4 ms·

Be The Obnoxious Needy Junior Programmer

37 points by austinlyons 13y ago

krob 13y ago
You're Fired!!! LOL j/k
verelo 13y ago
Being this guy is great fun, but honestly try avoid being obnoxious and /too/ needy. It's a great way to learn but its also a great way to find yourself out of a job, you need to get your work done and other people don't need the distractions. Learn as much as you can, but maintain a high level of respect for peoples time, including your own.
paulwithap 13y ago
You might want to consider a media query for that sidebar.
t1m 13y ago
Sometimes there is advice that seems wrong, but is actually really good advice. This isn't one of those times. The best advice for a young Jr anything is to do the job you were hired for exceedingly well. If the words obnoxious or needy are ever used in the same sentence as your name, you are doing something terribly wrong.
- kazagistar 13y ago
  The article actually supported its position with some degree of argumentation, while you just made a unfounded statement. Could you provide more details as to why you think the advice of this article is bad?
  - ianstallings 13y ago
    Do you really need explanation as to why you shouldn't be needy and obnoxious? I find it hard to believe that you need some empirical evidence to prove this point.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      Let's take two people. Person X has never been regarded as needy or obnoxious and is generally really great to be around. He is a junior engineer and spends a lot of time making sure everyone around him is as happy as possible by making sure he always completes anything assigned to him quickly. Person Y is generally regarded well, but people expect him to always ask them questions so they tend to avoid him. He's often referred to as needy and sometimes even as obnoxious. If you're doing something he doesn't know about, expect him to be hovering around trying to work out what you're doing and why. What happens if person X and Y stay at a big corporation? Person X is probably going to be promoted up a few rungs. If he is lucky he will eventually end up high in the organization. If he is unlucky or too nice, he will end up stuck in a dead end job doing the work of 5 people for the pay of 1 person. Person Y is probably going nowhere. What happens if X or Y decide to create a new startup? Person X only knows about engineering - and only small stuff, not the big picture. It's unlikely his startup would succeed. Person Y, however, has spend the last few years trying to understand everything about business/engineering/sales etc that he can get his hands on. His startup has far better odds. This is what the article is arguing. I find it hard to believe you DON'T need some evidence to assume person Y is always wrong. I've been person X before - I would not recommend it. Always make sure you understand the reasons behind anything you are doing, never just 'follow orders' or do anything you don't understand. Life is too short.
joeframbach 13y ago
How about some contrast on this page? I used the chrome inspector to change the font color to black.
- evmar 13y ago
  I opened the comments here to see if anyone else had this problem. I made a Chrome extension that fixes it. Unlike tools like readability, all it does is take the thing you click on and change it into a large black-on-white font. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-fix/ofafkoecdjghmmjibcbelabbllfoeidb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-fix/ofafkoecd...
centrinoblue 13y ago
Personally if you are a jr programmer on one of my teams I would be unimpressed if you felt the need to aggressively pursue external meetings so you could just sit and listen, or spend work time meeting with the CFO to discuss how much we pay the auditors. Get to work, it's what you're being paid for. Don't forget that.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Get to work, it's what you're being paid for. Don't forget that. You sound incredibly entitled. While I agree that it's strategically a bad idea for him to go outside of his job description, why is it not "work" for him to want to know how the company runs? He's not looking to upset apple carts; he just wants to know how the decisions are made. Anyway, I hate this attitude you're showing. I'm not downvoting you, because people need to see that your attitude exists (as it's fairly prevalent) so it shouldn't be buried, but I find it this "fuck you, I'm the boss" attitude revolting.
  - bitwize 13y ago
    Objecting to his attitude is above your pay grade, son.
  - centrinoblue 13y ago
    I was a jr programmer once as well and I was curious and engaged people outside my direct work assignments but was always focused on making sure the work I was expected to do got done. More than enough time is wasted in project specific meetings so actively looking to sit in on unrelated meetings screams 'wasted time'. I'm not 'entitled' I'm speaking as someone under pressure to deliver software projects and to explain why they may be late or off course. If I have a jr programmer who is constantly away trying to understand how to run a business so he/she can fly the coup to start their own company then I'm not going to be impressed with said programmer. I enjoy working with people who are creative, engaged, and curious -- but also focused. Call it what you will.
    - kazagistar 13y ago
mu_killnine 13y ago
I understand where the author is coming from, but your curiosity needs to be organic and come from a real yearning to understand the business. I can see a lot of young engineers thinking they need to voraciously hunt down random higher-ups 'just because'. There's no shortage of things to learn in an organization and sometimes it's best to start in an area closer to you (see: with Sr. Engineers).
