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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

A mentor who wouldn't give me answers.

When I needed to make SunOS give me tty key stroke input 1 character at a time, he refused to tell me what he already knew and just pointed me at some "areas to look into". Knowing about kernel tty drivers and terminals and line buffering didn't make me a better programmer, but it didn't hurt. Knowing my way around a variety of different documentation at many different levels of the systems I was working on helped make me a better programmer, and my mentor refusing to just answer my questions was a major factor in that. It also forced me to understand much more of the systems I was working on, rather than just how to use some piece of convenient API.

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I'm curious if you've ultimately found your mentor's behavior to be a net positive, or net negative, in your career.

One of the engineers under me often expresses his discontent that I won't give him answers, either. I think he's more than able to get to those answers on his own, and that the value he'll derive from learning how to learn is vastly greater than the value of being able to complete his work faster. On the other hand, he's given me the feedback that the method is excessively socratic at best, and flat-out frustrating at worst.

I think you have to strike a balance. In reality no one's knowledge came entirely from their own work and asking the right questions. Documentation is just one developer telling another how things work. Should we erase all docs?

You must sometimes give the answer.

It was absolutely a net positive, by a huge margin.

> he's given me the feedback that the method is excessively socratic at best, and flat-out frustrating at worst.

Yep, exactly how I felt in 1987. It was totally worth it, viewed from the present day.

My first boss out of college (a long time ago) was like this. I'd ask him, "how do I do X?" and he'd reply "man <some-command-useful-to-do-X>". I thought it was annoying, but got it a few years later :) I find myself being the same way these days when it comes to mentoring. Others will help a struggling person, but as long as they aren't crazy frustrated it is destroying their motivation too much, and as long as biz needs aren't being too disrupted, I generally have no desire to help. Why would I deprive them of deeper learning by helping them? ;)

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