[aklug] Re: AKLUG and others

From: adam bultman <adamb@glaven.org>
Date: Fri Mar 05 2010 - 10:48:18 AKST

Shane R. Spencer wrote:
>
> I'm experiencing this with a few people as well. A little education
> seems to be all they need to feel confident in their abilities but have
> absolutely no idea what they are doing. <snip>
>
> On the job training is where I got much of my experience and I'm
> personally having a hard time finding time reciprocating this to some
> newbz here at work. Looking back I realized that neither did my mentors
> - they simply gave me something interesting enough to work on. Turns
> out that 90% of my time on the job was spent trying to understand why
> the problem exists in the first place and most of my time outside of
> work was spent working on a solution.
> I believe many of us
> believe there is a very large problem with inspiring non-motivated
> persons to do at least one thing they are interested in that can support
> them.
>
> - Shane
There's a lot to be said for motivation and, well, to put it bluntly,
intelligence.

Shane's really freaking smart. He could pick up just about anything,
and as long as you kept him motivated, he'd figure it out, and then
school you. Not everybody is Shane though; if everybody was, it'd be
hard to tell people apart [0].

In the CS program at the college I went to, there were CS majors who
were graduating that spring that didn't know anything. Was it
motivation? Couldn't tell you that; but I can tell you that they didn't
"think around corners"[1] very well for sure (One dude in a network
programming course I took was given the task of commenting some of the
code after we were done; he couldn't even do that.)

Christopher, it sounds like you're smart, and you might not need a CS
prof to hold your hand. Others need that hand holding. Others need to
reach out to someone to have their hand held, and need their hand
slapped so they figure it out for themselves - they're smart enough, but
lazy [2].

This same argument doesn't only apply to computers, of course; the guy
who graduates at the bottom of his class in med school is still called
'Doctor'; artists who suck are called Jasper John [3]; people with
"certs" can still not know much of anything; people who stink at
managing people still end up as supervisors.

A friend of mine who works as a programmer gave a zinger to a coworker
in a code review. The first guy likened his code to art, and my friend
said, "Who does that make you, Jackson Pollock?"[4]

[0] Pause for laughter.
[1] Example: "There's got to be a better way to do this".
[2] Me, for instance. One of my CS profs refused to help me oftentimes
because he knew I could do it; I just was looking for the easy way out.
[3] Zing!

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_pollock
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Received on Fri Mar 5 10:49:30 2010

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