I push the new guys to fix project documentation once they’ve figured out a tricky bit. It helps solidify their knowledge, and helps us double check that they understood, and it’s something they can contribute when they still haven’t become part of the bus number on anything yet.
That all sounds reasonable and smart, but the real reason I do it is the Curse of Knowledge. People in a system can’t see it from the outside. They make assumptions, use opaque or even misleading jargon, and employ circular logic. The new guy doesn’t know the lingo, or the circular logic. Their explanation will make more sense to the next hire than anything I can say. And having it written down this way can also give me new perspective on the system. Maybe it doesn’t have to work this way.
Adding a new smart person to the team is one of those golden moments for a team, IMO. You get a tiny window of watching them struggle until the tribal team knowledge seeps into them by osmosis. During that time they don't yet know who to ask the questions to directly so they will post to team slack channels or the lead directly.
One must capitalize on this brief period because smart programmers are flexible and adaptable. Very quickly they will acclimatize themselves to the mess that surrounds them and they will become as blind to the deficiencies as the rest of the team.
Adjacent to this: ignore criticism as feedback, but treat questions as feedback.
People who don’t “get” the code ask questions that contain feedback they often don’t even register as feedback. By the time they distill it to an actual criticism, they’re often so wrapped up in the problem they can’t be constructive, or they present an XY problem. But if three people ask you the same question about your code? You have a design issue. Fix it. Fix it now.
That puts me in a weird relationship with FAQs. FAQs aren’t informational, they’re confessional. Here’s all the times I fucked up and won’t admit it. Let me explain why I am right and you are wrong.
Funny enough, many organizations will actually punish questions due to optics, noise, or RTFM (which fair enough do read it, but also don't presume the asker didn't just because you understand what you wrote. Being written down doesn't mean it's understandable by a new reader, or that it's optimally setup for discovery)
I tried to help some dude understand integration by parts, which I’m not sure I’d understood myself. I warned him. But it was late, he was desperate, and I was just going to go play computer games anyway.
I figured it out, but I’ve no idea if I got him sorted out for his final.
The professor is interrupted in the middle of his lecture by a student who asks about one of the previous week's problems:
— Could you please work an example for us?
— No problem!
The professor writes a problem statement, then scratches his head, tugs on his collar, rubs his chin, and at last scribbles a complicated integral on the board.
— There you go!
— Excuse me, professor, but could you please be a little more explicit?
— What do you want from me? I just did the problem 3 different ways.
Only getting 2 ways to solve it brings us back to russian jokes:
A soviet maths prof finds out he'd make more money as a labourer in the shipyards, so after more than a few carefully-distributed bottles of vodka he manages to change profession. A month or two working in the yards, and he sees a notice on the bulletin board offering a bonus to workers who sign up for a special "maths for the proletariat" evening school course.
Figuring it's easy money, he signs up, brings a novel, and sits in the back of the class reading instead paying attention. Then the prof calls him up to the brownboard, and asks him for the circumference of a circle.
Suddenly, our ex-prof blanks. Frantically he scribbles and scribbles on the brownboard, only to wind up with ... -2πr. No, that can't be right, but what went wrong?
Just when he's about to crack trying to figure out his error, he hears a friendly voice from one of the front-row students:
Someday you will die. Then you will die again when people forget you. Only the effect you’ve had on the world, including teaching others, who pass that along, outlives that second death.
So what’s this about efficiency? You should be more worried about effectiveness, not efficiency. Particularly in this profession.
What is consider efficient if it yields less best results?
I understand time constraints and end goals may prohibit the 'best' approach.
What I do not understand is how can you say something is more 'efficient' if the yield in understanding is less than what you would get with another method.
Hopefully this will clarify my thought process here:
If 'Best' is to teach others and requires 10,000 hours to yield 90-99% understanding.
In contrast, 'Efficient' method requires 2,500 hours to yield 30-40% understanding. However, there is diminishing returns meaning that doubling your hours to 5,000 does not return you with 60-80% understanding, rather maybe closer to 50-60% understanding. With 7,500 hours closer to 65-70% and 10,000 hours may around 75-89% understanding.
Here you've spent the same amount of time but did not achieve the same level of understanding. I think you may have a dynamic 'Best' vs 'Efficient' curve and to switch between those options to optimize maximizing your level of understanding in the least amount of time.
The problem I have with this argument is that you cannot consider "efficiency" in a vacuum. You need to have a metric against which to measure it.
Consider these two scenarios -
Goal: remember where to look up information when it comes up in $JOB
Metric: how much you remember, how quickly you find the info
Goal: discover new hyper-efficient method of training an AI (or insert popular ML topic here).
Metric: percent improvement vs current pubished best practice (deliberately vague)
Required understanding to make progress: "like a Ph.D. from Stanford"
Now you can possibly measure something.
The idea achievement of "90% understanding" is VERY topic dependent. Simple topic? Sure 100% understanding, I remembered the Latin names of all of the plants in my house. Complicated topic? The information for "100% understanding" might not even be written in the textbook - it probably includes things like seeing the interconnections between the topics and being able to apply them in slightly different contexts.
Make sure you read the studies so you know what they're talking about. In this area, I think summaries are frequently misleading. You have to know what the real evidence is that substantiates the claims. (I cannot tell you how many times I have looked at the evidence and just rolled my eyes - obviously not applicable in settings where I wanted it to be.)
Yes, but there are plenty of exceptions. I know brilliantly knowledgeable and extraordinary clever people that are so socially awkward that they can't explain virtually anything.
Good question and I think you're making a valid point.
I think overall on average they would do a decent job of explaining it in writing to equally brilliant people. Not so sure about "dumbing it down" for the "others".
For language acquisition: find a partner who speaks the other language and wishes to learn yours, then converse with each of you using your L2, falling back to L1 only when circumlocution fails or to make corrections.
(then how do you practise listening to your L2? Eavesdropping, ancillary encounters, news, movies, etc. give plenty of opportunity, but speaking requires you to make an extra effort.)
