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I’m shocked that people worked in an office together and the junior person never got mentored. It seems like if that was your goal that you’d have to go well o

I’m shocked that people worked in an office together and the junior person never got mentored. It seems like if that was your goal that you’d have to go well out of your way to avoid accidentally mentoring someone. “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?” I can’t imagine how I’d setup an in-person work arrangement to avoid mentoring.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
It's easy: > “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” Don't ever talk to one another during debugging sessions. Pick up your bug ticket, fix it, close the ticket. Everyone else has their own work to do so they are not interested in watching you pilot your heavily-customized IDE setup, and the boss doesn't make them. > “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” Don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture. If you must, definitely don't invite juniors. In fact, nobody actually writing code to implement the change will be in the meeting at all. We are architects and managers, they are merely developers. They'll write what we tell them to write. In many organizations, even the people called "architects" are left out of these meetings, and probably even line managers. These are Director Level Decisions, after all. > “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?” Easiest of the three. Just never ever have anybody "shadow" anyone for any reason. They have their own work to be doing. I'm not saying these behaviors are good, but they are pretty much the default behavior in corporate jobs AFAICT.
- paulrpotts 4y ago
  It’s the normal, default state of affairs when you have seniors and managers who feel they are competing with each other and so hoard knowledge and techniques, and assign themselves all the interesting work while juniors are left bored doing rite work. In several workplaces when I’ve tried to organize shared spaces like a commons, lunch-and-learns, etc., management had been actively hostile. I had one asshole manager who would even shut down any water-cooler conversation. I finally wound up mentoring a co-worker who needed help with C++ entirely off-site during lunches.
timr 4y ago
I mean...there are a lot of anti-social developers who truly want to believe. But really, people are just going out of their way to resolve the cognitive dissonance: they know that important intangible collaboration is lost in a world of remote work, but they prefer it anyway, so they convince themselves that the human aspect doesn't matter. Also, don't forget that HN is filled with junior engineers. It's true that a lot of what you do when you're a junior engineer can be done in isolation, and when you get to a self-sufficient junior level ("senior engineer" in modern parlance; achieved in about 3-5 years), it's easy to ignore all the times that someone with more experience made a one-off comment that saved hours of labor or headed off a thorny problem. They forget the number of times that someone wandered over to chat, "interrupted" them, and changed everything. The sibling comment is a great illustration. I can't tell if it's parody, but it reads like it: "just don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture," indeed. Whiteboard diagramming obviously never happens at every company, ever.
- paulrpotts 4y ago
  I had a boss order me to take down a whiteboard I set up in a common area so we couldn’t discuss code during work.
rmah 4y ago
I can see that because I've experienced it. That said, at most places I've worked at over the decades, there was a lot of mentoring, both formal and informal. One place I worked at, however, was just depressing. No one communicated except via emails. Informal discussions about how the system never happened. No one even went out to eat together No one was hostile... it was just... cold. To me, it was just weird and I got out of there ASAP -- but I suspect many there liked it that way.

ElevenLathe 4y ago

It's easy: > “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” Don't ever talk to one another during debugging sessions. Pick up your bug ticket, fix it, close the ticket. Everyone else has their own work to do so they are not interested in watching you pilot your heavily-customized IDE setup, and the boss doesn't make them. > “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” Don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture. If you must, definitely don't invite juniors. In fact, nobody actually writing code to implement the change will be in the meeting at all. We are architects and managers, they are merely developers. They'll write what we tell them to write. In many organizations, even the people called "architects" are left out of these meetings, and probably even line managers. These are Director Level Decisions, after all. > “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?” Easiest of the three. Just never ever have anybody "shadow" anyone for any reason. They have their own work to be doing. I'm not saying these behaviors are good, but they are pretty much the default behavior in corporate jobs AFAICT.

paulrpotts 4y ago
It’s the normal, default state of affairs when you have seniors and managers who feel they are competing with each other and so hoard knowledge and techniques, and assign themselves all the interesting work while juniors are left bored doing rite work. In several workplaces when I’ve tried to organize shared spaces like a commons, lunch-and-learns, etc., management had been actively hostile. I had one asshole manager who would even shut down any water-cooler conversation. I finally wound up mentoring a co-worker who needed help with C++ entirely off-site during lunches.

timr 4y ago

I mean...there are a lot of anti-social developers who truly want to believe. But really, people are just going out of their way to resolve the cognitive dissonance: they know that important intangible collaboration is lost in a world of remote work, but they prefer it anyway, so they convince themselves that the human aspect doesn't matter. Also, don't forget that HN is filled with junior engineers. It's true that a lot of what you do when you're a junior engineer can be done in isolation, and when you get to a self-sufficient junior level ("senior engineer" in modern parlance; achieved in about 3-5 years), it's easy to ignore all the times that someone with more experience made a one-off comment that saved hours of labor or headed off a thorny problem. They forget the number of times that someone wandered over to chat, "interrupted" them, and changed everything. The sibling comment is a great illustration. I can't tell if it's parody, but it reads like it: "just don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture," indeed. Whiteboard diagramming obviously never happens at every company, ever.

paulrpotts 4y ago
I had a boss order me to take down a whiteboard I set up in a common area so we couldn’t discuss code during work.

rmah 4y ago

I can see that because I've experienced it. That said, at most places I've worked at over the decades, there was a lot of mentoring, both formal and informal. One place I worked at, however, was just depressing. No one communicated except via emails. Informal discussions about how the system never happened. No one even went out to eat together No one was hostile... it was just... cold. To me, it was just weird and I got out of there ASAP -- but I suspect many there liked it that way.