Recently I have been given an opportunity to teach and pass my knowledge of my craft on….this should be an exciting day….
As I used to be a teacher in public schools, I was like “I got this, no prob”. Instead I found myself in a frustrating situation.
I was tasked with teaching/mentoring a recent graduate colleague who was put in a position as “developer” because they had “experience” in college developing. The company’s mechanism for hiring people didn’t do any rigorous testing to validate these claims, it was more on how did this person’s personality fit and worry about their technical skills as on-the-job training.
The first thing you may be saying, if you were like me, would be “that is insane, why would you do that”. But I have learned that 85% of success is your ability to work with others and only 15% is technical skills. I believe this is because we know when we “like” someone and are willing to work with them, versus most people are not technical enough to know what is “right” technically. So it is much easier to teach technical skills then people skills…..relatively.
“I knew the most when I was 18” – Michael Stewart
Do you remember when you were just learning something, there is a period that you learn just enough to believe you know “soo much”, but really at this point you are ignorant to your ignorance. So often we hear others around us claiming to be “experts”, but to find out their actual experience they may have done some one-off training at some point that had some relevance to the topic, or read a blog somewhere.
“How can I fill your cup if you bring it to me full?” – Unknown
Pride and hubris is truly a sin, it will bring the greatest of us to ruin. The best way to improve and to get even better is to be ready to learn from others. This will not only help you understand things you may have not known before, but it builds a relationship with the teacher that you value what they are saying.
So, you may be thinking I ran into this issue with my new “student”…..well actually it was me who was too prideful, and I didn’t understand immediately what opprotunity laid before me to help shape and mold this person. Rather, it became frustrating that this person was hindering progress due to a severe lack of development skills. I found myself thinking “but they said they understood Javascript….but they don’t even know how to create and use a variable”.
I am a very lucky person; I have parents, a manager, and friends who helped to ground me and try looking at it from a different perspective. This was a golden opportunity to build a great working relationship with this new developer and help shape them in practices that I believe make great developers. I was also lucky that I caught myself early in this opportunity so as not to have alienated this up-and-coming developer.
The lesson for me….take every opportunity to become better, and sometimes you will be given an opportunity to become better at something you never thought you needed to learn.