Asking for help
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- Опубліковано 27 січ 2019
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More than a year ago I was working in a different field, watching your videos, barely knew anything about anything.
Now I'm behind a desk as a software engineer and I want to say thank you for your motivating and educational videos.
Please keep up the great content! You're awesome.
Your comment is really inspiring. Do you have any formal qualifications? I'm interested in switching careers and have been tackling programming for about 6 months now. But I don't have any formal qualifications in this field, do you think a portfolio showcasing my skills is enough to suffice in acquiring a job in the development field?
@@peace8859 I don't have formal qualifications at all, there are many like me who work in this field without a cs/it degree. You are right, you want to have a portfolio with a lot of projects to showcase your skills when you apply for jobs. Jobs care about your skills most of the time.
So glad you brought this up! At my first dev job I struggled with asking for help and/or not knowing how or who to ask for help. Along the way I experienced a few negative encounters from other seasoned devs on the team. I felt like quitting more times then I can count. In the end I preserved and I still work at this company. I am now the total opposite of those other devs. I take the time to help out the other new tech support and devs on our team. No one assigned me to this task... I do it because it's the right thing to do. In my mind team dynamics are much better when everyone learns together. We don't do pair programming but I feel pair or mob coding is the best approach and should just be a standard practice on all teams! Thanks again MPJ for talking about this topic!
My I ask where this job is located/nationalities working there? EG, and American Company?
If you can tell from my comment above, I am Intrigued as I have not witnessed it myself and wondering if it's Cultural thing or I have been amazingly lucky in my job roles.
Colin Richardson That’s is awesome that your roles so far have been awesome experiences! It’s a testament that there are many good & healthy team environments!
I work in the US. The company on the whole is pretty good 👍
I am in both positions at the moment, as an older guy helping new people getting into the project, and also I am being moved to different projects where other people are helping me.
And you are completely on point!
What I've seen is that people who succeed are the ones who ask a lot. That depends on the environment (i.e. there actually is someone willing to answer), but that's the general case.
Learning is a cooperative process. The teacher needs experience to find the knowledge gaps, but the learner has to express his difficulties or opinions. We expect that they will fail and say a lot of nonsense, that's okay. We also expect to get nonsense questions that have nothing to do with the problem , so we can direct the person back to the right path.
Some people at my job have failed to ask questions. It's not even about asking the right question, but a failure in initiate a conversation. Months ago a guy started his trainee program here. He might even be reading this post, as I saw that he watches this channel as well.
He was a foreigner, from a country that's deep into government problems and huge inflation. His situation is rough and we did everything we could to help him succeed here, even for some personal/familiar stuff. We extended his trainee period, we tried to welcome him the best we could, we tried to explain the same thing multiple times on our own initiative... unfortunately this person seemed too afraid to fail and too afraid to ask questions. He had big dreams and seemed to have great general knowledge about programming, but came short on actually writing code.
We considered language barriers (portuguesespanish) but he was a competent Portuguese speaker, though his native language is Spanish. We kept asking him if he was understanding what we were saying. It's was his responsibility to ask for clarification.
We considered he disliked the domain of my job (chatbots), but we use all the general concepts in programming that would apply to everything of his ambitions. He should be able to master these concepts and apply them in every domain.
We considered he disliked working on backend stuff, but then we had him work on frontend and the results were even slower and needed more rework His backend work was better.
We considered our own shortcomings on teaching him. I promised to help him outside my work hours and then proceeded to not actually doing it due to lack of time, but that would be an extra. He has to study in his own time as well. Maybe the cultural differences between us worsened the issue, but we think our message couldn't be clearer: ask questions even if they sound dumb, ask for help if you get stuck, don't be afraid.
In the end nothing worked and I think he decided to give up. If he is reading this, I truly wish the best for you, and also ,you forgot your scientific calculator here in the office. Please come get it, it was a secret santa gift for you and the one who gave you the gift is kinda pissed because you didn't take it.
Thank you. I was in a job where I didn’t know what i was doing and i felt like I was wasting everyone’s time around me. I love programming so much, but that experience made it hard for me to go back. I hope I deal with more people in the field who think like you 👌
Damn, I found your channel some weeks ago and I'm loving every piece of knowledge you share, thank YOU very much...
