Which will (sadly) offer you zero extrinsic benefit at almost every job, and will often actually count against you as a waste of time relative to the vast majority of productivity metrics that companies actually use.

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godelski 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a lot of benefits you get by mentoring. When you have to teach you're forced to think more deeply about problems, see it from different angles, and revisit questions you had when learning but tabled at that time. That last one is pretty common. There's always questions you have when learning that you have to avoid because you don't have the knowledge to answer yet, because they would take you down too deep a rabbit hole. But later you have the experience to navigate those problems.

Personally, I've learned a ton while teaching. It's given me many new ideas and insights. But I'm obviously not alone in this. Even Feynman talks about how teaching results in better learning

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mystifyingpoi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which is unfortunately very true. I think, that in a healthy organization such kind of mentoring requires extremely well defined boundaries and rules. Can I spend 1h of my time explaining basic stuff to a junior, who will then be able to finish his task in 2h instead of 8h? Mathematically this is a win for the company. But economically, maybe that junior dev should be fired.

	▲	xp84 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's the problem -- except in the rare type of org that thinks past quarterly or annual results and thus values training up a pipeline to be the future seniors -- economically speaking, all the junior devs should be fired, and the simple tasks they can do are the same set of tasks that can be accomplished by a senior at the helm of AI at 10-50x the speed.

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reactordev an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Someone mentored you, pay it forward. If you think you got where you are entirely on your own, you need therapy.

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TeMPOraL an hour ago | parent [-]

Oh come on. Plenty of us here never had any form of direct mentorship at work or otherwise. It's not unusual when you pick up the trade as a hobby in your teens, and in terms of programming and technical skills (which is what we're discussing here), you stopped being a junior before getting your first job.

Myself, I learned from many folks on IRC and ol' phpBB boards, and I helped others on IRC and said phpBB boards in return; almost all of that was before graduating. That, and books, lots of books, and even more time spent just reading code online and writing my own. None of that hardly qualifies as "mentoring".

	▲	reactordev 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>you stopped being a junior before getting your first job. No, that was your hubris thinking you had the chops. We didn’t hire you because of your skills, we hired you because of your age and aptitude to learn. That’s how college recruitment works. If you didn’t go that route, you were still looked at as a junior. Your ego clouds your view.