- div 13y ago
  False dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to sponge up knowledge from Sr. Engineers, while picking up different bits of knowledge from people who are in different roles altogether.
angersock 13y ago
So, there's a really interesting thing here, right? On the engineering side of things, it's often that things are hard but tractable--there is a clear set of goals that need to be accomplished, and at least a somewhat reasonable dependency graph of objectives that can be inferred to reach those goals. Over in sales and business, though? OH GOD everything's on fire--we have too many customers and not enough product, too few customers and too much engineering, a great opportunity for a strategic partnership, wait no that isn't panning out, nobody likes us fuck fuck fuck what do we do. (And from what I've observed of sales and business folks, this sort of bipolar behavior is totally expected. They are in a deep, ongoing, and tumultuous relationship with your product and your customers, and things get crazy sometimes.) As a junior engineer it can be really disheartening to learn that your company has few customers and the ones you do have hate your product for reason X (where X probably is nothing you have direct control over). Especially in a small company, business is a howling vortex of crazy that honestly as a junior engineer you probably don't have the experience to make sense of. One of the most poignant lessons from Soul of a New Machine was that the Eagle team pulled off so much awesome work precisely because they were insulated from the rest of the company and allowed to focus on the engineering.
- jmduke 13y ago
  I think a really good depiction of this struggle is Mad Men, surprisingly enough. You've got two factions of symbiotic employees who have more or less differing objectives. (Thankfully, I haven't had to work with any Pete Campbells.) A lot of this has to do with the way we incentivize/disincentivize various business roles. At your average company, an engineer/developer's #1 goal is "don't fuck up", meaning: take time and caution when developing and releasing things and don't do anything that could break anything (both in the sense of 'throw an error' and 'cause a customer to leave'. The latter is especially important in the enterprise space, where a single customer can be worth more than 10% of your revenues and act as a marketing engine through whitepapers and referrals.) On the other side of things, sales folks are usually incentivized to sell, sell, sell. They get paid to sell things, so any behavior that doesn't maximize their ability to increase their commission is actively disadvantageous to them. Usually, this incurs a sort of long-term blindness: by devoting three developers to feature ABC for a week and making $X, you take them away from perhaps a bigger feature that might make the company $X * 10. Plus, by making time-sensitive promises to clients/customers you limit the engineer's ability to not fuck up. The answer to this isn't "sales people are bad and should be more honest" or "engineers should be better at what they do". There are a lot of different strategies: at smaller companies, you'll see ideals like uniting sales and marketing ("marketing" not in the sense of advertising, but in the sense of product development) but the biggest successes I've seen have revolved around shifting those incentives: commissions are simple and easy to tinker with (there's a lot of new interesting literature about 'recurring commissions' which reward salespeople for longer-lasting customers), but your average engineer at a firm deserves a better incentive to produce quality work than "if you don't you will look bad." Sales commissions for engineers may sound weird, but I think if you remove the decades of context there's nothing crazy about the idea that if someone creates a feature that generates $6million for their company, they're entitled to a small slice of that $6million.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Bad advice. Let me just say that off the bat, before I explain why. One of the most infuriating things about companies is how slow they are when it comes to trusting people. (Actually, they're sluggish around all kinds of decisions. Try selling to the enterprise some time.) While companies do value initiative and curiosity in the abstract, the length of time (even in most startups) one has to spend at them is an order of magnitude longer than makes any sense at all. If you're 6 months old in a company, but your manager only gets to spend 5% of his time with you (which is more than you'll typically get) then, from his perspective, you've been there for 1.3 weeks. You just got there, in his view. This really sucks, because it means a lot of time is wasted on the pokey track by people who feel like they could be advancing a lot faster (and are right). Typically, it takes a couple years before you're allowed to show initiative or curiosity, or have opinions. The dues-paying period is a horrible waste of life, but that's how human organizations are. I don't think anyone has found a cure for it. Being that obnoxious junior programmer is actually a terrible career strategy. Gaining credibility is often more potent than learning; there are a zillion people more capable of doing the top jobs than hold them at a given time, but only a few people acquire the organizational trust. Credibility, not capability, is the limiting factor. Learning general-purpose skills can be more useful than climbing a ladder (it's transferrable to the next job) but you don't have to step on toes to do that; while learning about an organization is less important than having it learn to trust you. (If you fail and get fired; everything you learned about the organization is useless.) Now, the thing is that when a company is running well and there's plenty of work to do, the overperformer who is eagerly seeking work "above his grade" is tolerated. The problem is that, whenever things become a bit more uncertain or it becomes clear that not all peoples' ambitions will be satisfied, they're high-class trophy-fires with giant bulls'-eyes on their asses. They also tend to get flanked by same-rank colleagues; if there's some Little Eichmann out there who can gain managerial approval by showing you up as "distracted", then watch out. Remember that it will have nothing to do with actual performance, but perception, which is ruined by the above-grade work.
