Comment by gavman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavman | Hacker News Reader

This was so nice to read. I think back to my very first coding internship after my freshman year of college when I messed up big time. I made a bad mistake that ended up forcing my supervisor to put down everything he was working on for a full afternoon and do an emergency fix. I so vividly remember sitting down in his office, trying to just calm down and keep it together. He never got upset or annoyed (at least he never showed it), instead he listened to me explain what I had done, figured out what was wrong, showed me what my mistake was, fixed everything up, and calmly walked me through the entire process, turning it into a learning experience. At the end he asked me some questions to make sure I understood everything that happened and told me "everyone makes mistakes, don't sweat it, just make sure you learn from it" and that was that. I remember leaving his office that day thinking "if I ever make it to the point where I have my own interns, I'm going to do everything I can to support them and treat them as well as he treated me." A little kindness really does go a long way!

To follow up, have you had interns yet and how did you treat them?

I had an intern for the first time last summer! I tried my best to focus on being as encouraging as I could and helping him whenever he ran into trouble. He clearly was working very hard and doing his best, so I focused on being as supportive as possible and praising the work he did (which was very good!). If I'm being honest though, we was a really terrific intern and we never ran into a situation like I did, so I wouldn't say it was much of a test :)

Mistakes happen. I can deal with that.

People lying about their progress however, that is hard to deal with.

Having been in this situation and been supervisor to people in this situation, it's possible to not be lying but also to not have complete understood the task or have it mis-spec'd.

Having someone rip into for lying when the spec was terrible to begin with is massively discouraging and the OP lesson applies just the same there.

Oh no, absolutely. There is no doubt this happens in the majority of cases, so when two things don't pair up when you look at them you don't accuse people of lying. Of course this does land you in an incredibly tricky situation when you do find out there is a habit of systematic lying.

Thankfully that situation is resolved now, though it lasted for too long, and miraculously didn't fall off the cliff it teetered on.

when a supervisor gives a freshman work which can mess up erverything it is the supervisor's fault and not the fault of the freshman

Why do you need to assign blame?

My opinion is that trusting people and giving them responsibility is one of the best ways to let them learn and grow. The bigger the mistake, the bigger the lesson. As long as it is possible to recover, it's a calculated risk which may well be worth it.

Exactly! A sane supervisor should have put a rule that disallows deploying on Fridays. End of story.

Maybe he made the same promise you did back in the day?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com