I’ve seen a lot of older programmers. They can wind up working as a team of one because they’re productive enough to do the work of an entire team.
I’ve seen this a lot. Hire older dev. Older dev has decades of experience. Older dev creates new product from scratch in a couple weeks.
Another issue is that mentoring is focused on junior devs by senior (6-8 years of experience) devs. So you’re less likely to have a senior dev (6-8 years experience) mentored by a dev with 20 years experience.
I’m kind of in this boat. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now (jeez). Mentoring a dev with 6 to 8 years experience is a pain in the butt (yes. I know. Not all of you).
While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. So I’ll give them that as a starting point and tell them how I’d approach the solving the problem. But they get frustrated that I didn’t solve their problem immediately. That I can’t point them at a blog post of Stack Overflow answer.
But a dev with 1 to 3 years experience? They’ll take that non-answer and run with it.
And I get it. The 1 to 3 probably has 1 maybe 2 tasks they’re working on. The 6 to 10 (to 15) has probably a half dozen things they’ve got to keep track of. Researching is probably pretty low on their list.
I'm working with a junior dev now and the phrase that I keep repeating is "slow the fuck down". He's completely frantic with the copy and paste. I'm watch him google something, click the first link, paste the code into his project, and when it doesn't work he's on to the next link, paste, repeat. He doesn't even back out the changes he made the first time that didn't work.
I spent hours fixing his code and hand it back to him and it's broken again in a week.
I had to wash my hands of it. The only advice he's getting out of me now is to follow a single tutorial all the way through until he gets that one tutorial working and then compare the tutorial to his code. I'll answer specific questions, but I'm not going to try to mentor him until he's ready to receive the wisdom.
This seems to be what modern software development has degenerated into. In the future, it'll be monkeys playing roulette with Github copilot until something compiles/executes.
No, it's not. They're just inexperienced and it will stop/become more thoughtful as they're gaining experience and learn how the pieces actually fit together.
The reality is that half of the tutorials and answers you can find won't work. Either because they're doing something entirely different or because they're for a tool/framework that's deprecated the functionality.
A beginner won't be able to tell this simply because none of the pieces are known to them.
When a person with more experience finds these tutorials they'll likely know within seconds if a given answer or tutorial is even remotely applicabe, which enables them to be much more thoughtful about what to do.
You'll potentially waste weeks on trivial tasks if you're hellbent on actually fully understanding something right at the start, and if the beginner does this the more experienced ppl will complain how inapt they're.
Honestly, you both just sound like toxic people in that regard and should not be allowed to work with total beginners. Which is fine, but the issue really isn't with the pupil that's just clueless. They need somebody to give them a tutorial and guide which is applicable and they'll learn how that piece works, now keep repeating that until they've got a basic understanding of the system and only then can they work on their own
That sucks. I wish I could say I’ve never had one of these. And luckily I haven’t had one go as badly as yours. The main one I recall is when I had a good manager at the time, and he noticed the amount of time I was spending with the junior. So my manager took it over until they got to more meaty issues that required discussions with me.
While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question.
The same. Especially under pressure. Which makes it virtually impossible for me to pass an oral technical interview.
Agree completely. Reach out to prior managers that you respected and would want to work with again. In the past decade, I’ve worked with the same manager across 3 different companies. All without a loop.
I have 20 yoe but happy to be mentored by someone with much less. There is too much to learn out there, so good chance the less experienced engineer can help me too.
It's crazy. I sometimes get the itch to learn a new language like Rust, but I haven't even come close to reaching the bottom of all the languages I already know. They are inventing new things faster than anyone can acquire them.
To add it's not just languages. I was once assigned to teach Cognos a BI tool that's been around a while. I was given the instructor's manuals to go through. It was then I realised how incredible sophisticated the software was and I also realised most people didn't even use 50% of the software's capabilities. I have found the same with text editors and IDEs. You can use an editor for five years and still continue to discover new features.
I have been programming for over 30 years now, and one thing I consider myself an expert in is bash... hell: the (original) author of bash is someone I have known well and used to work for, and he considers me an expert in bash (which is probably another example of this in and of itself), and I once spent a couple months writing my own bash-compatible shell replacement for various reasons with him on the sidelines cheering me on.
Well: I have recently been teaching programming to a 10-year old kid, and this morning he told me about the syntax {X..Y}, which expands to the range of characters between X and Y. I have likely typed {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} a thousand times and now I know you can write {0..9}. I was floored and have it on my todo list tomorrow to see if that is a new feature or if I simply somehow missed it in the man page--which I thought I had carefully read multiple times and which I additionally have skimmed many times--consistently for decades :(.
This. Completely. I have 38 yoe but I still encounter young people with fresh ideas. Keep that open mind. I have met some old engineers that turned into grumps (don't be one of them) but most of the older technical people I work with regularly find joy, both in their work, and through their coworkers.
I’ve seen this a lot. Hire older dev. Older dev has decades of experience. Older dev creates new product from scratch in a couple weeks.
Another issue is that mentoring is focused on junior devs by senior (6-8 years of experience) devs. So you’re less likely to have a senior dev (6-8 years experience) mentored by a dev with 20 years experience.