[HN Gopher] We Need Programming Mentors
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       We Need Programming Mentors
        
       Author : signa11
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-02-10 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
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       | svilen_dobrev wrote:
       | mmh. been mentoring few ppl.. last 15+ years. it's not easy to
       | find mentees. proper ones. actively interested in being mentored
       | (not taught, lectured, tick-that-course'd, etc).. And when there
       | is someone like that, noone pays for that. so it gets difficult..
        
       | feoren wrote:
       | A big reason 1-on-1 mentoring is so much better than almost any
       | other form of education is that the teacher is able to build a
       | mental model of what the student knows. You can get close to this
       | with a tight pedagogical track where the teacher can say "You've
       | all taken classes X and Y, so you should already be comfortable
       | with the concepts I'm going to talk about." But Software
       | Engineering is a young discipline and the topics discussed in TFA
       | are nebulous, opinion-laden, and specific to individual
       | companies, tasks, and languages. So precisely-specified pedagogy
       | is not possible, and the only remaining option is 1-on-1
       | mentoring. Every other option (online tutorials, videos,
       | presentations) doesn't allow the teacher to build a mental model
       | of what the student knows and adapt their lesson based on that.
       | It's not really about being _right next_ to the person or being
       | available _right now_ , as TFA says. It's about being able to
       | understand what the student already knows, which lessons are
       | sinking in and which aren't, and why.
       | 
       | Then comes the extremely hard part for the teacher: having the
       | deep self-awareness to be able to separate out what really
       | matters from what is simply their opinion, or what they're
       | comfortable with. When a company tech lead is mentoring juniors,
       | it doesn't matter as much, because her preferences can basically
       | become mandates without causing any real issue; that probably
       | increases the overall consistency of the codebase. But if you
       | want to set up a website where experienced mentors share real
       | grains of wisdom without the chaff of personal preference,
       | prepare for a lot of religious wars.
       | 
       | There's a reason the master/apprentice model has persisted for
       | thousands of years. It doesn't sound like TFA is advocating for
       | some mass-scale solution, but rather just pointing out how
       | valuable mentoring is and how it should be a priority for senior
       | developers if a company wants a healthy engineering culture.
       | Totally agreed. We're probably not ready for a mass-scale
       | solution to this problem yet.
        
       | AussieWog93 wrote:
       | Credit where credit's due, programmers are great at being open
       | and helping newbies find their footing.
       | 
       | I studied as an electrical engineer, but ended up drifting into
       | the software world because my first preference (FPGA/Embedded
       | dev) was so heavily gatekept and actively hostile to newcomers.
        
       | suddenclarity wrote:
       | Well, yes? There have been numerous sites trying to offer this
       | but the problem is that the number of mentees outnumber the
       | mentors at 1:infinity. There's little incentive to helping
       | beginners and it quickly becomes expensive if you want to pay
       | programmers market rate for their time.
        
       | cameronfraser wrote:
       | ChatGPT can mentor, using humans isn't scalable
        
         | hawkesnest wrote:
         | Do you really think that ChatGPT can analyze the work done by a
         | human and provide meaningful and accurate feedback? It's very
         | easy to make a claim, but have you perhaps tried it?
         | 
         | My experience with ChatGPT is the generation of text based off
         | a prompt. If you have actually done something similar to what
         | you claim that would prove very interesting. It might eliminate
         | most forms of management.
        
           | AussieWog93 wrote:
           | > Do you really think that ChatGPT can analyze the work done
           | by a human and provide meaningful and accurate feedback? It's
           | very easy to make a claim, but have you perhaps tried it?
           | 
           | It honestly does scarily well most of the time (until it
           | doesn't, of course). I've tried it multiple times.
           | 
           | You should give it a go!
        
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