- yuhong 13y ago
  >Typically, it takes a couple years before you're allowed to show initiative or curiosity, or have opinions. The dues-paying period is a horrible waste of life, but that's how human organizations are. I don't think anyone has found a cure for it. Well I know where it probably comes from.
christopherslee 13y ago
Specifically on the developer side of things, it's good to ask questions, but if I can answer it with lmgtfy.com then I'm going to get annoyed pretty fast, especially if you're asking me questions every 5 minutes when you can spend a little bit of time doing some research yourself. It's very valuable to me to not have to spoon feed you answers all the time. That is not to say that there are problems that seniors shouldn't spend time mentoring junior folks on. In my experience though, some people never learned to do research on the internet in college, and almost want you to tell them how to write the code, line by line.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
  I tend to encourage my juniors to ask questions. But from time to time, I call them out when they didn't try to do any basic research. Like googling the problem or looking up docs. Some seem to lack good re/search skills. They don't know search operators (site, filetype, etc) or the importance of keywords (eg searching: "how to add something to thingomatic" vs "thingomatic add something"). It amazes me at the lack of proper researching skills a junior may have.
  - hfsktr 13y ago
    I know that when I started I couldn't even begin to search because I didn't know what I was trying to search for. Eventually you learn the keywords through some trial and error and experience. The other thing is knowing which sites are better quality. I don't have that many years under my belt but it's hit me a few times that if you can search things better than someone they seem to think you are smarter. Maybe more for the non-tech people.
- BurritoAlPastor 13y ago
  You suggest that it's important for junior tech professionals to try and answer their own questions with, e.g., Google. But I feel like every other month I see somebody talking about all the bad habits developed by people who trust W3Schools as a credible resource because they're highly ranked on Google. The junior professionals who most frequently need to find quick answers for straightforward questions are the same people who are the least well-equipped to identify which answers are credible and appropriate. It's a paradox of finding trustworthy information without consulting the only sources you know to be trustworthy, and as someone new to the field myself, I lose sleep over this stuff.
topbanana 13y ago
Just be sociable and network. Works at all levels, and in personal as well as professional pursuits. You don't need to be obnoxious or needy.
xsmasher 13y ago
This is one of those things that requires a balance. I do not want a junior asking me something that they could just as easily Google. I DO want them to ask me about some company- or domain- specific tech, so I can save them a day of research with a two-minute explanation. If I can unstick them when they are stuck, that's great. If they get stuck every fifth line of code, or on simple problems, that's terrible. The advice to listen more than you talk is excellent. Soak up information and then take questions offline. You don't want to be "that guy" who holds important high-level meeting with newbie questions, or derail a business discussion with questions about engineering trivia.
- d23 13y ago
  > If I can unstick them when they are stuck, that's great. If they get stuck every fifth line of code, or on simple problems, that's terrible. Couldn't have said it better myself. I give leeway to the new hires to learn the domain-specific stuff, but it becomes quickly obvious if they aren't picking up on the material. I had a guy not understand that "4883-381" would not be interpreted by Python as a string without the quotes after 8+ months of working with the language. At one point I caught him trying to put arguments outside of parenthesis. I realized he had basically been copying and pasting the entire time, banging his head against the wall until something worked. I almost went postal.
ColinDabritz 13y ago
Good article, I particularly noticed the "just to listen" in meetings bit. If you want to provide a lot of value in this role? Take good notes. What meeting, when, where, with who? Who is in person/remote? Write as fast as you can, capture "todos", "next steps", follow up items of all kinds, important decisions. After the meeting, email the participants with your notes. Put them in your document repository (wiki, sharepoint, SCM if you must). This way you provide value, people see you, and they see that you are paying attention. It also gives you good fodder to ask questions later, e.g. "What did XYZ term mean?", "Why was Laura asking about question Y?", "Did no one think of X, or was it obvious?" Taking good notes is an art, and it's easiest when you are "just" listening.
temuze 13y ago
Friendly tip: you may want to make the font a little darker on your blog! It's hard to read with that little contrast.

