alt Hacker NewsThat's a thoughtful post, but I am skeptical of how "universal" her suggested Path Forward is. I suspect a hell of a lot of folks will have difficulty with the "people skills" stuff she mentions (and is almost certainly highly conversant in, herself).
> The most common answer from students when asked what they needed was a mentor who had just been in their shoes a few years ago, a surprising and heartening answer.
Mentoring is difficult; especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors.
For myself, I'm happily retired from the Rodent Rally, and find that LLMs have been a huge help, when learning new stuff.
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People skills are so important, I agree. Intergenerational people skills are especially important; in most things that matter, the old guard are the ones keeping their eye on the younger hires, pattern matching what they see over months of observation to who they've seen succeed before.
> especially in today's world, where we are taught to despise older folks, and encouraged to treat everyone that we work with, as competitors
What world is this? This not match my experiences at all. Is this a common sentiment among your peers?
> where we are taught to despise older folks
9 times out of 10 it goes the other way around. Most young people have only had very negative interactions with their seniors, which has been wholly on the part of the senior. The current young generation is very respectful towards older people.
I think I would also ad to the mix that young folk these days are incredibly overconfident and averse to criticism. A few years back they got a junior dev in here, and I was supposed to help him get on our stack, and ultimately mentor him.
This kid would not accept seniority, would constantly and publicly try to divert from the stack we worked with, he would not take any input on his work without actively fighting the process and will crowd the conversation at team meetings with never-ending Reddit-tier takes that contributed to nothing other than fill his ego.
In the end I managed to convince my boss to get him out, and he now works in Cyber, which will probably cause even more damage in the long run, but at least I can now say "not my problem".