My Man Socrates
What do you remember that you learned by rote?
Maybe you remember the capitals of all the US States. Maybe you remember some proofs from geometry. Chances are though you don’t remember much that you learned by simple rote. The things that you learned by failing and struggling with on the other hand…
Enter Socrates
You don’t need to know anything about greek philosophy. What you need to know is that Socrates is so popular of a philosopher that he has a bit part in ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ and quite possibly his biggest contribution to western thought is the Socratic Method.
The Socratic Method consists of asking a series of questions that lead the student who is answering the questions to arrive at the conclusion on their own. This is distinct from rote teaching where the answer is provided in that the student understands all the intermediary steps to arrive at the conclusion and is more likely to remember that which they have achieved on their own.
Go pick up a copy of ‘The Little Schemer’ even if you already understand recursion and the workings of this method will become clear.
How this applies (imperfectly) to managing junior developers
Your junior people will run into problems that they cannot solve on their own. In a quick and dirty world you can just tell them what to do and they will more or less faithfully execute what you tell them to the best of their ability simply because they are getting paid for that. The problem is, your junior person doesn’t grow when you do this and they will just keep coming back to you asking questions and you will continue to tell them what to do and they will do it slower than you could have done it yourself and everyone loses.
In a clean perfect world; You take the time to devise how the issue would be solved, you possess the introspection necessary to accurately assess what your thought process would be and devise clear unambigous questions that will lead your junior person to the solution you know is best. Best because in this perfect world you as a teacher already have the answers and are never wrong.
In the imperfect world in which I live it tends to go something like this; Ask some what and why questions so that we both understand the context. Ask some “what if” and “how about” questions to back the person out into the big picture from where they solve the problem themselves. It’s magic.