Nice muse!! Was in need of a some good MPJ emotional musing today. Thanks again for all your work!
When you started talking about "Code Archaeologist". I immediately resonated with it. It reminded me of the internship I had. Asking questions was a growing pain for me. Ask much as I wanted carry pride trying to fix it myself. I realized I had to ask questions.
Fantastic video, and a video that has motivated me to dedicate a couple hours per week per programmer in my team to commit to pair programming: it definitely sounds like a massive asset to their growth, my growth, and to my companies growth in the end.
1 caviat: after many years as a senior programmer, I can say that the new hires who ask questions are usually the ones that learn incredibly fast and move forward incredibly fast at the beginning. The ones who wait on asking questions until they absolutely have to tend to learn slow at the beginning and then absolutely blow passed the others. The ones that don’t ask questions ever are generally the ones that quite simply don’t make it.
My point is that it’s absolutely okay to wait maybe 15 - 20 minutes after someone asks a question. In that time they have either solved the problem or will ask you again. It ensures they are dedicated to finding an answer and gives them the opportunity not to become dependent on your answer. It’s a huge deal for me to make sure my team feels comfortable coming to me with a problem, but that doesn’t mean I’ll answer right away. A simple “yep, give me a couple minutes to finish xyz and we’ll jump into it together” is usually enough for them to find the answer on their own.
Our team is just coming out of the other side of this. Thank you for this fantastic video.
Okay. So now I know what my first job designation was, "Code Archaeologist". The rules then were simple, I am assigned a task, and have to figure it out myself. Senior dev only helped after 3 days. Also just like you said, it wasn't a well established team or codebase. I am amazed how these practices are so similar all around the world.
I totally agree. Please don't stop making such kind of videos.
I could agree with you more on the Senior Developers. Other developers should not be afraid to ask senior team members for help. It’s how we grow and learn something new.
I got to say I love these philosophic and high-level topics. When I am not working I like to listen to things that do not involve actual coding.
Very wise considerations !!!
You are awesome! Your videos are very helpful! You inspired me to create my own web development channel)! Thank you a lot!
Always so cool to hear that I've inspired some to create and teach themselves. God speed! 💛
@@funfunfunction Thanks a lot, again)
Totally agree! Propably the sponsors will not easily approve the double allocation for the pair method, but definitely it ends up saving time and money. Awesome landscape!
Yeah, pair programming looks very expensive on the surface, which is probably one of the reasons why it isn't more popular.
I think in the software archeology pattern it's important to take initiative and find your own buddies. I've been in the situation in several companies. What's worked for me is focusing on the quality of questions, rely on asynchronous communication, and alternate buddies as much as possible. Most of the time questions are the result of bad or missing documentation, so improving that is important as you go, too.
I like this video, it's wonderful. Personally I don't get an opportunity to work with senior developers like you mentioned who are kind and helpful. I have worked with people who didn't give help or hints when you need them but blame you when you wrote dirty code or you made mistakes (you heared shiiiiiiit from them) then you said that you have to accept criticism and not be angry. Pair programming is a good idea if you have a great pair with you. Good job mpj.
Thank you.
This video is very useful, I found myself recently in the first and second case, and wish to be in the third case
Excellent video as always :)
I'm currently going through dealing with having to do code archaeology right now. When I was hired there was someone I was paired with. We did the 'buddy system' and 'pair programming.' They ended up leaving. I felt like I learned a lot better doing that. This is my first job as a programmer(front end dev). So I'm having to figure out a lot of things as I go. Reserve engineering old code to add new features to apps that I had no hand in building. I feel stuck a good bit of the time, but leaving and coming back to work I can usually figure out whatever it was I having trouble with before. I'm not sure if there's much help I can get outside of calling the person that use to work here, but I don't feel comfortable doing that. I'm the only person here who knows how to code unfortunately. It is nice to know that I'm not the only one going through something like that.
Don't walk on ice! It'll give way one day!
I love your musings! Your video on how to learn a new codebase has helped me immeasurably. I hope to one day get to work for a company that is open to pair programming and mob programming.
Pair and mob programming is extremely effective but still rare for a number of reasons. With the new live mob programming format we hope to be a strong champion for the technique during 2019.
on point
Again, thanks a lot for your amazing job!
