What happens if a two-month-old baby is fed a Big Mac?
What happens if a weightlifter weighing 60 kg puts 150 kg on deadlift in the first week of training?
What happens if you put a couple of 200 nails into a meat grinder?
About the same thing as giving an intern the task of finalizing PouchDB so that he can work with PostgeSQL.
Here we have a decent company, everyone is friends, united by a common goal, we respect and appreciate each other. Not so in factories.
If you are the boss at the factory, and you don’t like a subordinate, you can make him “choke”. It's just such an approach. It is necessary to give a task that a person obviously cannot cope with in a timely manner with the specified resources.
And when he comes in a day and says that he can’t cope, and you need to transfer the task to another, you can yell at him, or start teasing that he is the last sucker who cannot cope with such a simple task.
As a result, when a person did not cope, you can spread rot on him. He is yours. He will not ask for a raise, better working conditions, normal treatment, and so on. He is a goof. officially recognized.
It's good that we don't do that. But there are situations when a person receives a task that he cannot cope with in a foreseeable time.
On the one hand, someone will say - there is nothing to whine, got a task - die, but do it. Or, in American terms, do or die. But why? See how he chokes and falls down?
If that's the goal, then you're right. If the goal is efficiency and effectiveness, then it is better to take an example from weightlifters or jocks. It is very simple there: it should be difficult, but doable.
They have such a tool: percentage. A chessboard with weights vertically and percentages horizontally. The training program says: bench press, 70%, two sets of ten reps. The athlete looks at the percentage, finds his maximum bench press vertically, moves his finger to the 70% column and understands that he needs to take a weight of 70 kg. Do you mind counting?
It's hard for him, but doable. The question may arise: why should it be hard? After all, you can take only light weights, do 2-3 repetitions and go for a beer.
Well, the answer is obvious: muscles only work when it's hard. Regardless of the goal - endurance, strength, hypertrophy (increase in muscle volume). The process differs in details, but in general the approach is the same: development goes through pain. The main thing is that the pain is tolerable, otherwise there will be an injury.
We return to our sheep. The task must be given such that a person can complete it, but with effort. Then he will make the metrics, and will develop.
Obviously, you say? Well, yes, if the mentor is adequate, or there is a ready-made training program for interns. But dofiga where exactly so?
Not enough. There were many cases in our village when an older brother (about five years old) fed the younger one (about two years old) with hot potatoes. But there are even more cases when a mentor feeds an intern with a “hot potato”.
On the one hand, perhaps the mentor simply does not know how (like that five-year-old guy). Well, he's a cool dude, he has the whole context of all tasks - right in the RAM of his head. He just doesn't understand how you can not know what npm prune is. Or is it clear?
I have been watching people for a long time, and many times I found myself in the situation of an intern. And often they would shove a “hot potato” down my throat. It's easy to recognize: see what the mentor will do when you choke.
The normal mentor will adjust. Simply because he understands that the training program is an asset of the company entrusted to him. If one trainee chokes, the second - something is wrong. You can, of course, continue to bend your face, like “fucking hipsters, they don’t know a damn thing what kind of youth went ...”, or you can realize that they are all like that now, and if you want new decent people, make the training program such that She was preparing, not sifting.
And an abnormal mentor will simply assert himself. He will say something like “well, you still need to know the whole world before watching this topic.” No, well, you can do it, but what for did you put it in the training program then? Or “I can’t help you, the problem is somewhere in the school where you studied, or you read the wrong books as a child.”
Yes, of course, I understand that among the interns there are inadequate. Although, no, I just wrote it that way. I did not come across such. Maybe there’s not enough practice, so I’ll leave a loophole - I’ll assume that someday I’ll get inadequate.
I'm still sticking to the heyday theory. Every trainee has a flowering point - something like that, after which he moves on like clockwork. Everyone I work with has that point. Someone needs to solve a work problem once instead of a training one, someone needs to communicate directly with a business customer, someone needs to read the right book at the right moment, someone needs to hear that he is just an intern, and not a child prodigy, as he was told Mom, for someone - to experience a hard fakap in order to understand their mistakes.
My observational history is still small, but it already says: the output of good programmers increases many times if you stop feeding them “hot potatoes”. Yes, and losses are equal to zero. I will write about this separately.
Source: habr.com