One of the more recent ones I watched is taking apart large wenches on a bulldozer. There is a metal plate with two bolts on it you have to take off. If you don't know what you're doing you take both bolts out and it flies apart losing stuff because there is a spring behind the mechanism. If you know what you're doing you take out one bolt then put in a bolt twice as long before taking out the second bolt, the long bolt catches the mechanism and releases the spring tension keeping all your parts in one place.
This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is orders of magnitude better than chance.
> The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. Often there’s an underlying pattern that the novice can pick up through careful observation, even if neither the expert nor the novice can properly articulate this pattern.
That explains part of it well. It's also an effect you can observe with graduate students of nobel prize winners tending to be "related" to professors who won nobel prizes or were part of their labs, etc. There's lessons imparted far beyond the structured material which is often available.
Things like mindset, culture, and more are shared this way.
Remote work is great, but it does limit these free form personal interactions which can be so invaluable. I'm a big fan of the potential for VR and AR to enable these experiences with remote work.
Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask the AI, spelunk the codebase for related relevant features or try one-liners.
I'd add, work on the niche things that no one else wants to work on but need to be done. That's how I quickly advanced in my career, becoming knowledgeable about systems no one else wanted to touch.
General intelligence helps but can't make up for domain-specific expertise. Example: move from accounting software to map navigation software. Clueless. Move from map navigation software to financial software. Within financial software move from quantitative pricing to exchange interfacing. Clueless.
Sure, you mostly get away with it but inevitably problems will arise that you have no idea what's causing them or even that they are a problem, so you spend days and weeks chasing what the expert figures out in minutes.
That's why I prefer to keep the domain when changing jobs because it adds up to being just a software developer.
9dev•17h ago
This is actually something I love doing with our junior developers: Often they have a question every once in a while, or they don't have any questions for too long so I ask them what they're doing currently. Both often leads to me taking a look, and discovering that they're like five miles deep into a dead end without realising it yet, and we spend an hour or two working on their problem together.
I love that time, since they usually start asking more and become increasingly confident calling my decisions into question, which in turn leads me to reflect on why I do things the way I do them, and we both end up smarter than we have been before.
One other thing I often notice is that when you're good at something, you don't care about looking good doing it. I have no qualms admitting I don't know something, or that I'd also start asking AI, or just throw some at the wall and see what sticks. This tends to build up a lot of trust with the juniors, since they realise I'm also just putting my trousers on one leg at a time.
Sure, it can be frustrating sometimes to wait for them to just… get the obvious right in front of them, but that usually comes very quickly. I can wholeheartedly recommend spending time with your juniors!