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Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

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Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#11

Post by dasmoth »

collyw wrote: post #10
em0ney wrote: post #5

Learning from others is invaluable. Listen to the perspectives of those around you, but don't regurgitate what they say or follow what they say blindly. Ask them questions, challenge conventional wisdoms and ask "Why". Experience is a form of bias and must always be taken with a clear head and a grain of salt. My grandfather would always say: Advice is free, until you take it. Good luck!

I learn most stuff by myself. Sure it speeds up the process a bit when someone teaches you, but often making all the mistakes by yourself you get a deeper understanding.

I agree. I worry about processes like Scrum which put so much emphasis on resolving “blockers”. Being able to spend a couple of days bashing your head against something thorny is a really important part of learning practical knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#12

Post by 4x5_Rules »

I've worked remote at a previous job for 8 years. The company really didn't handle communications with remote employees very well. Between that and not having the daily "coffee" chat with other employees, I felt I was missing out a lot. You can read all the stuff you like, but at times there is nothing better then bouncing ideas off your co-workers and seeing what sticks.

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#15

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

beagle3 wrote: post #9

Always strive to be the stupidest person in the room, despite being as smart as you can be - as long as the people you interact with don't make you feel bad (either because they are being a-holes, or because the difference in knowledge/experience/attitude is too big to be useful). I've had the fortune to be in that position for a very long time, and I wouldn't do it any other way. Many people / teachers / mentors don…

I'm in the unfortunate situation where I'm not the dumbest person in the room. It sucks, having to learn things the hard way digging through stackoverflow questions / blog posts when you can ask a question right away / get an answer.

I learned everything about programming myself with just online materials available to everyone. When I started stagnating & had issues managing this work project, I set aside a budget to subcontract more a much more experienced developer. Then I started attending meetups, starting working on nonprofit projects so I can learn from others smarter than me.

The lesson here is that even if you aren't the stupidest person in the room, you can make yourself not the smartest either. You are just a few emails away, a small sized budget to pretty much getting any teacher / mentor you want, and communicating via slack. You can always crowdsource answers and advice on reddit/stackoverflow

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#16

Post by Yhippa »

Extremely important. As a junior developer, it was important for me to have people smarter or more experienced than me to bounce ideas off of and to help me understand concepts. Things like "Why use Git? SVN is perfectly fine!"

I don't know if this is true for everybody but there was a window of time where I got to work with senior developers before I became a tech/people manager. That was the time I worked at several different companies and learned from experienced developers before I got put in that position. You want to absorb as much as you can during that time because opportunities become slimmer down the road.

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#17

Post by collyw »

dasmoth wrote: post #11
collyw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learn most stuff by myself. Sure it speeds up the process a bit when someone teaches you, but often making all the mistakes by yourself you get a deeper understanding.

I agree. I worry about processes like Scrum which put so much emphasis on resolving “blockers”. Being able to spend a couple of days bashing your head against something thorny is a really important part of learning practical knowledge.

I am kind of surprised at everyone here saying how important it is. I would say its a far more crucial skill to be able to learn by yourself for this industry.

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#18

Post by dasmoth »

Yhippa wrote: post #16

Extremely important. As a junior developer, it was important for me to have people smarter or more experienced than me to bounce ideas off of and to help me understand concepts. Things like "Why use Git? SVN is perfectly fine!" I don't know if this is true for everybody but there was a window of time where I got to work with senior developers before I became a tech/people manager. That was the time I worked at severa…

Are you absolutely certain you’re not following fashion here? To pick your example... yeah, there are some advantages of Git over SVN, and in particular some scenarios where the “distributed” side of DVCS becomes important. On the other hand, there’s every chance that SVN really was perfectly fine for your project (after all, in its heyday it was very common, and there are still large projects using it today).

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#19

Post by philpem »

Definitely a big thing for me. I've spent a couple of years as the "smartest person in the room". As much as it's great to teach, but it's even better to learn. Or maybe that's just me. The skill gap has been huge though - me plus a team who learned "on the job".

Putting in the best-practice and infrastucture to do a good job was interesting though. We've gone from zip files on a network share to automated builds an CI, and the CI tool even generates the final release ZIP files and test reports. From bug tracking in Word to bug tracking in Jira...

And on a budget of "zero or as close as possible" too.

Re: Ask HN: How important is it to be with peers you can learn from?

#20

Post by philpem »

4x5_Rules wrote: post #12

I've worked remote at a previous job for 8 years. The company really didn't handle communications with remote employees very well. Between that and not having the daily "coffee" chat with other employees, I felt I was missing out a lot. You can read all the stuff you like, but at times there is nothing better then bouncing ideas off your co-workers and seeing what sticks.

I'll second this. So many bugs become easy to solve when you try to explain the problem to a co-worker.

At my last job, we had a rubber-duck in the middle of the development floor. The first test was "Explain your problem to Ducky". About half of the time, the developer doing it would have a sudden epiphany half way through the explanation.

You could even book meetings with Ducky on Outlook... "Five-minute standup meeting with Ducky, meeting room 1"...

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