"Teach others what are you trying to teach yourself better" is the best long-term retention strategy in my personal experience.
That all sounds reasonable and smart, but the real reason I do it is the Curse of Knowledge. People in a system can’t see it from the outside. They make assumptions, use opaque or even misleading jargon, and employ circular logic. The new guy doesn’t know the lingo, or the circular logic. Their explanation will make more sense to the next hire than anything I can say. And having it written down this way can also give me new perspective on the system. Maybe it doesn’t have to work this way.
One must capitalize on this brief period because smart programmers are flexible and adaptable. Very quickly they will acclimatize themselves to the mess that surrounds them and they will become as blind to the deficiencies as the rest of the team.
People who don’t “get” the code ask questions that contain feedback they often don’t even register as feedback. By the time they distill it to an actual criticism, they’re often so wrapped up in the problem they can’t be constructive, or they present an XY problem. But if three people ask you the same question about your code? You have a design issue. Fix it. Fix it now.
That puts me in a weird relationship with FAQs. FAQs aren’t informational, they’re confessional. Here’s all the times I fucked up and won’t admit it. Let me explain why I am right and you are wrong.
But your phrase is spot on, well defined, and the subject of ongoing research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
Cheers.
A joke in Russian universities:
- A teaching assistant tells a student: "Look, I've been explaining it to you for so long, that I myself understood it!"
I figured it out, but I’ve no idea if I got him sorted out for his final.
The professor is interrupted in the middle of his lecture by a student who asks about one of the previous week's problems:
— Could you please work an example for us?
— No problem!
The professor writes a problem statement, then scratches his head, tugs on his collar, rubs his chin, and at last scribbles a complicated integral on the board.
— There you go!
— Excuse me, professor, but could you please be a little more explicit?
— What do you want from me? I just did the problem 3 different ways.
A soviet maths prof finds out he'd make more money as a labourer in the shipyards, so after more than a few carefully-distributed bottles of vodka he manages to change profession. A month or two working in the yards, and he sees a notice on the bulletin board offering a bonus to workers who sign up for a special "maths for the proletariat" evening school course.
Figuring it's easy money, he signs up, brings a novel, and sits in the back of the class reading instead paying attention. Then the prof calls him up to the brownboard, and asks him for the circumference of a circle.
Suddenly, our ex-prof blanks. Frantically he scribbles and scribbles on the brownboard, only to wind up with ... -2πr. No, that can't be right, but what went wrong?
Just when he's about to crack trying to figure out his error, he hears a friendly voice from one of the front-row students:
— Psst, colleague, swap order of integration!
So what’s this about efficiency? You should be more worried about effectiveness, not efficiency. Particularly in this profession.
I've already heard that line somewhere but can't remember where and who said it.
“Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.”
1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9556005-every-man-has-two-d...
I understand time constraints and end goals may prohibit the 'best' approach.
What I do not understand is how can you say something is more 'efficient' if the yield in understanding is less than what you would get with another method.
Hopefully this will clarify my thought process here:
If 'Best' is to teach others and requires 10,000 hours to yield 90-99% understanding.
In contrast, 'Efficient' method requires 2,500 hours to yield 30-40% understanding. However, there is diminishing returns meaning that doubling your hours to 5,000 does not return you with 60-80% understanding, rather maybe closer to 50-60% understanding. With 7,500 hours closer to 65-70% and 10,000 hours may around 75-89% understanding.
Here you've spent the same amount of time but did not achieve the same level of understanding. I think you may have a dynamic 'Best' vs 'Efficient' curve and to switch between those options to optimize maximizing your level of understanding in the least amount of time.
Consider these two scenarios -
Goal: remember where to look up information when it comes up in $JOB Metric: how much you remember, how quickly you find the info
Goal: discover new hyper-efficient method of training an AI (or insert popular ML topic here). Metric: percent improvement vs current pubished best practice (deliberately vague) Required understanding to make progress: "like a Ph.D. from Stanford"
Now you can possibly measure something.
The idea achievement of "90% understanding" is VERY topic dependent. Simple topic? Sure 100% understanding, I remembered the Latin names of all of the plants in my house. Complicated topic? The information for "100% understanding" might not even be written in the textbook - it probably includes things like seeing the interconnections between the topics and being able to apply them in slightly different contexts.
Make sure you read the studies so you know what they're talking about. In this area, I think summaries are frequently misleading. You have to know what the real evidence is that substantiates the claims. (I cannot tell you how many times I have looked at the evidence and just rolled my eyes - obviously not applicable in settings where I wanted it to be.)
Edit: See this comment (not me) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275869
Bjarne Stroustop, creator of C, famously rates his C knowledge as 7/10
How effective something is comes with what is best and compromise effectiveness for efficiency.
I think overall on average they would do a decent job of explaining it in writing to equally brilliant people. Not so sure about "dumbing it down" for the "others".
(then how do you practise listening to your L2? Eavesdropping, ancillary encounters, news, movies, etc. give plenty of opportunity, but speaking requires you to make an extra effort.)