconscious bias, generally causing the relationship to disintigrate over time.

or

b) The mentor is threatened by the prospective mentee's aptitude appearing in an individual that they can't bring themselves to relate to; they will withhold support, if not actively impede their growth.

In my field (databases), the boomers I’ve worked with (a handful, to be honest) were all keen on sharing their knowledge. They also seemed happy that someone younger was actually listening and not just telling them that their knowledge from the 70s is outdated.

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