I’m with you here.

I grew up without a mentor and my understanding of software stalled at certain points. When I couldn’t get a particular os API to work, in Google and stack overflow didn’t exist, and I had no one around me to ask. I wrote programs for years by just working around it.

After decades writing software I have done my best to be a mentor to those new to the field. My specialty is the ability to help people understand the technology they’re using, I’ve helped juniors understand and fix linker errors, engineers understand ARP poisoning, high school kids debug their robots. I’ve really enjoyed giving back.

But today, pretty much anyone except for a middle schooler could type their problems into a ChatGPT and get a more direct answer that I would be able to give. No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly.

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atonse 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Today every single software engineer has an extremely smart and experienced mentor available to them 24/7. They don't have to meet them for coffee once a month to ask basic questions.

That said, I still feel strongly about mentorship though. It's just that you can spend your quality time with the busy person on higher-level things, like relationship building, rather than more basic questions.

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Ronsenshi 4 hours ago | parent [-]

How would this affect future generations of ... well anyone, when they have 24/7 access to extremely smart mentor who will find solution to pretty much any problem they might face?

Can't just offload all the hard things to the AI and let your brain waste away. There's a reason brain is equated to a muscle - you have to actively use it to grow it (not physically in size, obviously).

	▲	atonse 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree with you about using our brains. I honestly have no idea. But I can tell you that, just like with most things in life, this is yet another area where we are increasingly getting to do just the things we WANT to do (like think about code or features and have it appear, pixel pushing, smoothing out the actual UX, porting to faster languages) and not have to do things most people don't want to do, like drudgery (writing tests, formatting code, refactoring manually, updating documentation, manually moving tickets around like a caveman). Or to use a non tech example, having to spend hours fixing word document formatting. So we're getting more spoiled. For example, kids have never waited for a table at a restaurant for more than 20 mins (which most people used to do all the time before abundant food delivery or reservation systems). Not that we ever enjoyed it, but learning to be bored, learning to not just get instant gratification is something that's happening all over in life. Now it's happening even with work. So I honestly don't know how it'll affect society.
	▲	ipaddr 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Just because you have every instruction manual doesn't mean you can follow and perform the steps or have time to or can adapt to a real world situation.

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socalgal2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have this feeling as well. At one point I thought when I got older it might be nice to teach - Steve Wozniak apparently does. But, it doesn't feel like I can really add much. Students have infinite teachers on youtube, and now they have Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT which are amazing. Sure, today, maybe, I could see myself as mostly a chaperone in some class to once in a while help a student out with some issue but that possibility seems like it will be gone in 1 to 2 years.

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simonw 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"No one particularly needs mentorship as long as they know how to use an LLM correctly."

The "as long as they know how..." is doing a lot of work there.

I expect developers with mentors who help give them the grounding they need to ask questions will get there a whole lot faster than developers without.