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michaelrpeskinHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I was just talking about this idea with my wife

I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff). One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experience at another company, so he's not totally new. When I give him work, he gets stuck (it's R&D after all), and blames the library or the API or things like that. It's like the "no there's not a bug in the compiler meme". I'll take a good chunk of my day and pair with him to show him how to get around the problems, and it seems like he gets it, and then the next week when we sync up, he's back to blaming the tools. My wife's opinion is that it just take a LONG time to learn that you're usually the one who's wrong, not the tools. And she pointed out that we both spent about 5 years in grad school. …

Original discussionFast Crimes at Lambda School332 source comments · at import
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duxupHN

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress on what was a fairly elementary task than she did. We just kept trying ... kept our hands on the keyboard and came up with new things to try. We were no less frustrated too. Now there's more to it than just typing like coming up with those ideas / thinking it through, but the grit to do that is not something many people have just to start. Amusingly that seems to be a problem with seasoned programmers too. I work with some good guys who do their job well enough, but man they…

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auggieroseHN

Let's face it, most of the time the tools are the problem. That is why, whenever possible, I write my own tools.

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darkersideHN

He's not going to recognize the pattern on his own, no matter how obvious it is to you. You will do him a disservice if you don't pull him aside one day and say, hey I noticed you have a blind spot, and I need to point it out to you because it's going to be a limiter for your career unless you learn to deal with it.

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zenlikethatHN

Depends, I've come across plenty of people who act like what you say there, probably because it's a variant on the natural human tendency to cast blame on something besides ourselves, but... these days, things move so fast and we lean on so many amateur part-time projects, that bugs or shortcomings in the libraries etc. we use are not uncommon. The fine art is partially in knowing when it's extremely unlikely you hit a bug (gcc), vs. very likely (JS library with five stars on Github). But more importantly, in digging in -- to me, that's a big part that's missing in leveling up the next generation -- like hey, there's a stack trace, let's go look at the lines of code in our source libraries and think about them instead of flailing around randomly like most people seem to.

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nradovHN

Making people feel worthless isn't necessarily a bad approach. Break them down and then built them back up again into something better. But it can also fail catastrophically.

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