alt Hacker News > Earlier you’d simply assume that a junior making mistakes is simply part of being a junior and can be coached; whereas nowadays said junior may not be willing to take your advice
On a positive note: I can remember mentoring some young people and watching them comb through blogs to learn about programming. I am so old that my shelf is/was full of O'Reilly books. By the time I was mentoring them, few people under 25 were reading O'Reilly books. It opened my eyes that how people changes more than what people learn. Example: Someone is trying to learning about access control modifiers for classes/methods in a programming language. Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. In my (somewhat contrived) example, the how is changing, but not the what.
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> I can assure you that when I was young, I did not listen to older people's advice and I tried to do everything my own way.
Hot take: This reads like a person who was difficult to work with.
Senior people have responsibility, therefore in a business situation they have authority. Junior people who think they know it all don't like this. If there's a disagreement between a senior person and a junior person about something, they should, of course, listen to each other respectfully. If that's not happening, then one of them is not being a good employee. But if they are, then the supervisor makes the final call.
> Old days: Get the O'Reilly book for that programming language. Lookup access modifiers in the index. 10 year ago: Google for a blog with an intro to the programming language. There will be a tip about what access modifiers can do. Today: Ask ChatGPT. In my (somewhat contrived) example, the how is changing, but not the what.
The tangent to that is it is also changing with the how much one internalizes about the problem domain and is able to apply that knowledge later. Hard fought knowledge from the old days is something that shapes how I design systems today.
However, the tendency of people who reach for ChatGPT today to solve a problem results in them making the same mistakes again the next time since the information is so easy to access. It also results in things that are larger are more difficult... the "how do you architect this larger system" is something you learn by building the smaller systems and learning about them so that their advantages and disadvantages and how and such becomes an inherent part of how you conceive of the system as a whole. ... Being able to have ChatGPT do it means people often don't think about the larger problem or how it fits together.
I believe that is harder for a junior who is using ChatGPT to advance to being a mid level or senior developer than it is for a junior from the old days because of the lack of retention of the knowledge of the problems and solutions.