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When I interrupt people, I make sure I have exhausted all avenues of finding the answer, and I tell them exactly what steps I tried. If they see that I’ve put i

When I interrupt people, I make sure I have exhausted all avenues of finding the answer, and I tell them exactly what steps I tried. If they see that I’ve put in significant effort, then it usually assuages any issues with them being interrupted. In a similar way when people interrupt me, I like to see the same.

emodendroket 6y ago
If I can answer a question in two minutes and it's going to take you a full day to figure it out it would be silly for me to refuse to help you.
- Kranar 6y ago
  For how my business works, I'd rather have the person invest a day working on a solution instead of answer it for them in two minutes. My goal is to have the developer attain a position where they can eventually answer a question for themselves in two minutes and that means letting them make mistakes, try things that are wrong, and spend time learning. If anytime someone needs to invest a day to learn how to research a solution, try something out, gain experience, I simply give them the exact and specific answer in two minutes, then I deprive them of experience. I substitute my experience for their opportunity to grow. I can appreciate that it's nice to want to help people out by giving them the answer, and my advice does not mean that you leave people to hang or feed them to the wolves and suffer... it's that as an organization, in the long run time is better spent giving people a system they can use to learn and grow and that system will necessarily require developers to invest a lot of time learning seemingly trivial things and learning from mistakes for themselves.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I think it depends. There's certainly a ton of value in getting someone to puzzle through a problem by themselves. But at some point you end up with diminishing returns. Often the person struggling will learn 90% of what they're going to learn in an hour, and the next 7 hours will only increase their knowledge and problem solving skills by that last 10%. After the first 90% it's often a better use of everyone's time to just go and ask for help.
  - statstutor 6y ago
    I don't believe that letting someone struggle for a day is a better learning experience than just telling them what they need to know. Sometimes it might be, but I feel it is more likely just unnecessary struggle - resulting in the same or a worse, bodged, end result. And, I am 100% sure that providing education is better than letting them struggle. If you don't want to tell them the answer (and I haven't fully understood why not), then pointing them in the right direction to discover the answer is certainly going to be more helpful.
    - Kranar 6y ago
      Learning is only a frustrating struggle if you do it the way most students are taught to do it at school, mostly through rote memorization and very boring repetition. But there are other effective ways of learning that are not frustrating and that allow people to explore and be creative. What I try to teach developers is how to learn things without getting frustrated. Usually people get frustrated because they don't have to right process in place for learning things, they try bolting solutions onto existing code and try fitting a square peg into a round hole. They get massive compiler errors or stack traces that are hard to isolate from the specific problem they're having and it feels like in order to solve one problem they need to solve a dozen other tangentially related problems. That's overwhelming and frustrating, but it need not be that way. I teach people how when they come across a challenge, how to learn to come to a solution from first principles; how to create a minimal project isolated from the rest of what they're working on and experiment. I try to emphasize the importance of having various different mental models of how a computer works and how to apply those models to have a better understanding of what's happening beneath the hood. > I haven't fully understood why not Because working in my industry isn't a matter of knowing answers to questions. It's about the process of knowledge discovery and that process comes with experience and practice. I really don't need anyone to be a glorified typist... if you need to take an entire day to really understand how to solve a problem, even if it's a trivial problem I could solve in a minute, then take the day. That's an investment I'm willing to make now while you're a junior and I am in a position to fully understand the problem you're facing, compared to 10 years from now when I won't be able to fully understand the problem and then we're really screwed.
- triceratops 6y ago
  A day is too long. If someone is stuck for more than 2 hours and I can get them unstuck, I'm happy to do it.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    I chose what I thought were extreme values to make my point, but I guess not everyone sees it my way.
- plank_time 6y ago
  Yes, if it’s one time. But if it’s constantly asking questions over and over again then of course this won’t work.

emodendroket 6y ago

If I can answer a question in two minutes and it's going to take you a full day to figure it out it would be silly for me to refuse to help you.

Kranar 6y ago
For how my business works, I'd rather have the person invest a day working on a solution instead of answer it for them in two minutes. My goal is to have the developer attain a position where they can eventually answer a question for themselves in two minutes and that means letting them make mistakes, try things that are wrong, and spend time learning. If anytime someone needs to invest a day to learn how to research a solution, try something out, gain experience, I simply give them the exact and specific answer in two minutes, then I deprive them of experience. I substitute my experience for their opportunity to grow. I can appreciate that it's nice to want to help people out by giving them the answer, and my advice does not mean that you leave people to hang or feed them to the wolves and suffer... it's that as an organization, in the long run time is better spent giving people a system they can use to learn and grow and that system will necessarily require developers to invest a lot of time learning seemingly trivial things and learning from mistakes for themselves.
- kelnos 6y ago
  I think it depends. There's certainly a ton of value in getting someone to puzzle through a problem by themselves. But at some point you end up with diminishing returns. Often the person struggling will learn 90% of what they're going to learn in an hour, and the next 7 hours will only increase their knowledge and problem solving skills by that last 10%. After the first 90% it's often a better use of everyone's time to just go and ask for help.
- statstutor 6y ago
  I don't believe that letting someone struggle for a day is a better learning experience than just telling them what they need to know. Sometimes it might be, but I feel it is more likely just unnecessary struggle - resulting in the same or a worse, bodged, end result. And, I am 100% sure that providing education is better than letting them struggle. If you don't want to tell them the answer (and I haven't fully understood why not), then pointing them in the right direction to discover the answer is certainly going to be more helpful.
  - Kranar 6y ago
    Learning is only a frustrating struggle if you do it the way most students are taught to do it at school, mostly through rote memorization and very boring repetition. But there are other effective ways of learning that are not frustrating and that allow people to explore and be creative. What I try to teach developers is how to learn things without getting frustrated. Usually people get frustrated because they don't have to right process in place for learning things, they try bolting solutions onto existing code and try fitting a square peg into a round hole. They get massive compiler errors or stack traces that are hard to isolate from the specific problem they're having and it feels like in order to solve one problem they need to solve a dozen other tangentially related problems. That's overwhelming and frustrating, but it need not be that way. I teach people how when they come across a challenge, how to learn to come to a solution from first principles; how to create a minimal project isolated from the rest of what they're working on and experiment. I try to emphasize the importance of having various different mental models of how a computer works and how to apply those models to have a better understanding of what's happening beneath the hood. > I haven't fully understood why not Because working in my industry isn't a matter of knowing answers to questions. It's about the process of knowledge discovery and that process comes with experience and practice. I really don't need anyone to be a glorified typist... if you need to take an entire day to really understand how to solve a problem, even if it's a trivial problem I could solve in a minute, then take the day. That's an investment I'm willing to make now while you're a junior and I am in a position to fully understand the problem you're facing, compared to 10 years from now when I won't be able to fully understand the problem and then we're really screwed.
triceratops 6y ago
A day is too long. If someone is stuck for more than 2 hours and I can get them unstuck, I'm happy to do it.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  I chose what I thought were extreme values to make my point, but I guess not everyone sees it my way.
plank_time 6y ago
Yes, if it’s one time. But if it’s constantly asking questions over and over again then of course this won’t work.