beyarkay

(author here) I'm not sure I agree. I certainly think that screen sharing is better than nothing, but remote screen sharing is a strict subset of what you can do while in-person. Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.

I can't describe how many times I've been saved days of work because a senior casually asked what problem I was working on as we both waited in line for a coffee, and they were able to point me in the right direction. As described in the essay, the novice doesn't know when to ask for help.

There are other, tangential, reasons to prefer remote work over in-person, but I don't think there's any reason why remote work would be better at educating novices.

(author here) I agree that novices have an advantage in that they have few assumptions:

> Something you can do independently (and possibly it’s best done without expert supervision), is exploration of the field. You know nothing, and have no biases about what may or may not be useful. Any time you come across something that feels like it has some depth to it, such as a well-written essay series or a deep technical dive, you need to invest heavily into it. As a novice, your one advantage is that everything is new and nobody expects you to be fast. Because of this, you can afford to spend the time to learn as much as possible.

I'm not sure that it's correct to characterise an expert by the lack of this though. I think it's correlated, but not all experts are so rigid.

(author here) it's a pity that there's no way to emulate an office's "just peer around your screen and ask your colleague" dynamic. Having your video camera always on is too creepy, and constantly being in a voice call with your peers still feels a bit weird.

(author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.

(author here) I think there's something to be said for having both (if I allow myself to imagine an unrealistic utopia).

Imagining the distribution of how much benefit novices get out of a scenario, only having the watercooler interactions probably has a high maximum benefit (i.e. there's some expert that loves teaching and puts loads of time into helping novices) but probably also a very low minimum benefit (i.e. there are no experts at the company, or the experts couldn't care less about helping out). So it's the risky scenario, with a high variance.

Only having formal teaching doesn't have nearly as low a minimum (even a lecturer doing the bare minimum is better than no lecturer), but also doesn't have nearly as high a maximum (a high-effort lecturer simply cannot pay attention to each of the 300 students in a lecture hall, no matter how hard they try).

So having the formal teaching raises the minimum, ensuring the worst outcomes are not that bad, and adding in some watercooler interactions raises the maximum, ensuring that high-effort experts are able to converse with interested novices.

(author here) This is an interesting point. I hadn't considered it, but I agree. Or maybe to be more specific, I think the novice has some prior that their idea will work, and hearing an expert's disagreement will update their prior somewhat. If the novice has a high respect for the expert, that update will be large enough. But sometimes the novice just has to experience the pain firsthand in order to truly appreciate why something is a bad idea.

(author here) Absolutely agree. Another commenter mentioned that sometimes the best mentor is someone slightly better than you, and not some seasoned veteran. You want someone knowledgeable enough to give good (and correct) advice, but not so knowledgeable that they struggle to be comprehensible.

(author here) I absolutely agree that knowledge transfer shouldn't be left to chance, and that there should be more consistent processes in place to make sure this happens. But I still think there's something to be gained from experts and novices having a more casual conversation about various topics.

When I was getting started in software, some of the most valuable conversations I had were after a technical meeting, when I could pick a seniors brain on the way out of the room, asking them why XYZ solution was dismissed immediately.

Encouraging frequent and casual conversation between experts & novices is key.

(author here) Thanks! this was my first anything published to the internet, glad to see it's been received so well.

> I really like spending time with novices

From reading the various comments about this essay, it seems like there's a pretty sharp divide, some people love spending time with novices, others despise the activity.

(author here) Ooooohhh this is a great example, I love it. Software can be so abstract with the footguns sometimes, but physical mechanisms are so much more intuitive

(author here) I've always found this advice a bit of a double edged sword. I absolutely agree that it'll develop your career, but I don't really want my day job to become 100% drudgery because I'm the only one who bothers to do it properly.

If the untouched system is just fiendishly complex this can be fun to figure out, but if the untouched system is pure pain to deal with, I think I'd rather risk unemployment.

(author here) Thanks! I appreciate your kind words. That scrapiness you talk of is interesting, totally agree that there's something there, and it's interesting to think of how to evaluate if someone has it without spending months working with them.

(author here) bless you for helping out the juniors. There's not nearly a strong enough culture of educating juniors IMO

(author here) Apologies, I've (maybe mistakenly) put dead links for various essays that are works-in-progress, in order to figure out what to prioritize. I know it's annoying, but it does give me very good signal about what people want to read. For example, 2% of people clicked the essay `/hard`, but only 1% of people have clicked on the essay for `/expert_aesthetics`. So I'm frantically trying to finish `/hard` before a streamer reads the main essay tomorrow.

If I can ask for constructive critique, how annoyed are you? The metrics are really useful to me, but I don't want to be an arsehole <3

(author here) Okay I know this is how the internet works, but I posted my essay here a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43664345) and it died a silent death. Excited to read the comments! But damn the internet is unintelligible sometimes.

Sorry for the confusion, I've replied to your other comment.

Sorry! I didn't mean it as an insult, there's just lots of bots nowadays with ChatGPT and whatnot.

Loadshedding is what the South African government calls regular power blackouts, where the government agency in charge of power (called Eskom) will schedule blackouts for different areas at different times. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis

The problem is that these schedules are _really_ confusing, difficult to understand, and change without notice. So I built a load shedding calendar, which basically puts events into your calendar when your area has load shedding. It's easy to use, and super useful because if you're planning a meeting online then you can easily plan your meeting around when you'll actually have electricity.

I don't explain loadshedding in the README because it affects all South Africans, so its pretty tricky to live in South Africa but not know what load shedding is. On the other hand, if you don't know what load shedding is then you'll probably never need eskom-calendar (since you'll probably never have load shedding). The only edge case would be tourists, but pretty much every hotel will either have generators for their own power, or they'll have a little card explaining load shedding.

Sorry for the confusion! But I'm glad you don't have load shedding, it's a real pain

You sound like a bot with all those keywords and repeated phrases.

Hey, thanks for posting about my project! I saw some clicks coming through from HN. I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about it.