37 points by austinlyons 13y ago

krob 13y ago

You're Fired!!! LOL j/k

Being this guy is great fun, but honestly try avoid being obnoxious and /too/ needy. It's a great way to learn but its also a great way to find yourself out of a job, you need to get your work done and other people don't need the distractions. Learn as much as you can, but maintain a high level of respect for peoples time, including your own.

paulwithap 13y ago

You might want to consider a media query for that sidebar.

t1m 13y ago

Sometimes there is advice that seems wrong, but is actually really good advice. This isn't one of those times. The best advice for a young Jr anything is to do the job you were hired for exceedingly well. If the words obnoxious or needy are ever used in the same sentence as your name, you are doing something terribly wrong.

kazagistar 13y ago
The article actually supported its position with some degree of argumentation, while you just made a unfounded statement. Could you provide more details as to why you think the advice of this article is bad?
- ianstallings 13y ago
  Do you really need explanation as to why you shouldn't be needy and obnoxious? I find it hard to believe that you need some empirical evidence to prove this point.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    Let's take two people. Person X has never been regarded as needy or obnoxious and is generally really great to be around. He is a junior engineer and spends a lot of time making sure everyone around him is as happy as possible by making sure he always completes anything assigned to him quickly. Person Y is generally regarded well, but people expect him to always ask them questions so they tend to avoid him. He's often referred to as needy and sometimes even as obnoxious. If you're doing something he doesn't know about, expect him to be hovering around trying to work out what you're doing and why. What happens if person X and Y stay at a big corporation? Person X is probably going to be promoted up a few rungs. If he is lucky he will eventually end up high in the organization. If he is unlucky or too nice, he will end up stuck in a dead end job doing the work of 5 people for the pay of 1 person. Person Y is probably going nowhere. What happens if X or Y decide to create a new startup? Person X only knows about engineering - and only small stuff, not the big picture. It's unlikely his startup would succeed. Person Y, however, has spend the last few years trying to understand everything about business/engineering/sales etc that he can get his hands on. His startup has far better odds. This is what the article is arguing. I find it hard to believe you DON'T need some evidence to assume person Y is always wrong. I've been person X before - I would not recommend it. Always make sure you understand the reasons behind anything you are doing, never just 'follow orders' or do anything you don't understand. Life is too short.

joeframbach 13y ago

How about some contrast on this page? I used the chrome inspector to change the font color to black.

evmar 13y ago
I opened the comments here to see if anyone else had this problem. I made a Chrome extension that fixes it. Unlike tools like readability, all it does is take the thing you click on and change it into a large black-on-white font. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-fix/ofafkoecdjghmmjibcbelabbllfoeidb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-fix/ofafkoecd...

centrinoblue 13y ago

Personally if you are a jr programmer on one of my teams I would be unimpressed if you felt the need to aggressively pursue external meetings so you could just sit and listen, or spend work time meeting with the CFO to discuss how much we pay the auditors. Get to work, it's what you're being paid for. Don't forget that.

michaelochurch 13y ago
Get to work, it's what you're being paid for. Don't forget that. You sound incredibly entitled. While I agree that it's strategically a bad idea for him to go outside of his job description, why is it not "work" for him to want to know how the company runs? He's not looking to upset apple carts; he just wants to know how the decisions are made. Anyway, I hate this attitude you're showing. I'm not downvoting you, because people need to see that your attitude exists (as it's fairly prevalent) so it shouldn't be buried, but I find it this "fuck you, I'm the boss" attitude revolting.
- bitwize 13y ago
  Objecting to his attitude is above your pay grade, son.
- centrinoblue 13y ago
  I was a jr programmer once as well and I was curious and engaged people outside my direct work assignments but was always focused on making sure the work I was expected to do got done. More than enough time is wasted in project specific meetings so actively looking to sit in on unrelated meetings screams 'wasted time'. I'm not 'entitled' I'm speaking as someone under pressure to deliver software projects and to explain why they may be late or off course. If I have a jr programmer who is constantly away trying to understand how to run a business so he/she can fly the coup to start their own company then I'm not going to be impressed with said programmer. I enjoy working with people who are creative, engaged, and curious -- but also focused. Call it what you will.
  - kazagistar 13y ago

mu_killnine 13y ago

I understand where the author is coming from, but your curiosity needs to be organic and come from a real yearning to understand the business. I can see a lot of young engineers thinking they need to voraciously hunt down random higher-ups 'just because'. There's no shortage of things to learn in an organization and sometimes it's best to start in an area closer to you (see: with Sr. Engineers).