When I first started to work in a company (I'm autodidact), I had to do the fucking archaeologist, sooooo bad!
It was a terrible experience for motivation, but very very valuable also... I'd love to test the pair programming :)
Loved this episode, really resonates with my situation now. 6 months into my "first" job (ie working under someone else) and it was a mix of archaeology and a buddy system (at a point my "buddy" moved to another team so I was the only frontend dev for a while). Thankfully, the organization is moving towards pair programming but not all teams are totally onboard.
The pushback I get sometimes is usually related to time constraints, assumptions that work will slow down, and other priorities like feature work with deadlines. Any advice for those types of objections?
Code archeology - great term - this can be really hard work and seldom anything other than the code.
Great video.
For remote working pair programming may be difficult to implement, so the buddy approach is more suitable in that case
Remote pair programming works great! I did it just fine back in the day on a three-month project, and today the tools and bandwidth is much better so it should be no problem.
Yes IF u r on a similar time zone :)
That may very well not be the case.
Working with people in different time zones just sucks, period. :)
Musings!! ❤️
U are awesome sir
Thank yoo
Who is filming you? Show some backstage. Lol. Love these walking&talking.
This is how I feel when I want to contribute to an open source project. Only there's no buddy system and nobody to pair program with because I'm just some random dude on the internet.
This is a great point actually. Perhaps we could invite maintainers of OSS projects on the show and we do a PR.
@@funfunfunction I meant more along the lines of learning an OSS project's code base. There's no sort of buddy system in place. I could ask a maintainer for help but I have a feeling that it must be annoying to have random people on the internet asking them how their code base works so that they can "help" (they're probably more of a nuisance than they are a help). I could try to learn the code base myself but it's overwhelming and I wouldn't know how to start.
To be fair (and maybe this was your point) a good first step would be to create a PR that fixes a simple problem. There are videos on youtube where people talk about how to create a PR but nobody (at least that I know of) has sat down with a maintainer of an OSS project to create a PR. I think it's a great idea and a lot of people (myself included) would find it useful and interesting. You could even turn it into a series. It could be similar to what you and David do, when you give yourselves an hour to create a project from scratch, only in this instance you would work with a maintainer of an OSS project and instead of trying to code something from scratch you could try to fix a bug in an existing project, then make a PR for the fix. I actually think that's a great idea and I'd love to see it.
Now I want to move to Stockholm as well 😍😍😍
As a software instructor I often show your do I have to be nice video, this one might just have to make its way in
💛💛💛💛
Ska du flytta till Sthlm? Till slottet? Rosenbad? Ska Sverige äntligen få den ledare vi förtjänar?! Äntligen lite goda nyheter!!!
I've been in this situation (the case number 1) for two years and I'm looking for another job. Bad thing to work this way.
Do you have *palms* in Stockholm? If not palms, what these are then? 5:35
I am writing from the opposite Baltic coast and we never had anything similar. Because of the climate.
I know that it's not popular and there are better and more efficient ways of working but I kind of like code archeology. Of course I enjoy good, well documented code that have tests and everything but I don't mind (and I did in the past) taking over a projects that has been for some reason abandoned by the original programmer and is a mess. This happen quite often when company is building new product and they have one or two guys on it and one of them decided to move away or vanish for any reason. Code archeology is slow, it may be frustrating but if the employer understands what it means to put a new guy on mystery code then it can be kind of rewarding.
It's like with the builders and actual archeologists. Builder just want to quickly dig a hole, build a building and deliver, then builder hits ancient bone and his infuriated because have to stop. Then archeologist comes in and is trying to slowly dig that bone out, figure out why it's the and what it was doing there. I'm not saying that having archeologist working on site is good when your goal is to build but there are people who actually don't mind it or even enjoy it.
Of course if you have a team of people and you are bringing a new guy then have some decency to have a proper way to introduce him in to the code base but if it's a project that just lost his "master mind" and there is no docs then sometimes it's good to find a guy who knows how to straighten things up and will not want rewrite everything after 10 minutes of looking at the code.
how are the palm trees in the background around 5:25 surviving in Sweden O_O??? excellent video btw.
