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> The Socratic method for teaching is actually quite good, and it can be employed without condescension. Socratic Method is hard to use without coming off as p

> The Socratic method for teaching is actually quite good, and it can be employed without condescension. Socratic Method is hard to use without coming off as patronizing, even if you think you're being careful. If you're genuinely jumping in to ask real questions to understand the problem, that's great. Most of the time when I see people use Socratic Method in the workplace it's because they think they're doing the other person a favor by asking leading questions instead of communicating directly. For the person on the receiving end, it becomes a game of navigating the questions and delivering the answers you know the person wants to hear, all done as delicately as possible to avoid disturbing their sense of superiority. Once you start doing this, every question starts to feel like a loaded question. Is this person genuinely asking my thoughts, or is this question another test to see if I agree with their secret answer? Am I okay to express a differing opinion here, or will I trigger another round of patronizing questions if I give the wrong answer? Is this person asking questions because they don't know, or because they think they know better than me and want me to realize I'm wrong? It's almost always better to approach the conversation as a discussion between peers. If you go in with implied seniority structures or student/teacher methods (including Socratic method) then it stops being a conversation among peers and starts to feel like another social hierarchy game that must be carefully navigated to avoid upsetting your elders. Just talk to your coworkers like collaborative peers, even if they're more junior than you. If you want to communicate something, say it directly. Don't ask questions and try to get the other person to guess the secret answer you want.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
Yeah ; I'm super open to coaching as opposed to mentoring, but last few years, when my managers tried to employ the coaching / questions methodology, it was obvious and painful : they did not feel like open questions to discover something together ; they felt like fake questions that had a "right" or rather "expected" answer, so it did not feel at all like "me figuring things out for myself " but rather"me trying to guess what I'm expected to say". Typically after a few frustrating minutes I just ask for straight feedback - I am happy and excited to receive constructive feedback and lecturing. My boss and I had an open discussion and it may be they just need more practice - coaching is a skill like any other and just because you took a two day class doesn't mean you're an expert yet. So we accepted that while he's more experienced than I am and my mentor in many things, he's junior in "coaching" so we sure working on it together :-)
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  I had some college professors who used Socratic style in class and I enjoyed it. However, that was literally a teacher/student relationship that I signed up for. Furthermore, the professors were usually genuinely curious about my responses and wanted to explore them when they didn't necessarily agree with the expected answers. In the workplace, Socratic method just feels like an unnecessary power move. Someone is trying to cement their role as teacher and the other person as student. I had a manager who liked to use the Socratic method for everything. He communicated everything in the form of questions. If you gave the "wrong" answer, he'd give a sharp sigh and then rephrase the question, giving you another change to give a "better" answer. This method was mildly annoying when he was right, but it was completely disastrous when he was wrong. He'd often arrive late to a situation that people had been dealing with for months and assume he knew exactly what was going on, better so than the people involved. He'd start his Socratic questioning, but you weren't allowed to explain the context or how you arrived at a solution. Your only option was to navigate his Socratic questioning until you could gingerly explain that he was missing a key constraint, or that we had already tried that, or that he had received bad information, and so on. It became a tool for him to control the conversation and put you in your place at the same time. It was a very sad time in my career. I'd arrive to every meeting feeling like I was about to play a psychological game of "guess the right answer" as I navigated the Socratic questions until we could get him to reveal what he was really thinking, or why he was so frustrated, or why he thought we were wrong, or any other number of issues that he just wouldn't tell us.
onlypositive 4y ago
+1 I gave up on the "teaching" years ago, it never did anyone any good and wasted a lot of time. Now I say explicitly what I think is wrong and what needs changing. This too can come off badly so I limit reviews to one or two remarks. I also build a relationship with these engineers and explicitly explain how I do reviews different nothing that while I give you solid direction, whether you take my advice is entirely up to you to evaluate and that it is 100% ok with me if you explain why I'm wrong and you're not changing it. - the purpose of my reviews is to catch problems you haven't thought of, if you've already thought about it and made a trade off that's your call to make. (And I trust you to make it) Translation: I'm too old for this tit for tat shit and have bigger hills to die on than where you put your whitespace.
- onlypositive 4y ago
  I should also clarify that I am always clear on exactly why I am suggesting something, and the level of importance I place on the change (though usually, if I'm commenting, it's relatively important, if not, I just don't bother mentioning it)
dgb23 4y ago
I think there's value in having a small set of 'goto questions' or maybe rules that are well known and regularly used. Then you can go over them together in the case of a review, a debugging session or to clear up a problem. I don't know how that relates to the Socratic method. But I think it's useful, if done honestly. It's like a little ritual that you do together and it serves both sides as a guideline in the moment, but also helps to converge to a common way of communicating things and writing code.
deleted 4y ago
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NikolaNovak 4y ago

