A common trait I see in new developers is the fear of looking dumb. I know because I had the same concern. I thought that seeming stupid would caus...
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I definently agree to this post, but unfortunately, I have different experiences. During my time I had an internship. Most of the time I asked for help, the senior developers found it quite annoying and told me to Google harder. Even if I struggled and were Completely stuck. They kept telling me to Google even 4x harder to find the solution. How can a completely newbie, fresh out from the school expect to have any experience?
I felt helpless, insecured and vurnable. Thank God we have Discord today. Without that chat program, I wouldn't even know what to do.
That sucks to hear. I think a lot of it stems from more senior developers forgetting what it's like to be completely new to the tech industry and being stumped by everything. They remember the times they were able to get themselves unstuck via Google and believe that they've been able to do it on their own all the time.
The ironic thing is that the information you find from Google is usually blog posts written by people who took the time to carefully explain their understanding and give back to the community. If every developer's answer was just "Google it" instead of trying to give back, there would be no information for which to "Google".
Thank you for your support! I wish more senior developers would think like you. It would make the world a better place ❤️❤️
Ask questions is certainly a great thing, but it’s just the first part...the luck is also finding the person who answers with details, that is willing to spend 10 minutes to pass the right information, and that particularly has the ethic and empathy to take care about knowledge transfer.
That's a good point. Finding those people can definitely be a struggle. I was fortunate enough to get an "onboarding mentor" when I joined the company I work for now. He answered all my questions, no matter how seemingly stupid, and even paired with me for multiple hours each week for the first couple weeks of my onboarding.
Looking back now, I realize how not-normal that is. I wish more companies used a similar Buddy-System for onboarding new engineers.
Hi Sun-Li, During my first web development internship, I felt really dumb at the office. My mentor was right opposite from where my work table was. During the first week or 2, I asked him a lot of questions, days went by and I realized I've been asking too much help, then I stopped asking him and I used to spend hours googling the issues that I was stuck in. A few days later, He came to my table and said, 'Look, man, please don't hesitate to ask me questions. I don't want you getting stuck in the problem for hours or even days. Just ask me. To be honest, I am flattered when you ask me.' And I was really happy to hear that. 😌
Happy to hear you have a fantastic mentor. Wish I also had one as you.
That's awesome! We definitely need more folks like him in the tech industry.
We should help people to understand that, by asking questions, both the asked and the "teacher" learn.
And the teacher is the one who learns the most, because the amount of knowledge needed to explain something is way bigger than for juste using it.
I've run into the exact opposite problem :-( I've offered over and over to help save someone time on areas I've wrestled with or am advanced in. Inevitably I find they go and do their own thing. I partially blame myself for being too enthusiastic and giving too much technical details, but a large portion of it is the culture which has no real technical leads and has lots of silos. This results in a lot of parallel effort on similar tasks. Not sure what else I can do to help that beyond being approachable, offering, and sharing just the asked for minimum to help solve a pain point.
It's really hard to not go into more detail on topics I'm so passionate about and limit my help surely to solving one pain point for someone. I just like to make some inroads on this.
Yeah that's true. People approach problem solving in different ways. I personally like to seek feedback and advice from those who are more senior than me as they tend to have much better insights.
But I've also seen people who prefer to struggle on their own and "carve their own path" so to speak. That's certainly a way to learn as well. What worries me about that is the lack of accountability and feedback. It can lead to entrenched mentalities and bad habits.
In the end, I personally wouldn't worry too much about people not taking your advice. If you're especially advanced in a given field, many people would benefit from your experience. Whether or not they choose to accept your help is up to them.
Great article! I learned from it a lot. The lesson is "don't pretend you know it all when you don't". Every one started from the egg and sperm.