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Comment by leibnizwasright | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you, it is important to let the person fail and learn. But sometimes, this can be costly and fixing it may be hard.

My approach is to ask the person question and understand what is the objective trying to be achieved, and hope with the answers given, the person realize it is doing a mistake.

I also hope that the person respect my experience and is able to learn from my mistakes and do not need to do the same mistakes in order to learn.

But I do not always succeeds in these endeavors. Once a colleague was developing some page objects for Selenium tests and creating classes with only one attribute, which was the full URL of the page. Of course tests would not word when executed in several environments and to have this files were useless. But to fix exactly this, I saw it required more knowledge on OO design than a simple talk could give.

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The problem with Socratic questioning is that it assumes a teacher-student type of relationship, or at least a superior-subordinate one.

If that's not the case, and once someone recognizes what it is that you're doing, they may become rightly offended at the arrogance you're displaying by choosing the teacher role for yourself.

“Socratic questioning” implies only a collegial relationship. If you cannot walk over to a colleague and ask them questions about their work without them getting offended, your office politics are extremely unhealthy.

Or else you are probably wearing an expression of disapproval when you ask them these questions. If you go in with an honest “I want to learn and understand” stance, normal people will generally be happy to answer.

Of course you can and should always ask your colleagues questions in order to understand their point of view and way of thinking.

But that's not what Socratic questioning is. It is specifically when you ask pointed questions, pretending that you don't know the answer already, in order to make the student work out the line of thinking herself, or perhaps force her to flesh out her thinking more completely.

It's more about making the askee think than transferring information. As such, trying to mask that behind "I'm just asking questions" is rude.

I have the understanding from experience that people will always give a reason for doing something that I could not imagine.

So 1st, make questions, understand what is the objective with that code you see on screen. 2nd, make more questions too see if other use cases were considered.

3rd, there are best practices, literature that provide a common way of working, discuss how to apply this.

There are no ways of understanding without making questions.

On this specific case, besides the lack of OO design knowledge, there were also a misunderstand on the page object pattern , how web apps are build and what is the web app and what is part of the browser.

And this is why I also talk with my team on my ideas to develop something before or while developing it. It should not be a surprise, no matter how nice and commented the code is.

You can go into a session like this with your mind made up and still legitimately ask these questions. This questioning should hopefully show the other party why they are wrong or show you why they are correct. Either is a great outcome and the questions are the same either way.

>> But to fix exactly this, I saw it required more knowledge on OO design than a simple talk could give.

What do you do in this situation?

I think that 1st we have to understand that to solve this, every solution is slow. 1st I send some links on OO designs and SOLID principles. 2nd I made a few comments on the code review that tacked more real problem like maintenance, change of URL since we were still in development phase and other pages and dialogs that do not have a URL and how this mixed with the rest that have. 3rd was to have design discussion pior development - which we did not have. For last, some hours during week with the whole team to talk on design and coding, in order to have evryone on a similar level of knowledge.

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