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Anyone who's professionally coding right now has one super-effective option that's rarely talked about: Hire someone knowledgeable to walk you through what you'

Anyone who's professionally coding right now has one super-effective option that's rarely talked about: Hire someone knowledgeable to walk you through what you're learning. I've been doing a heavy C++ project, and as a web developer, I was basically a walking footgun. I realized this early on, hired a total expert in the field (the guy has contributed to C++ standards committees before), and am Loving how smoothly this project is going thanks to learning from him. It's incredibly fun. I pay the guy $150/hr in 10 hour chunks and get the most in-depth insight into what I'm doing, how to revise my code, what the code means in the first place, etc. It's perfect if you know how to code but find yourself in a brand new domain. I still learn outside of our hour-long mentor sessions, of course. Skip the MOOC, hire the teacher. ..and then also do the MOOC, honestly they're pretty great.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
> $150/hr in 10 hour chunks and get the most in-depth insight into what I'm doing Yeah, it's... an option, I guess, if you've got the dough. Many of us don't have that kind of budget so we look for some of those experts who have blogs and youtube channels.
- compacct27 6y ago
  That's totally fair, this guy is on the higher end and this is the only project I'd be willing to pay that for. You can find one for less, though, if you ever find yourself wanting one. Mentor.io is a good place for it.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  I'm trying to figure out what I know well enough to charge $150/hour to teach people now...
  - pvarangot 6y ago
    I've charged that rate and it's usually veeeery niche knowledge that somehow seems to combine more than 10 years of experience. Like I worked in information security and aerospace and am a C/C++ coder and someone is thinking about a software product that's a C++ library for securely communicating with satellites. I'm usually contacted by engineers or companies that do market surveys and have the detailed knowledge of my background, so doing a lot of those (which are usually also compensated at like 40 to 60 per hour) pays off. I haven't been able to engage in any of these for two years now because I moved to the US on an H1B visa, but the offers still keep on coming. I got like five in 2019 and two in 2020 and I had to say no.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  I hesitate to throw this out here, because it goes against the "do it as a business" ethos here on HN. However, if you are really interested in some topic, why not trade your knowledge for the knowledge you seek? In centuries past, if there were a mathematician who wanted to know more about botany, it was the most normal thing in the world for him to contact a botanist interested in math and trade the knowledge. This usually involved one going to stay at the home/studio/estate/whatever of the other for what today would be considered a long period of time. The upside was that you could learn all you needed to know from what was as good a source as you were likely to ever find. If you think about a modern version of this model, you could get all the information you need on the subject you're interested in and it wouldn't cost you a nickel. We have the internet, they didn't. Might even get a pretty good friend out of the deal. Of course you need knowledge to trade, and pretty deep knowledge at that. At the same time, if there is an arborist out there looking to learn programming, and you have heaven only knows how many fruit trees on your property, what do you have to lose by checking his/her clients for references? You can teach him/her programming. They can teach you what you need to know to care for your property. You guys can each contact each other's references to make sure you're actually experts in your respective fields. There doesn't seem to be any risk in trying? (Unless I'm missing it?) It just seems a really easy fix to the money problem. And you can access knowledge from everyone from arborists and physicists to dance teachers and electric motorcycle engineers to international development experts and nanotech engineers. The sky would be the limit.
  - titanomachy 6y ago
    But this problem is exactly why we invented money in the first place... If I'm an interventional radiologist and I want to learn algebraic topology, what are the chances of a coincidence of wants? How many algebraic topologists do you think there are in the world who will trade their time for a chance to get better at placing arterial stents? On the other hand, I can basically guarantee you that someone somewhere is willing to pay money for an arterial stent, and somewhere else there is a world-class expert mathematician who will accept money in exchange for tutoring.
  - louhike 6y ago
    Ivan Illich suggested having a system of credits for learning in his book Deschooling Society. Everybody would have a basic amount of credits to ask for help for his self-education. This amount will be more higher if you have a less privileged background. If you want more credits, you will have to gain them by educating other people.
miccah 6y ago
Mentors are definitely a great resource! Of all the learning activities I have tried, having a real person to talk to and ask questions has been the most effective and motivating. For those who want an easy (and free!) mentor system for learning various programming languages, try Exercism [1]. I have been using it to learn Rust and Clojure. [1] https://exercism.io https://exercism.io
bdcravens 6y ago
Codementor.io is good for this. (most there are in the $60-100/hour range, and you can work in as small as 15 minute intervals)
- loosetypes 6y ago
  Oh wow, this could be interesting for discussing system architecture or database schema designs before committing a large chunk of time to an implementating a solo project. If it’s something you’ll spend a significant amount of time building that could be well worth the price.
