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Comment by justrudd | Hacker News Reader

I’m kind of in this boat. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now (jeez). Mentoring a dev with 6 to 8 years experience is a pain in the butt (yes. I know. Not all of you).

While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. So I’ll give them that as a starting point and tell them how I’d approach the solving the problem. But they get frustrated that I didn’t solve their problem immediately. That I can’t point them at a blog post of Stack Overflow answer.

But a dev with 1 to 3 years experience? They’ll take that non-answer and run with it.

And I get it. The 1 to 3 probably has 1 maybe 2 tasks they’re working on. The 6 to 10 (to 15) has probably a half dozen things they’ve got to keep track of. Researching is probably pretty low on their list.

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I'm working with a junior dev now and the phrase that I keep repeating is "slow the fuck down". He's completely frantic with the copy and paste. I'm watch him google something, click the first link, paste the code into his project, and when it doesn't work he's on to the next link, paste, repeat. He doesn't even back out the changes he made the first time that didn't work.

I spent hours fixing his code and hand it back to him and it's broken again in a week.

I had to wash my hands of it. The only advice he's getting out of me now is to follow a single tutorial all the way through until he gets that one tutorial working and then compare the tutorial to his code. I'll answer specific questions, but I'm not going to try to mentor him until he's ready to receive the wisdom.

That sucks. I wish I could say I’ve never had one of these. And luckily I haven’t had one go as badly as yours. The main one I recall is when I had a good manager at the time, and he noticed the amount of time I was spending with the junior. So my manager took it over until they got to more meaty issues that required discussions with me.

This seems to be what modern software development has degenerated into. In the future, it'll be monkeys playing roulette with Github copilot until something compiles/executes.

No, it's not. They're just inexperienced and it will stop/become more thoughtful as they're gaining experience and learn how the pieces actually fit together.

The reality is that half of the tutorials and answers you can find won't work. Either because they're doing something entirely different or because they're for a tool/framework that's deprecated the functionality.

A beginner won't be able to tell this simply because none of the pieces are known to them.

When a person with more experience finds these tutorials they'll likely know within seconds if a given answer or tutorial is even remotely applicabe, which enables them to be much more thoughtful about what to do.

You'll potentially waste weeks on trivial tasks if you're hellbent on actually fully understanding something right at the start, and if the beginner does this the more experienced ppl will complain how inapt they're.

Honestly, you both just sound like toxic people in that regard and should not be allowed to work with total beginners. Which is fine, but the issue really isn't with the pupil that's just clueless. They need somebody to give them a tutorial and guide which is applicable and they'll learn how that piece works, now keep repeating that until they've got a basic understanding of the system and only then can they work on their own

While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question.

The same. Especially under pressure. Which makes it virtually impossible for me to pass an oral technical interview.

If you've done good work for a few decades, you have tons of former coworkers willing to hire you.

Agree completely. Reach out to prior managers that you respected and would want to work with again. In the past decade, I’ve worked with the same manager across 3 different companies. All without a loop.

Yes, they refer me to their corporate recruiter and what happens next is "sorry, that's how the process is, we can't change it" :-)

Interesting.. do you have pair programming sessions in your company ? to accelerate routine problem solving ?

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