div 13y ago
False dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to sponge up knowledge from Sr. Engineers, while picking up different bits of knowledge from people who are in different roles altogether.

angersock 13y ago

So, there's a really interesting thing here, right? On the engineering side of things, it's often that things are hard but tractable--there is a clear set of goals that need to be accomplished, and at least a somewhat reasonable dependency graph of objectives that can be inferred to reach those goals. Over in sales and business, though? OH GOD everything's on fire--we have too many customers and not enough product, too few customers and too much engineering, a great opportunity for a strategic partnership, wait no that isn't panning out, nobody likes us fuck fuck fuck what do we do. (And from what I've observed of sales and business folks, this sort of bipolar behavior is totally expected. They are in a deep, ongoing, and tumultuous relationship with your product and your customers, and things get crazy sometimes.) As a junior engineer it can be really disheartening to learn that your company has few customers and the ones you do have hate your product for reason X (where X probably is nothing you have direct control over). Especially in a small company, business is a howling vortex of crazy that honestly as a junior engineer you probably don't have the experience to make sense of. One of the most poignant lessons from Soul of a New Machine was that the Eagle team pulled off so much awesome work precisely because they were insulated from the rest of the company and allowed to focus on the engineering.

jmduke 13y ago
I think a really good depiction of this struggle is Mad Men, surprisingly enough. You've got two factions of symbiotic employees who have more or less differing objectives. (Thankfully, I haven't had to work with any Pete Campbells.) A lot of this has to do with the way we incentivize/disincentivize various business roles. At your average company, an engineer/developer's #1 goal is "don't fuck up", meaning: take time and caution when developing and releasing things and don't do anything that could break anything (both in the sense of 'throw an error' and 'cause a customer to leave'. The latter is especially important in the enterprise space, where a single customer can be worth more than 10% of your revenues and act as a marketing engine through whitepapers and referrals.) On the other side of things, sales folks are usually incentivized to sell, sell, sell. They get paid to sell things, so any behavior that doesn't maximize their ability to increase their commission is actively disadvantageous to them. Usually, this incurs a sort of long-term blindness: by devoting three developers to feature ABC for a week and making $X, you take them away from perhaps a bigger feature that might make the company $X * 10. Plus, by making time-sensitive promises to clients/customers you limit the engineer's ability to not fuck up. The answer to this isn't "sales people are bad and should be more honest" or "engineers should be better at what they do". There are a lot of different strategies: at smaller companies, you'll see ideals like uniting sales and marketing ("marketing" not in the sense of advertising, but in the sense of product development) but the biggest successes I've seen have revolved around shifting those incentives: commissions are simple and easy to tinker with (there's a lot of new interesting literature about 'recurring commissions' which reward salespeople for longer-lasting customers), but your average engineer at a firm deserves a better incentive to produce quality work than "if you don't you will look bad." Sales commissions for engineers may sound weird, but I think if you remove the decades of context there's nothing crazy about the idea that if someone creates a feature that generates $6million for their company, they're entitled to a small slice of that $6million.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Bad advice. Let me just say that off the bat, before I explain why. One of the most infuriating things about companies is how slow they are when it comes to trusting people. (Actually, they're sluggish around all kinds of decisions. Try selling to the enterprise some time.) While companies do value initiative and curiosity in the abstract, the length of time (even in most startups) one has to spend at them is an order of magnitude longer than makes any sense at all. If you're 6 months old in a company, but your manager only gets to spend 5% of his time with you (which is more than you'll typically get) then, from his perspective, you've been there for 1.3 weeks. You just got there, in his view. This really sucks, because it means a lot of time is wasted on the pokey track by people who feel like they could be advancing a lot faster (and are right). Typically, it takes a couple years before you're allowed to show initiative or curiosity, or have opinions. The dues-paying period is a horrible waste of life, but that's how human organizations are. I don't think anyone has found a cure for it. Being that obnoxious junior programmer is actually a terrible career strategy. Gaining credibility is often more potent than learning; there are a zillion people more capable of doing the top jobs than hold them at a given time, but only a few people acquire the organizational trust. Credibility, not capability, is the limiting factor. Learning general-purpose skills can be more useful than climbing a ladder (it's transferrable to the next job) but you don't have to step on toes to do that; while learning about an organization is less important than having it learn to trust you. (If you fail and get fired; everything you learned about the organization is useless.) Now, the thing is that when a company is running well and there's plenty of work to do, the overperformer who is eagerly seeking work "above his grade" is tolerated. The problem is that, whenever things become a bit more uncertain or it becomes clear that not all peoples' ambitions will be satisfied, they're high-class trophy-fires with giant bulls'-eyes on their asses. They also tend to get flanked by same-rank colleagues; if there's some Little Eichmann out there who can gain managerial approval by showing you up as "distracted", then watch out. Remember that it will have nothing to do with actual performance, but perception, which is ruined by the above-grade work.

