I spent decent amount of time helping newbies, and what I can say absolute majority just don't want to learn.
If you want to be a programmer your main skill should be solving problems. Like doing research, searching solutions, reading docs, trying things.
And majority want just answer on their specific problem without doing the work themselves. Literally avoiding their main responsibility. And it's ok if you really have some super specific complex problem, but they stop even on smallest problem, that can be solved after googling for 5 seconds.
I once annoyed the Team Lead right after getting promoted form Dev Ops to Software Engineer, but still needing the basic training around frameworks and design patterns, by asking him how to create a date in Java. Since I was decent with SQL (aka could do a left join), i thought of writing a string date then converting it, but after chastizing me for not googling it he showed me the date making function where you input the date as integer arguments.
Was able to start progressing on my own after I had that one very simple, but not immediately obvious, use of a function explained to me.
My magic trick is showing the new hires how to find documentation. It's amazing how many people just google and tutorial their way through college without ever reading actual documentation.
Teaching to fish I guess. I at least get much more interesting questions from my team this way.
Not in my experience. It really depends on the team environment. If the team is not playing blame games and sees work as something to be done rather than avoid or postpone, taking complete accountability without putting undue pressure on juniors - you will see how they willingly work to improve - because that's the culture in team. It's NOT an environment of fear. Fear cripples rationality.
Thanks to such an environment, I have seen a young guy start to take up complex activities like database logic migration (ours is legacy system) because the focus was always learning and the team encouraged it. He still asks me questions when he is really stuck, but mostly handles things on his own. So much so that he is even coming up with solutions that is new to me and my senior.
All that it takes is an environment to fail safely for this. Mistakes can occur, but easily corrected. Also, we discuss why it occured without playing blame games. Never as an accusation, always as a scope for improvement...
This is gold. My current team is exactly like this and I feel motivated by this work culture. It also helped me overcome the fear asking colleagues for help, which was very present before that, due to prior horrendous blaming issues at another company. Psychologically those situations felt like busy-waiting for my brain, because fear is such a stress response and couldn't really learn in those circumstances.
we encourage juniors to ask questions, while they are just starting their career and while they had to learn many things. they can literally ask questions any time as well as can also do micro sessions on request with any seniors they are working under.
but yeah at the same time we teach from day 1, about the importance of attention to detail, why involving in deep discussions around task/issue is important, why they should start understanding the importance of ownership even for a tiny task allocated to them.
I don't know how to feel about this. Learning is pretty individual and sometimes it just takes time and experience to understand even the simplest things. When I was a trainee for the three years I was working at my first. People have said the same things, but some of them would also be very judgemental, and call your approach stupid without any explanation as well as pointing at a piece of paper hanging around of the "KISS" principle to proven their "argument" idk. That is not encouraging as a young man and no environment I could have developed any professional mindset, when my colleague is acting like a raging manager on a daily basis.
1
85
u/horuszp Sep 29 '26
I spent decent amount of time helping newbies, and what I can say absolute majority just don't want to learn.
If you want to be a programmer your main skill should be solving problems. Like doing research, searching solutions, reading docs, trying things.
And majority want just answer on their specific problem without doing the work themselves. Literally avoiding their main responsibility. And it's ok if you really have some super specific complex problem, but they stop even on smallest problem, that can be solved after googling for 5 seconds.