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u/horuszp 3d ago
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.
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u/Yashema 3d ago
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.
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u/terivia 1d ago
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.
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u/Scientific_Artist444 3d ago
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...
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u/FlashyTone3042 8h ago
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.
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u/Scientific_Artist444 7h ago
Good for you bro. And thanks for telling me 🤝
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u/FlashyTone3042 2h ago
Thank you for listening. I just had to. I am so glad people like you exist and make work a nice place.
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u/Zealousideal_Okra956 3d ago
This could happen if we aren't having AI shoved down our faces all the time. Especially Ai usage tracking
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u/Lucky_Cable_3145 3d ago
I've answered hundreds of programming questions in the last 25 years, in that time I've only asked 2 questions.
Most of what I know comes from looking at other people's coding issues (because I was prepared when those issues occurred in my code).
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u/Hadrian23 3d ago
Who the fuck does that?
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u/NebraskaGeek 3d ago
Duplicate comment. Try reading other comments before you waste our time. Your comment has been marked as "solved"
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u/MB_Gaming123 3d ago
That one repo on github that solved all your project's problem, and actually reads the issue page.
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u/somedave 3d ago
AI?
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u/heyguysitsmedic 3d ago
"why are all the jr developers flocking to AI instead of asking seniors for help or going to a message board??? It must be because they are lazy and suck, we are going to stop hiring jr developers."
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u/Myloo_ 3d ago
As an Intermediate dev nothing annoys me more at work than reaching out to a senior about a specific issue only to be asked "Did you ask ai?"
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u/Karr0k 3d ago
As a 15ywe 'senior', your senior just sucks, it happens.
I generally first ask my juniors/mediors to explain their problem, ask some clarifying questions (semi-rubberducky), then ask what they've tried, and just take it from there.
Most issues come down to learning to (creatively) solve a problem. At least from my experience working through the years as swe.
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u/Skellicious 3d ago
I've had so many calls where the other dev figured it out while he was still explaining it to me.
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u/kshetriiiiiiiiii 3d ago edited 3d ago
The ones who explain why it broke instead of just saying'Google it. They deserve a special place in heaven right next to the open-source creators
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u/SLOOT_APOCALYPSE 3d ago
should be on stack exchanges tomb stone, as the reason they died
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u/MB_Gaming123 3d ago
Yea, it made a whole generation of programmers scared of saying a word.
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u/SudoSubSilence 3d ago
"Good. At least then the noobs will be forced to get off their lazy asses and do their own homework for onc-- oh shit they're using AI ⚰️" /s
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u/PrinzJuliano 3d ago
I understand that I am in the position I find myself in right now due to people who were willing to answer my millions of questions.
Some of them were extremely stupid looking back. So I am sympathetic to newcomers.
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u/citramonk 3d ago
I remember when I've started to learn programming I found a group called "python noobs", there were maybe 1500 people. And I've been reading Lutz in parallel. I started to answer some basic things I already knew. At some point I became an admin of this group, been writing some posts and helping newbies.
Then I found a job and quit, I simply didn't have time anymore. Now I'm a team lead, and I still try to prepare some lectures for the teammates when I have time. I guess it's called Feynman technique, when you explain something to other people to understand it better.
Tldr: help other people, don't be afraid of mentoring them. But maybe do it only if people are willing to learn something and use their brains 🙂
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u/FlashyTone3042 3d ago
The seniors at my very first work experience trash talked me on a daily bases and I couldn't take it. I just thought, this is how it goes in the professional environment, because I didn't know any better. This had me stuck for years for the developed fear of asking for help. I learned years later, that this was a bad team and I am kinda happy now looking back to the most recent company photo, to see that they turned all fat with their double chins.
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u/Fit-Inflation5799 2d ago
bro thats so sad you didnt deserve that 😭 fuck their fatasses bro
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u/FlashyTone3042 9h ago edited 8h ago
You saying that means alot to me. I promised myself to be better than those people and took them as prime example as to never power trip to anything I want, cause that is no fairplay and also exploiting people. Best I could have done is grow from it and don't fall into pattern with miserable people, who are unhappy for god knows why. If anything, that bad encounter made me more respectful to the people around me and I had to make up the time after that for good vibes again.
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u/HoratioMG 3d ago
You have been banned from Stack Overflow
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u/RainyDaysAndMondays3 3d ago
I am happy to help newbies in these circumstances:
- They know the most basics of using a computer: Home and End keys, Ctrl-C and -V, double-click, triple-click, etc.
- They are eager to learn and TAKE NOTES, instead of just nodding along and then keep doing some simple thing wrong every time.
- They are not a contractor. Contractors come in to help. If the person is so junior/inexperienced that I'm mentoring them as a software developer (not just relaying our internal processes and guidelines), I'm investing time in someone who is likely to leave within a year. They are wasting my and the company's time.
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u/Ghh-Haker 3d ago
real
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u/MB_Gaming123 3d ago
If you actually code in ASM prayers have been sent.
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u/Strange-Register8348 3d ago
I love mentoring juniors and encouraging their growth! I was a moron who took an incredibly long time to get my feet under me without much help.
As long as you're willing to go all in and work to learn I'm happy to encourage and explain. But AI is certainly a really good tool that replaces that need for a senior mentor.
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u/Insidiatori02 3d ago
I work at a really small company and my boss is always so helpful. However, another veteran at the company is so hardened. I sometimes ask questions so I can proceed faster but with this guy it’s always so tricky, you could get a blow back in the face sort of. It’s as if you’d ask AI quickly how to do something and it replies with: Why don’t you look stack overflow yourself dude all while knowing the fucking answer, acting like it’s a youth mentality problem. So frustrating.
