Readit News> Work in progress (or 404)
I think it would be a lot politer if the target page was clearer. As it is, I could be 'voting' on a draft or it could just be plain broken and the intended page somewhere else.
Personally, I think it would make more sense to just put up what you have explicitly noted as drafts etc, and count the 'votes' that way.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm just using a static site generator so have limited flexibility, but I'll see what I can do to make it clear that something is a WIP vs a true 404.
PS: I love your writing, thank you so much for putting it out there (:
Not annoyed. But curious!
I agree that mentoring is hard, and I want to read your take.
I wonder if we agree on expert aesthetics or not. You write:
> Experts tend to have an aesthetic preference towards technically challenging work rather than simple-but-interesting work, and I’ve written more about this phenomenon here: expert aesthetics.
When I read the passage the first time, I thought you meant "experts prefer to work on hard problems in order to arrive at simple solutions". But that's not what you're saying!
> I agree that mentoring is hard, and I want to read your take.
Thanks for the vote of confidence (: I'm kicking myself for not figuring out a mailing list before this essay went viral, but I'll cross-post the essay on my substack (https://beyarkay.substack.com/) when it comes out, so you can sign up there to get an email.
> I wonder if we agree on expert aesthetics or not. You write:
So I'm coining "expert aesthetics" as a relatively unused phrase that I can put my own connotations onto. There'll be more in the essay (; but at a high level, I've observed that, as someone becomes an expert in a field, their sense for what's "beautiful" in that field changes, and _generally_ it starts to focus on things that are technically challenging. That is, experts (IME) tend to find technically difficult things _aesthetically_ beautiful, even though novices might not care one bit about the technical skill required.
Examples might help: Wine connoisseurs preferring wine from specific regions or made using specific techniques, while casual drinkers just want something that tastes good. Fashion designers preferring something that's different from last year and riffs off of the current styles, while the general public just want the same old same old. Painters taking delight in still lifes that perfectly capture the reflection of light through a wine glass, while most people just want a pretty sunset or portrait for their wall.
This is all still in flux, but that's the gist of what I'm calling "expert aesthetics".
> sometimes you [novice] just need to be able to show them [expert] what you’re doing without any specific question in mind
> the vast majority of learning comes from a novice watching how the expert plies their skills, and not from direct questions and answers
This succinctly describes why pair programming can be valuable when used judiciously.
I've seen large institutions hold long, boring "knowledge transfer" sessions where the expert explains the codebase to a group of novices but these are largely ineffective without practical experience.
Pair programming for a few weeks during the transition period (novice drives, expert advises) can be a more effective method to bring a novice up to speed. It works in remote environments, too, but does require synchronous time.
(author here) If you haven't watched the Factorio head developer's bug-fix videos on youtube, you really should. They're a goldmine of insight. Also the second video is a very strong case in favour of peer-programming.
> novice drives, expert advises
I've not heard this explicitly recommended, but it's so clearly the best way to do things if learning is the goal.
> This explains the difficulty of training new employees when all your experts are working remotely, as remote work practically eliminates any sort of casual unguided “water-cooler” interaction.
In software development remote work, the novice can learn from the expert by screen sharing how they're working on a problem, sometimes called a working session. The expert can point out more efficient ways of working, like installing a tool, or whether they are using the wrong approach altogether.
(author here) I'm not sure I agree. I certainly think that screen sharing is better than nothing, but remote screen sharing is a strict subset of what you can do while in-person. Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.
I can't describe how many times I've been saved days of work because a senior casually asked what problem I was working on as we both waited in line for a coffee, and they were able to point me in the right direction. As described in the essay, the novice doesn't know when to ask for help.
There are other, tangential, reasons to prefer remote work over in-person, but I don't think there's any reason why remote work would be better at educating novices.
One counterpoint I have to this article.
Considering expert vs. novice problem-solving: Within their domain, experts leverage highly efficient models. Outside? Rigidity often impedes adaptation. Their ingrained patterns, assets in familiar territory, become cognitive liabilities in the unfamiliar. The novice's counter-intuitive strength lies in a lack of assumptions, fostering the openness to explore without ego.
(author here) I agree that novices have an advantage in that they have few assumptions:
> Something you can do independently (and possibly it’s best done without expert supervision), is exploration of the field. You know nothing, and have no biases about what may or may not be useful. Any time you come across something that feels like it has some depth to it, such as a well-written essay series or a deep technical dive, you need to invest heavily into it. As a novice, your one advantage is that everything is new and nobody expects you to be fast. Because of this, you can afford to spend the time to learn as much as possible.
I'm not sure that it's correct to characterise an expert by the lack of this though. I think it's correlated, but not all experts are so rigid.
You don't need to wait for AR/VR. For computer work the real space of interaction is currently the screen. Unstructured pair programming for two remotes with a shared screen and audio and chat is a way more effective interaction than most things you could do together at the office.
Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask the AI, spelunk the codebase for related relevant features or try one-liners.
(author here) it's a pity that there's no way to emulate an office's "just peer around your screen and ask your colleague" dynamic. Having your video camera always on is too creepy, and constantly being in a voice call with your peers still feels a bit weird.
What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though.
> The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. Often there’s an underlying pattern that the novice can pick up through careful observation, even if neither the expert nor the novice can properly articulate this pattern.
That explains part of it well. It's also an effect you can observe with graduate students of nobel prize winners tending to be "related" to professors who won nobel prizes or were part of their labs, etc. There's lessons imparted far beyond the structured material which is often available.
Things like mindset, culture, and more are shared this way.
Remote work is great, but it does limit these free form personal interactions which can be so invaluable. I'm a big fan of the potential for VR and AR to enable these experiences with remote work.
(author here) I love the graduate student + nobel laureate reference, I had read that study but totally forgot how relevant it is to the essay. Absolutely it hammers home the point that there's something about just spending casual time with experts in a field that's invaluable to novices, regardless of the skill/talent of the novice.
Not really. It's the same reason formal lectures are so much less valuable than one-on-one mentoring. An expert's value doesn't come from a bundle of facts, but from being able to figure out which facts you need to hear right this second given your current background, and figuring out how to present them so that you in particular can apply them. Having a motivating problem to discuss also helps both parties appropriately engage.
You can reduce the chance element a bit by having dedicated pairing time or something, and writing things down is better than nothing, but if you want to level up your juniors as fast as possible you'll definitely want some of that water cooler time.
(author here) I think there's something to be said for having both (if I allow myself to imagine an unrealistic utopia).
Imagining the distribution of how much benefit novices get out of a scenario, only having the watercooler interactions probably has a high maximum benefit (i.e. there's some expert that loves teaching and puts loads of time into helping novices) but probably also a very low minimum benefit (i.e. there are no experts at the company, or the experts couldn't care less about helping out). So it's the risky scenario, with a high variance.
Only having formal teaching doesn't have nearly as low a minimum (even a lecturer doing the bare minimum is better than no lecturer), but also doesn't have nearly as high a maximum (a high-effort lecturer simply cannot pay attention to each of the 300 students in a lecture hall, no matter how hard they try).
So having the formal teaching raises the minimum, ensuring the worst outcomes are not that bad, and adding in some watercooler interactions raises the maximum, ensuring that high-effort experts are able to converse with interested novices.
I now think it's more accurate to think that someone is an expert relative to someone else, and only for a specific field. But that'll have to be another essay (: