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ryandrakeHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Maybe I am showing my age, but one of the more frustrating parts of being a senior mentoring a …

… Maybe I am showing my age, but one of the more frustrating parts of being a senior mentoring a junior is when they come with a question or problem, and when I ask: “what does the official documentation say?” I get a blank stare. We have moved from consulting the primary source of information to using secondary sources (like O’Reilly, blogs and tutorials), now to tertiary sources like LLMs.

Original discussionThe Junior Hiring Crisis510 source comments · at import
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throwaway2037HN

> Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice Hot take: This reads like an old person looking down upon young people. Can you explain why it isn't? Else, this reads like: "When I was young, we worked hard and listened to our elders. These days, young people ignore our advice." Every time I see inter-generational commentary like this (which is inevitably from personal experience), I am immediately suspicious. I can assure you that when I was young, I did not listen to older people's advice and I tried to do everything my own way. Why would this be any different in the current generation? In my experience, it isn't. On a positive note: I can remember mentoring some young people and watching them comb through blogs to learn about programming. I am so old tha…

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HeyLaughingBoyHN

No. Just no. If I have a problem with a USB datastream, the last place I'm going to look is the official USB spec. I'll be buried for weeks. The information may be there, but it will take me so long to find it that it might as well not. The first place to look is a high quality source that has digested the official spec and regurgitated it into something more comprehensible. [shudder] the amount of life that I've wasted discussing the meaning of some random phrase in IEC-62304 is time I will never get back!

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wyclifHN

[Disclaimer: I'm a Gen Xer. Insert meme of Grandpa Simpson shouting at clouds.] I think this is undoubtedly true from my observations. Recently, I got together over drinks with a group of young devs (most around half my age) from another country I was visiting. One of the things I said, very casually, was, "Hey, don't sleep on good programming books. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. MIT Press. No Starch Press. Stuff like that." Well, you should've seen the looks on their faces. It was obvious that advice went over very poorly. "Ha, read books? That's hard. We'd rather just watch a YouTube video about how to make a JS dropdown menu." So yeah, I get that "showing my age" remark. Used to be the discipline in this industry is that you shouldn't ask a question of a senior before you'd read the documentation. If you had read the documentation, man pages, googled, etc., and still couldn't come …

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throwaway2037HN

I like your sentiment about "first principles" of documents -- go to the root source. But for most young technologists (myself included, long long ago), the official docs (man pages for POSIX, MSDN for Win32 etc.) are way too complex. For years, when I was in university, I tried to grasp GUI programming by writing C and using the Win32 API. It was insane, and I did little more than type in code from a "big book of Win32 programming". Only when I finally tried Qt with C++ did the door of understanding finally open. Why? It was the number of simple examples that Qt docs provided they really helped me understand GUI (event-driven) programming. Another 10 years went by when I knew enough about Win32 that I was able to write small, but useful GUIs in pure C using the Win32 API. The very reason that StackOverflow was so popular: People read the official docs and still don't understand... so th…

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