While I’ve got a pretty good memory, a lot of the times I don’t have a direct or complete answer for their question. I’ll have a tingle of a memory that is similar to their question. So I’ll give them that as a starting point and tell them how I’d approach the solving the problem. But they get frustrated that I didn’t solve their problem immediately. That I can’t point them at a blog post of Stack Overflow answer.

But a dev with 1 to 3 years experience? They’ll take that non-answer and run with it.

And I get it. The 1 to 3 probably has 1 maybe 2 tasks they’re working on. The 6 to 10 (to 15) has probably a half dozen things they’ve got to keep track of. Researching is probably pretty low on their list.

I spent hours fixing his code and hand it back to him and it's broken again in a week.

I had to wash my hands of it. The only advice he's getting out of me now is to follow a single tutorial all the way through until he gets that one tutorial working and then compare the tutorial to his code. I'll answer specific questions, but I'm not going to try to mentor him until he's ready to receive the wisdom.

The reality is that half of the tutorials and answers you can find won't work. Either because they're doing something entirely different or because they're for a tool/framework that's deprecated the functionality.

A beginner won't be able to tell this simply because none of the pieces are known to them.

When a person with more experience finds these tutorials they'll likely know within seconds if a given answer or tutorial is even remotely applicabe, which enables them to be much more thoughtful about what to do.

You'll potentially waste weeks on trivial tasks if you're hellbent on actually fully understanding something right at the start, and if the beginner does this the more experienced ppl will complain how inapt they're.

Honestly, you both just sound like toxic people in that regard and should not be allowed to work with total beginners. Which is fine, but the issue really isn't with the pupil that's just clueless. They need somebody to give them a tutorial and guide which is applicable and they'll learn how that piece works, now keep repeating that until they've got a basic understanding of the system and only then can they work on their own

The same. Especially under pressure. Which makes it virtually impossible for me to pass an oral technical interview.

It's crazy. I sometimes get the itch to learn a new language like Rust, but I haven't even come close to reaching the bottom of all the languages I already know. They are inventing new things faster than anyone can acquire them.

Well: I have recently been teaching programming to a 10-year old kid, and this morning he told me about the syntax {X..Y}, which expands to the range of characters between X and Y. I have likely typed {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9} a thousand times and now I know you can write {0..9}. I was floored and have it on my todo list tomorrow to see if that is a new feature or if I simply somehow missed it in the man page--which I thought I had carefully read multiple times and which I additionally have skimmed many times--consistently for decades :(.