I honestly don't know if they are fake or dead. :) I doubt that they have the capability to hibernate, but who knows? (Horticulturists, probably)
Looks cold but fun 👍
It was SO cold. -6 celsius. Me and Isa were severely underdressed and had to go for emergency hot chocolate after the shoot.
Ouch, you hid the cold well. Good idea with the hot chocolate 👍
Musing month, how UNPROFESSIONAL! 😁
Why on earth youtube allows only one like per video? 🤷🏻♂️
What are your thoughts on constant pair programming? I was recently let go from a company that did this. We were remote and would share our screens and be on a call all day. Each day we would pair up(rotating each day) and one person would share their screen and drive while the other navigates for the whole day. I didn't like it because I felt I didn't have control and would get lost when navigating and when driving it felt like I was just being told what to do the whole time. I also didn't like the fact that I had to tell the other person when I was leaving to get a drink or go to the bathroom and having to take lunch when everyone is ready. There was a lot of social pressure involved. Talking while programming made it really difficult to concentrate and think deeply about a problem and made it difficult to do exploratory stuff since the pair would often already know it or not care. I think pair programming is great if you get stuck on a bug or need to design something. I also think it's much easier to do in real life with one computer rather than remotely. Overall I think it's a good practice but it shouldn't be mandatory or my experience was the wrong way of doing it. I'm glad I don't have to do it anymore.
that sounds terrible. if you're remote i dont see a need to be in constant contact all day like that. that is very annoying. I am remote and im just by myself. attend a tech meeting in the morning and talk to my team mate through slack. maybe once every morning and that's it.
Hi! I wanted to thank you for your inspiring videos. If you don’t mind, here’s my turn to ask for help :)
I got out of coding bootcamp at the end of September and found multiple jobs immediately. I trained in JS/React and decided to take a junior position learning Angular and Java as a full-stack developer. I’m in a position where the financial side of things, especially the prospects are great, the company is stable and I’m only expected to learn, learn and learn in the first 6 months or so.
My insecurity lies however in the fact that this being a small company with 2 senior developers, one of them being the tech lead and my “buddy”, everybody’s overburdened. Code review is sporadical, I just hack away and now my buddy is on a months-long project abroad, basically only coming back to the office on Fridays. The backend code is overwhelming, frontend is legacy AngularJS 1.2 code and I feel like although I’m learning for sure, I’m falling behind and there’s no immediate prospect of me honing my React skills, the framework that I actually really like. So early in my career I have a feeling that if I stay here long enough I won’t be up-to-date with other technologies, even though financially I’d be set for a long time. I also find AngularJS to be soul-crushing and nowhere near as elegant or lean as React so I’m having issues motivating myself to work. I don’t have that sense of accomplishment that I feel when I write React, because most of the user stories I get culminate at inserting a tick into a table with the corresponding backend programming.
I really don’t know what to do because each month I have a feeling that the company is investing in me, I’m not being terribly productive and I feel like leaving soon would be a more honest, fair decision, on the other hand besides the occasional frustration I get from the tech lead everybody is super laid-back and helpful. What do you think, are my fears legitimate or am I just overthinking? I know I could invest time heavily into off-the-job practice but to be honest, I’m at this point in my life where I like not to turn on my computer at home, having missed the normalcy of private moments of my life in the last 15 years entirely due to an other extremely demanding line of work.
If you could give an opinion on this, I’d appreciate it immensely :)
Hey dude, I've been exactly in your position a year ago So here are my advices:
- Choose a full stack that you would enjoy and start learning/using it for at least a month (i.e: React, Apollo, GraphQL, Express, Sequelize, PostgreSQL)
- Try to find companies using the stack that you choose and apply
- Tell them you wanna leave your current job because you want to code with technologies you are pationate about
- Get hired, leave your archeology job and voilà !
At least that's almost what I did and I am now in a start-up, a bit less paid for more hours sometimes but I'm feeling like I'm improving everyday and that's what I wanted from day one.
Calidev yes, that would generally be the idea, but... although I’m not using the latest technologies, I get dipped into a bit of everything. Last project was data visualization, next one is actual data science. Nothing programmatically fancy, but I think this may serve me well in the long run. On the other hand, I can’t really decide if this is more important at this point or the mastery of the latest & greatest technologies.
