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I've seen this behavior with new coders too. They see an error and immediately get paralyzed and reach out for help without actually reading it to see what it s

I've seen this behavior with new coders too. They see an error and immediately get paralyzed and reach out for help without actually reading it to see what it says. I think non-technical people see an error message and don't take the time to read it, they just assume that the text is just nonsense. That's fair, of course, and reading error messages can be very hard sometimes even for the best of us. Still, I think there is a psychological hurdle to understand errors as a process, not as a roadblock.

atoav 4y ago
I always tend to present it to beginners as a way of the computer to tell you what is going on. Programming is (among other things) the art of knowing how to speak to a computer and gow to interpret the things it says. That means everything that damn thing says gives you hints of how it "sees the world" and how you therefore need to describe things to it so it can execute them for you.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
Or the worst variant, who seem numerous at my current job, that get paralysed and then simply give up and either turn off warnings, resort to type hacks (eg if they are using TS they will just just the any keyword), or radically change their design to far below any reasonable quality. Then they act surprised when someone objects to any of this in pull request reviews and even more surprised when asked to do it properly and finally even more surprised when asked why they didn’t reach out for help. They always seem genuinely like they’ve never heard of the idea of help before despite being repeatedly asked to ask for help when they aren’t sure. Really hard to say what this is but this level of hand holding required feels like a failure in a part of the interview process.
- Zababa 4y ago
  I don't know about other people, but for me, it gets tiring to ask for help all the time, and I'm not used to working with senior people. Programming in college was with groups of people as clueless or even more clueless than me, so asking for help was useless. And most of my programming I did on my own. I'm also not very good with people in general, or rather, after I spend "too much" time with someone I need some time alone to recharge my social batteries. It's also hard to know exactly what "not being sure" is. Does that mean 15 minutes without progress? An hour? Half a day? What if I'm still making progress, but slower than usual? Seniors love to say "ask for help if you're not sure" but I've never heard anyone properly defining what "not sure" is supposed to be. When I ask for clarification, some of the time people look at me like I'm an alien. I understand that managing people is hard, but I also find it hard to be managed when expectations aren't clear and are mostly a reflection of "I wish things were better".
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    This is so important and thank you for being so open. You are right - it's very easy to feel like things are normal if you think you are making progress or eventually complete the task. If the task could have been done with 10% of the time/effort, you may not even know. Something I found works for me is trying to be transparent about what is going on in general. Like I'll over share a bit of what I am working on and how I am thinking about it. If I am really fucked up in my thinking, usually someone says something.

atoav 4y ago

I always tend to present it to beginners as a way of the computer to tell you what is going on. Programming is (among other things) the art of knowing how to speak to a computer and gow to interpret the things it says. That means everything that damn thing says gives you hints of how it "sees the world" and how you therefore need to describe things to it so it can execute them for you.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

Or the worst variant, who seem numerous at my current job, that get paralysed and then simply give up and either turn off warnings, resort to type hacks (eg if they are using TS they will just just the any keyword), or radically change their design to far below any reasonable quality. Then they act surprised when someone objects to any of this in pull request reviews and even more surprised when asked to do it properly and finally even more surprised when asked why they didn’t reach out for help. They always seem genuinely like they’ve never heard of the idea of help before despite being repeatedly asked to ask for help when they aren’t sure. Really hard to say what this is but this level of hand holding required feels like a failure in a part of the interview process.

Zababa 4y ago
I don't know about other people, but for me, it gets tiring to ask for help all the time, and I'm not used to working with senior people. Programming in college was with groups of people as clueless or even more clueless than me, so asking for help was useless. And most of my programming I did on my own. I'm also not very good with people in general, or rather, after I spend "too much" time with someone I need some time alone to recharge my social batteries. It's also hard to know exactly what "not being sure" is. Does that mean 15 minutes without progress? An hour? Half a day? What if I'm still making progress, but slower than usual? Seniors love to say "ask for help if you're not sure" but I've never heard anyone properly defining what "not sure" is supposed to be. When I ask for clarification, some of the time people look at me like I'm an alien. I understand that managing people is hard, but I also find it hard to be managed when expectations aren't clear and are mostly a reflection of "I wish things were better".
- xyzelement 4y ago
  This is so important and thank you for being so open. You are right - it's very easy to feel like things are normal if you think you are making progress or eventually complete the task. If the task could have been done with 10% of the time/effort, you may not even know. Something I found works for me is trying to be transparent about what is going on in general. Like I'll over share a bit of what I am working on and how I am thinking about it. If I am really fucked up in my thinking, usually someone says something.