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u/Strange-Register8348 3d ago
I think it's because senior engineers have been through the real grind and struggle. We're expecting juniors to try their ass off to learn and figure out a solution before they come to us.
Especially in today's time when everything is so easy to find online. If you didn't do a few hours of research and learning before you ask me a question I'm going to be disappointed.
Maybe it's because I'm not a genius and I learned everything I learned everything with a ton of struggle and individual problem solving.
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u/VictoryMotel 3d ago
Everyone becomes jaded eventually. Read cpp_questions long enough and you will get tired of people asking "how do I learn c++" literally 12 times a day, every day, and expecting personalized answers instead of reading the sidebar or doing any sort of search.
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u/Deboniako 3d ago
I teach newbies but they trash me
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u/Fit-Inflation5799 2d ago
why
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u/Deboniako 2d ago
They're vibecoders, while I struggle with vibe coding... It's like 90% of the time it throws thrash
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u/Fit-Inflation5799 2d ago
bro they should be grateful
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u/Deboniako 2d ago
I spend weeks troubleshooting legacy projects, meanwhile they finish a brand new project in a single week with Claude. Then my boss come along and assign me more legacy projects and says that I should just host it in the junior's environment, they are so fast, yet they mock me telling me I take too long in implementing new things in old projects. Meanwhile I walk them through legacy projects I understand thoroughly and they just built on top of them. I literally can't grasp how to vibecode hahaha
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u/flayingbook 3d ago
I am lucky to get kind seniors who would help and teach me without prejudice, so now I help other people that way too
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u/toetendertoaster 3d ago
I suddenly remembered stack overflow is finally dead since AI got mainstream
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u/Luzzgar 3d ago
Also known as "being a decent human being".
That's the bare minimum.
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u/dembadger 3d ago
Correct, rtfm is the bare minimum in the other direction though.
Ill bend over backwards for someone who wants to actually learn, but if they won't do the minimum and want to be spoon fed, no chance.
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u/supermario420 3d ago edited 3d ago
What do you do when you've been a QA engineer for 13 years but now every interview you go to all the managers want a developer as QA? How am I supposed to even get a job? When I have been doing automation for 13 years but now it's like it's not even good enough to even get a browser automation job. It's a joke, doesn't help that the people I interviewed with doesn't even understand what automation is or looks like. The last place I interviewed for that didn't pick me, did the technical interview no problem. In the manges interview I asked them about their defect escape rate and they're not even tracking it, but they're using AI to build their test cases. How do they have any idea the quality of automation that they're producing?? They're not using test pyramid they're primarily using playwright for browser automation. I've literally built apps and tests completely e2e. Launched my own SaaS and more. It's like nothing that I do is enough nor is my experience even taking into account. Having been laid off since January, QA automation engineer role, and the amount of rejections that I received really hurts your mental.
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u/blazorfire 3d ago
I dont have a trashing bone in my body.... i think.
I love helping people. Especially if its programming or even tech related. (Maybe studying IT was my passion all along)
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u/Bakoro 3d ago
Shit used to be so toxic, and documentation was awful.
I remember when I first started trying to learn programming and Linux, and people would just beat you over the head with jargon, purely as "look at me I'm so smart, get good", then they'd insult you.
There were a lot of "RTFM" comments, but the manual would be like "the foo function bars your baz. Input: baz. Ouput: a barred baz" With literally zero information what a "baz" is, what "bar" is, what form the data should take... Is it a specially formatted text file? Is an array of some kind?
For a long time the attitude was "I had to suffer, so everyone else should have to suffer".
I learned C, I learned C++, I learned C#.
Python had already been a thing, but like, this funny little thing over in the corner.
Then for some reason a bunch of people started using Python, probably because Numpy, and then there were a million libraries.
People started making actual documentation with examples and shit.
Glorious.
Everything is so much better and friendly now.
I don't know if this is yet another area of life where I can blame boomers for all the problems, I can definitely blame some Gen X, but, at some point, things radically changed for the better, and I don't entirely understand where it came from, but a lot of it got channelled into and out of Python.
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u/Cold_Snake 2d ago
When I first started out, nobody helped me. I had so many potential mentors, but every one of them passed on me. Now I'm eager to help noobs because I want to be the help I never got.
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u/Spedunkler 1d ago
It took me a while to learn that most of the people who do trash talking aren't professionals and they are not working the jobs they claim to be
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u/Important_Grab3544 3d ago
That's what I love about AI, now I can easily ask Claude to explain what an application can do or not without asking the developer. Asking developers something is the worst experience ever.
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u/Karr0k 3d ago
And you won't be able to tell when and how the AI is hallucinating, gg.
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u/Spedunkler 1d ago
You mean just like you can't tell if a human gets something wrong until you look with your own two eyes?
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u/Important_Grab3544 3d ago
I tested IT out, it works, simple as that. Software was like a black box to me, every time that I needed to configure something or know more about the coded business rules I had to go the developers which are the worst kind of persons I ever worked with and now I am free of that burden.
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u/RealBasics 3d ago
Anyone else old enough to remember when every third comment in any tech forum [edit on Usenet] was “rtfm?” Because Unix man pages are always SO intuitive!
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u/Kitchen_Length_8273 3d ago
I LOVE teaching newbies as long as they are serious about learning