3 ms·

This reminds me of an intern that recently went through our company. A part of his summer project was to make some api calls to a soap endpoint. We were all v

by snarfy 9y ago

This reminds me of an intern that recently went through our company. A part of his summer project was to make some api calls to a soap endpoint. We were all very busy so he tried to be as self sufficient as possible and not ask questions. After about a week, he comes to me with questions about soap xml schema and implementation details. He did not understand it's already built into the tooling. You literally drag-n-drop a url endpoint into your project and get a proxy class for calling the soap endpoint. He was way off into the weeds trying to finish his project. A little guidance helps.

fnord123 9y ago
Hopefully you lot took it as your own failure and not the poor intern dropped into the field with one of the most over complicated technologies and 'magical thinking' tooling.
- snarfy 9y ago
  Sure, we shouldn't have been so busy to not support our teammates. Still, I don't consider it a big failure. A lot of people go through life using technologies without really knowing how they work. He could have very well drag-n-dropped the soap endpoint and never learned a thing about soap. Now that he knows a bit about it he may alter his decisions in the future knowing the guts e.g. 'don't do that because it won't work through soap' etc.
  - fnord123 9y ago
    Fair enough. I was mostly concerned that it doesn't become a 'haha stupid interns' thread.
btschaegg 9y ago
Not saying that is necessarily the case, but situations like this can also develop if you have a lot of basic knowlege (especially regarding tooling) that is neither documented properly nor spread amongst most of the team. I've had scenarios where I spent an afternoon building a little one-off application I needed for some specific debugging task only to be told a month or so later that someone already built a proper tool for that - but only one developer knew about it, and it was stored in a different repository I had no access to.

by snarfy 9y ago

fnord123 9y ago

Hopefully you lot took it as your own failure and not the poor intern dropped into the field with one of the most over complicated technologies and 'magical thinking' tooling.

snarfy 9y ago
Sure, we shouldn't have been so busy to not support our teammates. Still, I don't consider it a big failure. A lot of people go through life using technologies without really knowing how they work. He could have very well drag-n-dropped the soap endpoint and never learned a thing about soap. Now that he knows a bit about it he may alter his decisions in the future knowing the guts e.g. 'don't do that because it won't work through soap' etc.
- fnord123 9y ago
  Fair enough. I was mostly concerned that it doesn't become a 'haha stupid interns' thread.

btschaegg 9y ago

Not saying that is necessarily the case, but situations like this can also develop if you have a lot of basic knowlege (especially regarding tooling) that is neither documented properly nor spread amongst most of the team. I've had scenarios where I spent an afternoon building a little one-off application I needed for some specific debugging task only to be told a month or so later that someone already built a proper tool for that - but only one developer knew about it, and it was stored in a different repository I had no access to.