I am starting an internship and most probably it will be archaeologist type of situation with this Angular app. As far as I know no one currently working in the company knows Angular well. Whats more no one actually touched code of that app since it was made and the guy who made it no longer works in that company... Oh and I started learning Angular a week ago...Any tips?
God speed! I hope they are patient with you. Looking at things positively, this gives you an easier chance to prove yourself cause they won't hold you against high standard. The bad: this is not good in a long run for your career. If you like working on it - read a lot, try participating in communities online - it does not have to learn it from people in your company.
@@Arvigeus Thanks for your tips man. I will try to broaden my perspective on things :)
Hey MPJ! You forgot to link the video to your quokka demonstration (20:11). No big deal, take care
Thank you so much for pointing this out, fixed!!
Yes, this topic is fascinating. I agree with your point of view, specially the training and supporting your peers part. However, I feel some developers will take your help for granted.. and it is weird, but they may ask for support on the smallest of things (not even business logic related). It gets to a point that it’s a bit abusive (asking the same question uncountable times).. sometimes just taking your time and doing some research also helps immensely in your own carrear growth. On that note, I personally love the “archeology process” 😂😂😂 it’s the most fun part of joining a team/company to me.. it provokes me to learn new syntax, libraries, understand how things are being orchestrated, etc.. Anyways, my point is.. I agree on supporting your peers, but sometimes I believe a “lazy” effect may happen because of it. What do you think about it?
If you hired someone who is lazy, they are going to stay lazy whether you put them in a corner or give them lots of help. I would say that if your organization has problem with lazy developers, odds are that the problem is that you have problems with accountability, not with giving too much support (or having a question-centered culture).
I'm not really sure why you would love archeology, or think it's an effective way of learning. Having nobody to ask slows me down to at least a 10th of the speed I otherwise have in learning a new library, syntax, orchestration etc.
@sandra: Personally, I've always loved to help someone out - I can always improve them and explaining things at a basic level tends to improve my own thinking of things.
In these cases, you might want to help the person to fish, so to speak. They might be new and insecure in information seeking, so show them how you would have searched for the problem. Many developers today have been learning through assembly-instruction-tutorials that don't teach problem solving so they might actually need to learn that from you. Use the socratic method to guide their thought process. Another reason might also be that they are feeling insecure in general, or are stressed. If you are, then you tend to miss obvious solutions i.e. "google the error message" and they might need a little boost of confidence to get them out of their panic mode.
I would also like to try to stay clear of calling things a "management problem" and rather use terms like "team problem" as the former displaces blame. Yes, your manager might be the one allocating tasks but as a team member you still have significant influence over the team culture. Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic.
All that said, a good manager DOES allocate time for this, which is why I push for formalized buddies or pair programming.
I totally agree that it is best if time is properly allocated from management to support developers new to the codebase.
But for the case you are taking about, it seems to me like you have a problem with an individual, not really the general approach on how to deal with stuff in teams. If someone is not wearing pants to work, the problem is not that we lack a no-pants policy, if you get what I mean. :)
Sometimes I have a brain freeze during pair programming sessions. Anyone else who goes through this?
Warm Up your ears :D
Hello MPJ, Can we have a series on DevOps?
It's a good subject in a way, buy I'm not too hot on it, and it often makes bad videos because it is mostly configuration and long waiting times. I have not yet figured out how to make it Interesting.
@@funfunfunction True! But it has steep learning curve for beginners, GCP doesn't have good materials too.
Love the backstage, I wish I could be there
Is "asking for help is hard" such a common thing? I hear it every so often and think it's a bunch of nonsense and ignore it.
But then I hear "asking for help is hard" again, And again.. And again.. and again here in this video.. and in the comments below..
Every job I've ever been in, people are always at someone else's desk helping or asking for help themselves.
I don't know if it's a cultural thing or not? But I have worked with lots of different nationalities (though they have all moved to the UK).
I am genuinely intrigued now as I have not witnessed it myself.