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    Definitely. People also use it to learn a new skill, for help with parts of a task that they aren't an expert in, etc. (I do a lot of sessions there on the mentor side)
hirundo 6y ago
How did you connect with your expert?
- compacct27 6y ago
  Made a post on the c++ subreddit asking for a mentor. Described my project I wanted help on and said I was willing to pay.
squeaky-clean 6y ago
I like this idea, obviously I couldn't afford it for every thing I want to learn, but there are some topics where I can't really find quality tutorials/MOOCs/whatever and would be willing to pay to learn. How would one go about doing this? Was that person listing their mentoring services somewhere, or did you contact them directly?
- compacct27 6y ago
  I made a post on the C++ subreddit (r/cpp) asking for a mentor. Talked about the project and said I was willing to pay. Some people pointed me towards others (those people were too busy), but one guy reached out and had an online presence I could check out before deciding. The mods removed my post btw :/ apparently it was against the subreddit rules to ask for help. Found the guy before they could remove my post though, and here I am.
  - lrossi 6y ago
    Reddit is overly moderated, to the point that many communities do not seem friendly at all. The programming ones are a mixed bag. But others are worse. I was browsing recently a medical subreddit which was a support forum for a certain class of diseases, and people were using codewords to refer to banned names of various medical problems, to avoid having their posts deleted. It was ridiculous. For programming/tech related topics, I no longer use reddit these days, instead just read HN and some blogs. The community is nicer here.
  - catacombs 6y ago
    > it was against the subreddit rules to ask for help. Yes, as it says in the /r/cpp sidebar. You needed to post your request for help in /r/cpp_questions/
__mharrison__ 6y ago
There's a reason why top performers in any industry (CEO's, athletes, actors) have coaches. I can explain to you how to ski all day long, but if I get you on a hill you will learn many times faster. Coaching works (in programming contexts as well).
- boredumb 6y ago
  I've been learning spanish for years via videos and it has gone a long way to show me how little I can learn from them by passively ingesting the information. I moved to a spanish speaking area recently and within a few months being able to really apply the knowledge (outside of duolingo or basic exercises) it has given me more understanding and confidence than years of more passive approaches. The knowledge is great and required, but being able to apply it, fail, learn, apply it, succeed is absolutely the fast track.
omarhaneef 6y ago
This raises the question of your "learning workflow". I tried something similar but found I wasn't learning much and he (it happened to be a guy) was doing all of the work and I was barely engaging with it. We had a shared github account, he would do some work and then explain it to me. What is your workflow? (10 hours is a large chunk!)
- compacct27 6y ago
  Thankfully, mine's been the opposite. Idk your situation, but I had a well-defined project in hand before I found him. I had done some work on it already, even. When I took him on, my flow's been this: I do as much work as I can, get stuck, then he's there to pull me out of the mess I made. I learn a ton along the way, and he'll point out topics for me to research on my own. 10 hours is a large chunk, but it's lasted a full 2 months with probably a good month left in it. This project edits some PhysX engine code for an Unreal Engine-based game I'm making. The level of technical depth in it is beyond anything I've done before, so I pulled out the stops for it.
  - omarhaneef 6y ago
    Interesting. So you don't sit with him 10 hours at a time. You have him -- more or less -- on call when you get stuck for 30 minutes at a time? Or do you batch all the roadblocks you have, then ask him to schedule something at, say 10am, the next day. He looks at your git repo and the issues you have?
    - compacct27 6y ago
      Oh for sure, I chunked out my payment essentially. Our calls last about an hour at a time, and yeah, I batch all my roadblocks. It's easy to have big c++ roadblocks that take a while to debug and explain, so it's a great fit. We jump on Zoom and screenshare, but he'll look at my github separately sometimes
Programmer12389 6y ago
I agree with the advice of getting a tutor. I am working with a tutor who has a PhD in mathematics to teach me various fields of mathematics. Doing homeworks from textbooks with someone to check your work and answer your questions has been a tremendous resource. I used to post my questions online but having a personal tutor has accelerated my progress.
catacombs 6y ago
> I pay the guy $150/hr in 10 hour chunks $1,500 seems....excessive.
- virtualmachine7 6y ago
  It might not be worth it for you, but it's definitely not greedy to charge that much. Always remember that your freelance rate should be double your full time rate (maybe more) so really it's like a $75/h job or $135k/y equivalent, and then there is the fragmentation of time mentioned, and the fact you have to mentor in real time (unlike coding you can wake up at 4am and get a bit done). Therefore I think it's a reasonable price to charge. Whether it is worth $150/h to you (or your employer) I guess depends on the business. But if your company has say never used mongodb before (for example), it's not much to pay to get someone with all the battle experience to come in and get people up to speed rather than say have production outages as people didn't know what they were doing, or alternatively hiring someone full time at a cost of $200k just for their mongo expertise.
  - catacombs 6y ago
    > Always remember that your freelance rate should be double your full time rate Can you elaborate on this? I had always wondered what a baseline rate should be if one goes freelance.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

