In general, the Hand of God is one of the most famous football goals in history, performed by the Argentinean Diego Maradona in the 51st minute of the quarter-final match of the 1986 World Cup against England. "Hand" - because the goal was scored by hand.
We, in our team, call the hand of God the help of an experienced employee to an inexperienced one in solving a problem. An experienced employee, respectively, is called Maradona, or simply M. And this is one of the key methods for improving efficiency in the face of insufficiently qualified employees. Well, it so happened that we have a lot of interns in the team. I'm setting up an experiment.
According to statistics, not much help is needed. The "average check" is 13 minutes - this is from the moment when M took his ass off the chair, and until the moment he returned his ass to the chair. This includes everything - understanding the problem, and discussion, and debugging, and architecture design, and talking about life.
The spread of time to help at first was large, up to 1 hour, but gradually narrowed, and now rarely goes beyond half an hour. Those. it takes several minutes of time M for the task to move on, or even to complete successfully. Sometimes it happens.
Key feature: accounting and limiting time for "maradona". Until you count the minutes, it seems that helping others takes a lot of time. And when you record, it turns out that everything is not so bad.
For example, I moonlight as Maradona in the team. The limit was set - 3 hours a day for all employees. Thought it wouldn't be enough. It turned out that even 3 hours - behind the eyes, because. average consumption is 2 hours per day.
Accounting and limiting act magically on employees. Anyone who asks for help understands that it is necessary to spend time efficiently, because the limit is the same for everyone, and it is not profitable to waste time M in vain. Therefore, there are much fewer conversations about life, which, of course, depresses me.
In general, the Hand of God is a slippery trick. After all, it seems that the employee himself must figure everything out, solve all problems, understand the whole context. But there is one nuisance - neural connections.
The brain works like a simple automaton - it remembers the path and the result. If a person has gone through some path, and this has led to a positive result, a neural connection of the βthis is how it should be doneβ type is formed. Well, vice versa.
So, imagine an intern or a novice programmer. He sits alone and solves the problem, without TK. The client sets a certain goal, and the programmer chooses the way to achieve it.
He doesnβt have much to choose from, because. he does not know any solution to the problem. There is no experience. And he starts looking for a solution by typing, experimenting, searching the Internet, etc.
As a result, he finds some option, tries it, and then - bam! - happened! What will the employee do? Ideally, of course, he will look at what other solutions are available, evaluate his code, decide on the correct architecture and the validity of interfering with other people's objects and modules.
But, let me remind you - for our man, all these words mean nothing. He just doesn't know what he's talking about. Therefore, he, like, I beg your pardon, a monkey, will simply remember the option that led to success. The neural connection will either form or strengthen (if it has already formed earlier).
Further we go, worse it becomes. A person will stew in his own juice, because there will be very few reasons to get out of this juice. As we said in the section on code quality, no one will ever tell a programmer that he is writing shit code. Customers do not understand this, and other programmers rarely look at someone else's code - there is no reason.
Therefore, returning to the original thesis that a person must figure everything out on his own - alas, this is a so-so method. At least in terms of working with interns.
This is where the Hand of God comes to the rescue. And he will tell you the direction of the search for a solution, and he will give advice on the PL, and he will give you options, and he will tell fortunes based on experience which solution will definitely not work, and he will criticize the code and tell you where to write off the already finished code.
In fact, very little is needed from M. The trainee, as a rule, tupit out of the blue. Just because he doesnβt know, for example, how to go to the function description, format the code, doesnβt suspect the existence of moment.js or ways to debug services in chrome. All you have to do is point your finger at it to move on.
And the value of the hours that he will spend on an independent search for this information is zero. And from a business point of view, this is generally theft. For obtaining this competence, the company has already paid Maradona.
And all this - in an average of 13 minutes. Or 2 hours a day.
Yes, let me remind you: the Hand of God is needed in a timely manner. It would be funny if Maradona came to the football field after the end of the match and scored a goal with his hand.
UPD: I forgot to say what is happening with the productivity of M.
Oddly enough, with the beginning of this activity, productivity increased by 1.5-2 times. And the productivity of the team as a whole has grown even more.
On the M, I'm now trying out the fast shifting technique. If it doesn't die, I'll write when I accumulate statistics. Including about the second M, who is currently undergoing an internship.
Source: habr.com