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Ask HN: As a dev coach, how do you handle "expert beginner" behavior?

8 points by NicoJuicy 3y ago

I spend a lot of time helping collegues and onboarding others. With some people, it's truelly a great experience. I think these people are mostly curious, eager to learn and are probably smarter than me, when I was their age or had their experience ( they pick it up quicker than me, who spend more time understanding those things). But I've noticed a pattern with others which I have a hard time coping with. It seems that sometimes, people forget how many times you helped them to create their current solution ( literally taking over and doing pair programming for the hardest parts). After a while, some people start to think they know all things better, but it perplexes me since I know which questions they sometimes ask, and it's pretty basic things that were questioned. Most of the time, they still write horrible code and sometimes they don't understand what they are doing ( eg. Trying to explain known things and their problem with the wrong vocabulary ). After a while of working on repetitive code, it seems the ego gets bigger so that they want to show authority versus others, while they obviously are still beginners. Additionally, their behavior is becoming ungrateful and helping them because a burden ( eg. unrespectful). Is that just me or my character? Or has someone observed similar situations? Any tips, pointers or books on how to handle these situations better?

NicoJuicy 3y ago
Thanks! Many great points. There is a reason behind my original question, since it's related to reflecting over the mentor role in the current situation. And I'm trying to find out if if there, with the current situation, are similarities with past annoyances because of my character. So the following hit right to home, because that's what I'm reflecting about: > What struck me each time is how the things you observe are universally centered around people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. I'd appreciate your thoughts about the mentor role on the following situation. The person I'm mentoring now is a senior with past roles in Amazon, IBM, ... We are working together for 2 months now, but December is traditionally a low activity month because of holidays and a week off by the company. I've had a feature that I was originally going to do solo ( my priority was the deadline and now I'm mentally switching to onboarding the senior the right way). This also means that the user stories were less documented. We have a 7 hour difference in time zone ( he in Canada and I'm from Belgium). I've almost daily asked if there were any issues/unclarities. He also started early sometimes, probably to have more overlap and more help from me. He also worked a Saturday ( for a relatively simple problem that he couldn't fix in 3 days, we did pair programming and I had 2 solutions in 30 minutes). He couldn't solo implement a feature flag, where the "enabled" route took the new endpoint ( swagger generated) and the old route took the old one. I literally had to take the screen over and did it in 5 minutes. Personally, this looked like an easy task. Any advise from the mentor viewpoint? My urge was that this ( and other things) looked like a red flag. I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account. I'm now trying to compare past experiences to reflect on that feedback. But I have a hard time getting over it that someone with 18 years of experience couldn't do that solo. I was always worried that he would be without work. It's possible that this was viewed as "pushing", while I just tuned in to see if everything was clear and if he had questions. My current guess is that perhaps because of my handling, he tried to adjust his coding to my way of doing/development and it impaired him ? ( that's the only possible explanation I can find). This guess is related to what was mentioned after feedback internally. My actual guess is more in the lines of "beginner expert". And my worry is that our team in theory has an additional senior, while that's not the case. Note: I requested for an additional senior ( full stack) for a while since we can use it. But it seems that the position that was open is not similar to what was fulfilled ( I would say there's even such a big difference that's it's red flag. And i believe it's also my job to signal that). Any advice / reflections would be greatly appreciated.
- psyklic 3y ago
  It sounds to me like you really care about mentees being successful and are investing a lot of time/effort. I believe you can change your outlook a bit into knowing it's moreso on them to flourish. For example, you sound extremely hands-on for a mentor. I would not do all of their coding for them. IMO it's not your job to teach how to use a framework. But instead of assuming they "should" know things, you could assume they are skilled but at different aspects of development. So from this perspective, a mentor might give additional topics to brush up on to be successful in the job. And still be super open to providing internal career advice, helping with company-specific things, etc. It sounds like maybe a lot of what you write here is important for mentee success yet not being communicated. You could probably be more upfront about team expectations, and let them know what a typical dev workload will look like. Hiring is tough, and some people are not able to perform as well as expected. That can be frustrating, but it's not your fault. You may want to clarify how the company evaluates new hires so you know the process.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Wanted to put in a plug for this comment: it's honestly stunningly rare and a real credit to you to think about it carefully in these terms.
  - NicoJuicy 3y ago
    Thanks. A lot of this is similar to what I encountered/observed, to the point where I thought to check the hiring process too. > For example, you sound extremely hands-on for a mentor. I would not do all of their coding for them. Well. I guide them through keywords to look up, so they can find more info about their current issue and then ask them to come back when they need to know more or still have further issues ( I do want to see they put in some effort in finding the issue first, depending on the issue ofc). The problem is after some back and forth. If it takes a relatively long time, I sometimes do the coding for them ( a lot less the last years) and I still think it's a difficult balance. Once you fix their problem with pair programming, I tend to get into an akward situation, where it's expected to do that more from their side, which I don't want to do. To the point of the actual request of : "can you take over my screen" or "can you do it for me". Fyi, that's an example of the current senior situation. I hit the "can you do it for me" feedback loop really fast this time.

refulgentis 3y ago

Man I feel bad for being it a bit flippant about "it's your character": you're extremely thoughtful and I can see the tension clearly now. I won't belabor the major point, you extracted it well from another comment of mine, re: there's a cost to the mentor in this type of situation, even when the mentee is...someone we don't see much traction with. `I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account.` I hated having to go through this exercise of interpreting statements from my managers, but in retrospect, I always found there was much more nuance to their advice than they were able to communicate: here, I detect subtle understones of "they might not measure up to you, you're excellent technically and thoughtful" via character differences, as well as invoking cultural, to give some breathing room and indicate it might not even be that they have character issues, but might be attributable to outside influences. Honestly you've handled everything extremely well, even going to the trouble to seek out advice internally, and here, and being very thoughtful in the process. A real outlier. What I'd say then is, they probably expect you to treat this as a performance management problem. Which is where it gets hairy. I can tell you at G if a manager was in your situation, pre-2020, they'd end up being silently flagged and just never...advance. That's one extreme. Driven by that it's a _very_ difficult, to impossible, problem to communicate directly with an individual. You'd have to come up with a whole other abstraction layer to not communicate too directly, because you'd incinerate the relationship. Since it's a difficult problem, and they preferred having headcount, you'd just sort of see the relationship grind on over _years_. The other extreme is 2023 Google, or what you may have seen as a TikTok trend of people videotaping their firings. Because performance management is so difficult, and companies are incentivized to cut right now, very frequently management never says anything _and_ suddenly lets the person go. You could strike a middle ground and let them get a performance review cycle in with a sanitized version of what you wrote to us (ex. needs guidance from peers too often, etc. etc.) and see what happens.

NicoJuicy 3y ago
> Man I feel bad for being it a bit flippant about "it's your character": you're extremely thoughtful and I can see the tension clearly now. No worries at all. It's a good thing to reflect about too. There are certain characters that just don't fit with others and I'm trying to see if that's the case or what is wrong. For the rest of the comment. I'm still need to reread it a couple of times to see if I get the jest of it and how to apply it. I asked originally to let me handle the feature alone and get them to get a fresh perspective on it through tag-teaming him with someone else. But that's not possible it seems. I guess I'll have to accept the fact that the mentor role isn't meant as a performance signal early on and deal with it mentally + don't let it affect my mentoring ( since we could use an additional good senior atm). Either way, I like your feedback and already got more from it than I expected through a text based medium ;) Thanks!