> $150/hr in 10 hour chunks and get the most in-depth insight into what I'm doing Yeah, it's... an option, I guess, if you've got the dough. Many of us don't have that kind of budget so we look for some of those experts who have blogs and youtube channels.

compacct27 6y ago
That's totally fair, this guy is on the higher end and this is the only project I'd be willing to pay that for. You can find one for less, though, if you ever find yourself wanting one. Mentor.io is a good place for it.
commandlinefan 6y ago
I'm trying to figure out what I know well enough to charge $150/hour to teach people now...
- pvarangot 6y ago
  I've charged that rate and it's usually veeeery niche knowledge that somehow seems to combine more than 10 years of experience. Like I worked in information security and aerospace and am a C/C++ coder and someone is thinking about a software product that's a C++ library for securely communicating with satellites. I'm usually contacted by engineers or companies that do market surveys and have the detailed knowledge of my background, so doing a lot of those (which are usually also compensated at like 40 to 60 per hour) pays off. I haven't been able to engage in any of these for two years now because I moved to the US on an H1B visa, but the offers still keep on coming. I got like five in 2019 and two in 2020 and I had to say no.
bilbo0s 6y ago
I hesitate to throw this out here, because it goes against the "do it as a business" ethos here on HN. However, if you are really interested in some topic, why not trade your knowledge for the knowledge you seek? In centuries past, if there were a mathematician who wanted to know more about botany, it was the most normal thing in the world for him to contact a botanist interested in math and trade the knowledge. This usually involved one going to stay at the home/studio/estate/whatever of the other for what today would be considered a long period of time. The upside was that you could learn all you needed to know from what was as good a source as you were likely to ever find. If you think about a modern version of this model, you could get all the information you need on the subject you're interested in and it wouldn't cost you a nickel. We have the internet, they didn't. Might even get a pretty good friend out of the deal. Of course you need knowledge to trade, and pretty deep knowledge at that. At the same time, if there is an arborist out there looking to learn programming, and you have heaven only knows how many fruit trees on your property, what do you have to lose by checking his/her clients for references? You can teach him/her programming. They can teach you what you need to know to care for your property. You guys can each contact each other's references to make sure you're actually experts in your respective fields. There doesn't seem to be any risk in trying? (Unless I'm missing it?) It just seems a really easy fix to the money problem. And you can access knowledge from everyone from arborists and physicists to dance teachers and electric motorcycle engineers to international development experts and nanotech engineers. The sky would be the limit.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  But this problem is exactly why we invented money in the first place... If I'm an interventional radiologist and I want to learn algebraic topology, what are the chances of a coincidence of wants? How many algebraic topologists do you think there are in the world who will trade their time for a chance to get better at placing arterial stents? On the other hand, I can basically guarantee you that someone somewhere is willing to pay money for an arterial stent, and somewhere else there is a world-class expert mathematician who will accept money in exchange for tutoring.
- louhike 6y ago
  Ivan Illich suggested having a system of credits for learning in his book Deschooling Society. Everybody would have a basic amount of credits to ask for help for his self-education. This amount will be more higher if you have a less privileged background. If you want more credits, you will have to gain them by educating other people.

miccah 6y ago

Mentors are definitely a great resource! Of all the learning activities I have tried, having a real person to talk to and ask questions has been the most effective and motivating. For those who want an easy (and free!) mentor system for learning various programming languages, try Exercism [1]. I have been using it to learn Rust and Clojure. [1] https://exercism.io https://exercism.io

bdcravens 6y ago

Codementor.io is good for this. (most there are in the $60-100/hour range, and you can work in as small as 15 minute intervals)

loosetypes 6y ago
Oh wow, this could be interesting for discussing system architecture or database schema designs before committing a large chunk of time to an implementating a solo project. If it’s something you’ll spend a significant amount of time building that could be well worth the price.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Definitely. People also use it to learn a new skill, for help with parts of a task that they aren't an expert in, etc. (I do a lot of sessions there on the mentor side)

hirundo 6y ago

How did you connect with your expert?

compacct27 6y ago
Made a post on the c++ subreddit asking for a mentor. Described my project I wanted help on and said I was willing to pay.

