Some background: due to the whole "autistic recluse hermit" thing I've got going on since very young, I've always been the sort to search for info in books or the internet instead of other irl humans. So I don't even have personal experience to draw from on how that changed for myself.

I'm currently mentoring some young (adult) programmers and preparing some coursework for them, and I've always been confused by how much difficulty beginners have with "just" searching for solutions to their problems online. (I put "just" in quotes there because I realise that it's actually difficult for them.)

This leads to a lot of situations where they'll ask me things and I'll literally just send them one of the top 5 duckduckgo results that I find on a quick search, which is usually exactly what they need. Besides creating learning bottleneck (i.e. if I am otherwise busy they could be left waiting too long), I worry that they won't develop the independence to find the solutions themselves in the future.

But I definitely don't want to tell them to "Just Google DDG it" or RTFM. Not because I don't think they actually should, just because I think they might take that as some sort of insult or think that I'm not interested in helping (when in fact I'm always more than happy to help even with trivial stuff like this).

I recognise that one part of the problem is that they're not all comfortable with their English, and native language search results are usually not very good. But I reckon there's more to it that I'm just failing to understand, and if I don't even properly understand the problem, I won't be able to come up with a proper solution. I don't think this is a local issue, so I believe others here might have encountered this in the wild too and understand it better than me.

What am I missing here?

Edit: Great comments all around, I'll ponder all the suggestions and insights here and see what I can do. Thanks comrades!

  • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think a part of it is that they are being mentored by you, not by google etc. So they come to you looking for answers because isn't that the whole reason you're mentoring them? To teach them?

    I think this could be more of a case of them seeing you as an authority on the subject and so wanting your thoughts and opinions first rather than just checking it on the web.

    As a person, you can give them a clear yes/no on whether something is correct, but if they google it, they could just end up with a wrong solution. Additionally, they're probably trying to understand the concepts involved, and are worried that copy/pasting code from google will mean they won't be learning how to do it themselves.

    I guess the real question here is: Is this even a problem? Is this something you're worried about, but your mentorees aren't bothered by at all? Maybe you could talk to them about it and find out directly from them?

    Though I'm a former psych major, not a programmer, so I'm probably a bit biased towards the "talking out problems" solution lol