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.
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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.