Hi MPJ. Semi-senior dev here. I would like to get your feedback for my current scenario. I have trained 4 people in last half year that joined our big project and am currently a "buddy" to one new guy who joined recently and I have quite new situation for me. I have went above and beyond to explain things to this new person who actually has on paper more experience than me and keeps ignoring everything I elaborate to him. Whenever I elaborate he nods when I ask if he has any questions he never has and later on he asks most basic fundamental questions that you'd assume someone would know that arent related to software development at all like "What should put here as task after i completed " or I send him a one page list of all of the most important data he needs to get his simple task done and he never opens the file and keeps pinging everyone why this field is not accepting something and why nobody told him even tho he had first week to just read documents and ask questions, here is like 5 pages of welcome pdf that he needs to just open once in first week but he never bothered and even ignored first few tasks given to him.
I find my self constantly explaining everything to this person multiple times and I just cant help it anymore after a month to not get frustrated and stressed.
I've had 2 cases: a person that I was willing to help (giving me infinite patience) and wasn't accomplishing any tasks , and a person that I hated but was intelligent. Honestly, it's rough. In both cases I talked with my bosses about the issues I was having, and AFAIK that's the most I could do.
I'm watching all these videos meant for software developers with jobs and I don't even have a job lol
I cant help being annoyed when you have to repeat yourself 5 times in quick succession to explain things because they dont want to listen but still want help
If you have to repeat yourself five times it might be because the other person isn't listning, but it MIGHT also be because your skills at teaching can use improvement. You certainly have more control over the latter, and improving communication skills is always good, so I mostly assume it is myself that is unclear whenever I see that people don't understand.
Repetition is also key to teaching. If you look at world-class teachers like Khan Academy, they repeat themselves a lot, but in different ways. This is because the brain of each student is different, and will require different explanations.
If you, unlike Khan Academy, have access to the student in-person, such as when a co-worker asks you a question, you can spend a little bit more time listening to understand the motivation behind the question and the students existing knowledge level. This will allow you to tailor your explanation and reduce the chance that you'll need to explain it again.
@@funfunfunction Ill try to be more mindful. I never show my annoyance because as you say that never helps.
Craig Freeman try Socratic questioning. Basically, reply to their question with a more drilled in open ended question. Continue that until they’ve explained and answered their own question. Might work better for someone who doesn’t learn as well through lecture or instruction.
I am not sure how your seniority is related to ability (or willingness) to help other people? Without going into whether you should or should not help, I believe that seniority should be determined by you ability to solve tasks of certain complexity.
Solving complex tasks is, in my experience, achieved at a pretty early level in a software development career - possibly even junior. Most university graduates are pretty decent at it.
Having the ability to lift the colleagues around you, spreading knowledge effectively and inspiring to positive change, is far more difficult and important and such, in my opinion, a much bigger factor in what we should view as senior. Problems in software development are very rarely due to developers lacking in problem solving ability - much more often it is due to team cultural values around work hygiene, and how to perform it. Teams that don't know how to do effective code review, unit testing etc and, in the context of this video, lacks systems for knowledge sharing.
@@funfunfunction In my experience, technical mastery can be achieved reasonably early in career. However, ability to understand problem and devise a solution that is both adequate, reusable and non/disrupting to existing code base is a trait of a senior developer. For example, I expect from juniors in my team to have technical mastery. I am there to help them understanding big picture and to help them understand what needs to be done (and rarely how to do it). Lack of testing discipline is solved by not accepting code that is not tested. Thank you for your time and clarification. Much appreciated.
It is interesting how you can manage to speak perfectly well in english yet all the time saying "just" with "u" instead of "j". I guess this bug is just a feature.
yust do it for great yustice has turned into my little brand now haha
It's for some reason very very hard to shake. I'm well aware of the error but I don't really know how to get rid of it. If I focus on it the dialouge becomes stiff and if I relax I start making the error again. :)
@@funfunfunction It is a very swedish thing don't worry about it. Wanted to point it out so you'll improve just like you said in the video. Help you. Great content. Love these outside walks.
I thought you, need a help... The video title is a little ambiguous ....
jesus is this a palms?? Sweden is weird, man...
Edit: UNDER THE BRIDGE??
Yeah, stockholm is a weird place. :) Joking aside, stockholm gets really hot during the summer and it works well then.
@@funfunfunction Come spring, I'd be surprised if these palms are still alive. The deal breaker for them is the frost, not the lack of warmth in the summer I believe
I'm can't say for sure but there is non zero chance that they are artificial