squeaky-clean 6y ago

I like this idea, obviously I couldn't afford it for every thing I want to learn, but there are some topics where I can't really find quality tutorials/MOOCs/whatever and would be willing to pay to learn. How would one go about doing this? Was that person listing their mentoring services somewhere, or did you contact them directly?

compacct27 6y ago
I made a post on the C++ subreddit (r/cpp) asking for a mentor. Talked about the project and said I was willing to pay. Some people pointed me towards others (those people were too busy), but one guy reached out and had an online presence I could check out before deciding. The mods removed my post btw :/ apparently it was against the subreddit rules to ask for help. Found the guy before they could remove my post though, and here I am.
- lrossi 6y ago
  Reddit is overly moderated, to the point that many communities do not seem friendly at all. The programming ones are a mixed bag. But others are worse. I was browsing recently a medical subreddit which was a support forum for a certain class of diseases, and people were using codewords to refer to banned names of various medical problems, to avoid having their posts deleted. It was ridiculous. For programming/tech related topics, I no longer use reddit these days, instead just read HN and some blogs. The community is nicer here.
- catacombs 6y ago
  > it was against the subreddit rules to ask for help. Yes, as it says in the /r/cpp sidebar. You needed to post your request for help in /r/cpp_questions/

__mharrison__ 6y ago

There's a reason why top performers in any industry (CEO's, athletes, actors) have coaches. I can explain to you how to ski all day long, but if I get you on a hill you will learn many times faster. Coaching works (in programming contexts as well).

boredumb 6y ago
I've been learning spanish for years via videos and it has gone a long way to show me how little I can learn from them by passively ingesting the information. I moved to a spanish speaking area recently and within a few months being able to really apply the knowledge (outside of duolingo or basic exercises) it has given me more understanding and confidence than years of more passive approaches. The knowledge is great and required, but being able to apply it, fail, learn, apply it, succeed is absolutely the fast track.

omarhaneef 6y ago

This raises the question of your "learning workflow". I tried something similar but found I wasn't learning much and he (it happened to be a guy) was doing all of the work and I was barely engaging with it. We had a shared github account, he would do some work and then explain it to me. What is your workflow? (10 hours is a large chunk!)

compacct27 6y ago
Thankfully, mine's been the opposite. Idk your situation, but I had a well-defined project in hand before I found him. I had done some work on it already, even. When I took him on, my flow's been this: I do as much work as I can, get stuck, then he's there to pull me out of the mess I made. I learn a ton along the way, and he'll point out topics for me to research on my own. 10 hours is a large chunk, but it's lasted a full 2 months with probably a good month left in it. This project edits some PhysX engine code for an Unreal Engine-based game I'm making. The level of technical depth in it is beyond anything I've done before, so I pulled out the stops for it.
- omarhaneef 6y ago
  Interesting. So you don't sit with him 10 hours at a time. You have him -- more or less -- on call when you get stuck for 30 minutes at a time? Or do you batch all the roadblocks you have, then ask him to schedule something at, say 10am, the next day. He looks at your git repo and the issues you have?
  - compacct27 6y ago
    Oh for sure, I chunked out my payment essentially. Our calls last about an hour at a time, and yeah, I batch all my roadblocks. It's easy to have big c++ roadblocks that take a while to debug and explain, so it's a great fit. We jump on Zoom and screenshare, but he'll look at my github separately sometimes

Programmer12389 6y ago

I agree with the advice of getting a tutor. I am working with a tutor who has a PhD in mathematics to teach me various fields of mathematics. Doing homeworks from textbooks with someone to check your work and answer your questions has been a tremendous resource. I used to post my questions online but having a personal tutor has accelerated my progress.

catacombs 6y ago

> I pay the guy $150/hr in 10 hour chunks $1,500 seems....excessive.

virtualmachine7 6y ago
It might not be worth it for you, but it's definitely not greedy to charge that much. Always remember that your freelance rate should be double your full time rate (maybe more) so really it's like a $75/h job or $135k/y equivalent, and then there is the fragmentation of time mentioned, and the fact you have to mentor in real time (unlike coding you can wake up at 4am and get a bit done). Therefore I think it's a reasonable price to charge. Whether it is worth $150/h to you (or your employer) I guess depends on the business. But if your company has say never used mongodb before (for example), it's not much to pay to get someone with all the battle experience to come in and get people up to speed rather than say have production outages as people didn't know what they were doing, or alternatively hiring someone full time at a cost of $200k just for their mongo expertise.
- catacombs 6y ago
  > Always remember that your freelance rate should be double your full time rate Can you elaborate on this? I had always wondered what a baseline rate should be if one goes freelance.