Hacker News Reader

Comment by 38 | Hacker News Reader

> He would not crowd them or railroad them, but let them take the time to learn whilst carefully crafting moments of insight and learning, often as Socratic questions, what ifs, how elses.

I do not like people who do this. just tell me the answer. this is such a gigantic waste of everyone's time. you figured something out months/years ago, great for you. give it to me NOW, so I can get on with my day. if we BOTH run into something unknown, we can tackle it together. but dont force me to go through the same painful learning process you went through. YOU suffered, because at the time no one knew how to do whatever it was. now that someone knows (you), your job should be to spread that knowledge across the business as quickly as possible, not hoard it to yourself until someone is deemed "worthy" of knowing it.

View on HN

You are thinking of something different than this is describing.

Your situation is a waste of time where no one grows. The article is describing growing skills which is a net productivity benefit.

Quite simply, no.

You're not going to learn from being handed an answer on a silver platter.

You'll implement it, get on with your day, and not at all think about why the answer is what it is.

> You'll implement it, get on with your day, and not at all think about why the answer is what it is.

this is an incorrect assumption. some people (like me) have an analytical mind. if I am given an answer, I will usually reverse it back to the question, so that I understand how it came about. or I will ask follow up questions until I have that understanding.

all this method is doing is forcing multiple people to go through the discovery process, when all that should be needed is for one person to do so. its a waste of business resources. person A can share with person B, then person B can go on to make their own discoveries. we dont need to force every employee to discover EVERYTHING on their own. thats just a huge waste of time. it would be like forcing everyone to discover Pythagorean theorem on their own, instead of giving them that tool and letting them use it to create other stuff.

Just because you're a special snowflake (you aren't, but keep believing it if it works for you) doesn't mean that the discovery process isn't the best approach for teaching most people things. Hearing or reading something is the lowest form of learning and generally results in the lowest retention.

> thats just a huge waste of time.

Instilling knowledge and discovery rather than rote completion of work based on others' ideas is far from a "waste of time" for people who actually understand the learning process. Growth is generally desired in the business world, even if it results in a short term hit.

> Just because you're a special snowflake (you aren't, but keep believing it if it works for you)

Someone who makes a comment like this, isn't arguing in good faith, or even intelligently. So I will give this comment the respect it deserves: none.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't cross into personal attack or otherwise break the site guidelines. We had to ask you this once already recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36274535) and you've been doing it elsewhere too, unfortunately. That's not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've worked with several types of people. For me, the best mentors were the ones who would answer questions I had with the full answer, often with details. Then they got on with what they were doing while I went back to my desk and tried to understand/retain some of what they told me.

I'd personally find someone shadowing me and asking questions super annoying.

I don't think this would work with all teams, the takeaway I got from the article is about artificial metrics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com