Yeah ; I'm super open to coaching as opposed to mentoring, but last few years, when my managers tried to employ the coaching / questions methodology, it was obvious and painful : they did not feel like open questions to discover something together ; they felt like fake questions that had a "right" or rather "expected" answer, so it did not feel at all like "me figuring things out for myself " but rather"me trying to guess what I'm expected to say". Typically after a few frustrating minutes I just ask for straight feedback - I am happy and excited to receive constructive feedback and lecturing. My boss and I had an open discussion and it may be they just need more practice - coaching is a skill like any other and just because you took a two day class doesn't mean you're an expert yet. So we accepted that while he's more experienced than I am and my mentor in many things, he's junior in "coaching" so we sure working on it together :-)

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
I had some college professors who used Socratic style in class and I enjoyed it. However, that was literally a teacher/student relationship that I signed up for. Furthermore, the professors were usually genuinely curious about my responses and wanted to explore them when they didn't necessarily agree with the expected answers. In the workplace, Socratic method just feels like an unnecessary power move. Someone is trying to cement their role as teacher and the other person as student. I had a manager who liked to use the Socratic method for everything. He communicated everything in the form of questions. If you gave the "wrong" answer, he'd give a sharp sigh and then rephrase the question, giving you another change to give a "better" answer. This method was mildly annoying when he was right, but it was completely disastrous when he was wrong. He'd often arrive late to a situation that people had been dealing with for months and assume he knew exactly what was going on, better so than the people involved. He'd start his Socratic questioning, but you weren't allowed to explain the context or how you arrived at a solution. Your only option was to navigate his Socratic questioning until you could gingerly explain that he was missing a key constraint, or that we had already tried that, or that he had received bad information, and so on. It became a tool for him to control the conversation and put you in your place at the same time. It was a very sad time in my career. I'd arrive to every meeting feeling like I was about to play a psychological game of "guess the right answer" as I navigated the Socratic questions until we could get him to reveal what he was really thinking, or why he was so frustrated, or why he thought we were wrong, or any other number of issues that he just wouldn't tell us.

onlypositive 4y ago

+1 I gave up on the "teaching" years ago, it never did anyone any good and wasted a lot of time. Now I say explicitly what I think is wrong and what needs changing. This too can come off badly so I limit reviews to one or two remarks. I also build a relationship with these engineers and explicitly explain how I do reviews different nothing that while I give you solid direction, whether you take my advice is entirely up to you to evaluate and that it is 100% ok with me if you explain why I'm wrong and you're not changing it. - the purpose of my reviews is to catch problems you haven't thought of, if you've already thought about it and made a trade off that's your call to make. (And I trust you to make it) Translation: I'm too old for this tit for tat shit and have bigger hills to die on than where you put your whitespace.

onlypositive 4y ago
I should also clarify that I am always clear on exactly why I am suggesting something, and the level of importance I place on the change (though usually, if I'm commenting, it's relatively important, if not, I just don't bother mentioning it)

dgb23 4y ago

I think there's value in having a small set of 'goto questions' or maybe rules that are well known and regularly used. Then you can go over them together in the case of a review, a debugging session or to clear up a problem. I don't know how that relates to the Socratic method. But I think it's useful, if done honestly. It's like a little ritual that you do together and it serves both sides as a guideline in the moment, but also helps to converge to a common way of communicating things and writing code.

deleted 4y ago

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