Weaning Rules

What happens if a two-month-old baby is fed a Big Mac?
What happens if a 60 kg weightlifter is assigned a deadlift of 150 kg in the first week of training?
What happens if a couple of nails are put into a meat grinder with a power of 200?
It's pretty much the same as giving an intern the task of refining PouchDB so that he can work with PostgreSQL.

We have a decent company, everyone is friends united by a common goal, we respect and value each other. But it's not the same at the factories.

If you're the boss at the factory and you don't like an employee, you can make him 'choke'. It's a direct tactic. You need to assign a task that the person will certainly fail to complete within the agreed timeframe and resources.

And when he comes back the next day and says that he can't handle it and needs to pass the task to someone else, you can yell at him or start mocking him for being the last loser who can't manage such a simple task.

In the end, when the person fails, you can put him down. He is yours. He won't be asking for a raise, better working conditions, or decent treatment. He is a loser. Officially acknowledged.

It's good that we don't do that. But situations where a person receives a task that he cannot complete in a reasonable time do occur.

On one hand, someone might say – stop whining, you got a task – die, but do it. Or, in American style – die or do it. But why? To watch him choke and collapse?

If the goal is exactly that, then everything is correct. If the goal is productivity and effectiveness, then it's better to take a cue from weightlifters or bodybuilders. It’s very simple: it should be hard but doable.

They have a tool: percentage chart. A chessboard where weights are arranged vertically and percentages horizontally. The training program states: bench press, 70%, two sets of ten repetitions. The athlete looks at the percentages, finds his maximum bench press vertically, moves his finger to the 70% column and understands that he needs to lift 70 kg. He's not going to calculate it in his head, right?

It's hard for him, but doable. A question may arise: why should it be hard? You could just use light weights, do 2-3 repetitions, and go for a beer.

Well, the answer is obvious: muscles only train when it's difficult. Regardless of the goal—endurance, strength, hypertrophy (muscle volume growth). The details of the process may vary, but the overall approach is the same: development occurs through pain. The key is that the pain must be bearable; otherwise, it will lead to injury.

Let's get back to our topic. The task should be set up so that a person can accomplish it, but with effort. This way, they will meet the metrics and also develop.

Is this obvious, you might say? Well, yes, if the mentor is reasonable or if there’s a ready-made training program for interns. But is it often like that?

Not often. In our village, there were many cases where the older brother (around five years old) fed the younger sibling (around two years old) with hot potatoes. But even more common are cases where the mentor feeds the intern "hot potatoes."

On one hand, it’s possible the mentor simply doesn’t know how (like that five-year-old). After all, he’s a cool guy; he has all the context of all tasks right in his head’s RAM. He just doesn’t understand how someone could not know what npm prune is. Or does he?

I've been observing people for a long time, and I’ve often found myself in the intern's shoes. More than once, I was served "hot potatoes" myself. It’s not hard to recognize: just watch what the mentor does when you choke.

A normal mentor will adjust. Simply because he understands: the training program is a company asset entrusted to him. If one intern chokes, the other is also struggling—something's wrong. Sure, you can keep pushing, saying "damn hipsters, they don’t know anything, what’s up with this generation…" or you can realize that they’re all like that now, and if you want decent new people, you need to make the training program one that actually prepares them, not just filters them out.

An abnormal mentor will just assert himself. He’ll say something like, "Well, you still have a whole world to discover before you can look at this topic." Sure, you can take that approach, but then why did you include it in the training program?

Yes, of course, I understand that among interns there are inadequates. Although, no, I just wrote that. I haven't encountered anyone like that. Maybe there aren't enough internships, so I'll leave a loophole—I'll assume that at some point, an inadequate will appear.

I still adhere to the theory of blossoming. Every intern has a blossoming point—something after which things go smoothly. For everyone I work with, this moment happens. For someone, it takes solving a work problem instead of an educational one, for someone else, it’s talking directly with a business client, for another, it’s reading the right book at the right time, for someone else—it’s hearing that they are just an intern, not a prodigy, as their mother told them, and for someone else, it’s experiencing a severe failure to understand their mistakes.

My history of observations is still small, but it already indicates: the output of good programmers increases dramatically if you stop feeding them "hot potatoes." Yes, and the losses are zero. I will write separately about this.

Source: habr.com