yuhong 13y ago
>Typically, it takes a couple years before you're allowed to show initiative or curiosity, or have opinions. The dues-paying period is a horrible waste of life, but that's how human organizations are. I don't think anyone has found a cure for it. Well I know where it probably comes from.

christopherslee 13y ago

Specifically on the developer side of things, it's good to ask questions, but if I can answer it with lmgtfy.com then I'm going to get annoyed pretty fast, especially if you're asking me questions every 5 minutes when you can spend a little bit of time doing some research yourself. It's very valuable to me to not have to spoon feed you answers all the time. That is not to say that there are problems that seniors shouldn't spend time mentoring junior folks on. In my experience though, some people never learned to do research on the internet in college, and almost want you to tell them how to write the code, line by line.

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
I tend to encourage my juniors to ask questions. But from time to time, I call them out when they didn't try to do any basic research. Like googling the problem or looking up docs. Some seem to lack good re/search skills. They don't know search operators (site, filetype, etc) or the importance of keywords (eg searching: "how to add something to thingomatic" vs "thingomatic add something"). It amazes me at the lack of proper researching skills a junior may have.
- hfsktr 13y ago
  I know that when I started I couldn't even begin to search because I didn't know what I was trying to search for. Eventually you learn the keywords through some trial and error and experience. The other thing is knowing which sites are better quality. I don't have that many years under my belt but it's hit me a few times that if you can search things better than someone they seem to think you are smarter. Maybe more for the non-tech people.
BurritoAlPastor 13y ago
You suggest that it's important for junior tech professionals to try and answer their own questions with, e.g., Google. But I feel like every other month I see somebody talking about all the bad habits developed by people who trust W3Schools as a credible resource because they're highly ranked on Google. The junior professionals who most frequently need to find quick answers for straightforward questions are the same people who are the least well-equipped to identify which answers are credible and appropriate. It's a paradox of finding trustworthy information without consulting the only sources you know to be trustworthy, and as someone new to the field myself, I lose sleep over this stuff.

topbanana 13y ago

Just be sociable and network. Works at all levels, and in personal as well as professional pursuits. You don't need to be obnoxious or needy.

xsmasher 13y ago

This is one of those things that requires a balance. I do not want a junior asking me something that they could just as easily Google. I DO want them to ask me about some company- or domain- specific tech, so I can save them a day of research with a two-minute explanation. If I can unstick them when they are stuck, that's great. If they get stuck every fifth line of code, or on simple problems, that's terrible. The advice to listen more than you talk is excellent. Soak up information and then take questions offline. You don't want to be "that guy" who holds important high-level meeting with newbie questions, or derail a business discussion with questions about engineering trivia.

d23 13y ago
> If I can unstick them when they are stuck, that's great. If they get stuck every fifth line of code, or on simple problems, that's terrible. Couldn't have said it better myself. I give leeway to the new hires to learn the domain-specific stuff, but it becomes quickly obvious if they aren't picking up on the material. I had a guy not understand that "4883-381" would not be interpreted by Python as a string without the quotes after 8+ months of working with the language. At one point I caught him trying to put arguments outside of parenthesis. I realized he had basically been copying and pasting the entire time, banging his head against the wall until something worked. I almost went postal.

ColinDabritz 13y ago

Good article, I particularly noticed the "just to listen" in meetings bit. If you want to provide a lot of value in this role? Take good notes. What meeting, when, where, with who? Who is in person/remote? Write as fast as you can, capture "todos", "next steps", follow up items of all kinds, important decisions. After the meeting, email the participants with your notes. Put them in your document repository (wiki, sharepoint, SCM if you must). This way you provide value, people see you, and they see that you are paying attention. It also gives you good fodder to ask questions later, e.g. "What did XYZ term mean?", "Why was Laura asking about question Y?", "Did no one think of X, or was it obvious?" Taking good notes is an art, and it's easiest when you are "just" listening.

temuze 13y ago

Friendly tip: you may want to make the font a little darker on your blog! It's hard to read with that little contrast.