Some background: due to the whole “autistic recluse hermit” thing I’ve got going on since very young, I’ve always been the sort to search for info in books or the internet instead of other irl humans. So I don’t even have personal experience to draw from on how that changed for myself.

I’m currently mentoring some young (adult) programmers and preparing some coursework for them, and I’ve always been confused by how much difficulty beginners have with “just” searching for solutions to their problems online. (I put “just” in quotes there because I realise that it’s actually difficult for them.)

This leads to a lot of situations where they’ll ask me things and I’ll literally just send them one of the top 5 duckduckgo results that I find on a quick search, which is usually exactly what they need. Besides creating learning bottleneck (i.e. if I am otherwise busy they could be left waiting too long), I worry that they won’t develop the independence to find the solutions themselves in the future.

But I definitely don’t want to tell them to “Just Google DDG it” or RTFM. Not because I don’t think they actually should, just because I think they might take that as some sort of insult or think that I’m not interested in helping (when in fact I’m always more than happy to help even with trivial stuff like this).

I recognise that one part of the problem is that they’re not all comfortable with their English, and native language search results are usually not very good. But I reckon there’s more to it that I’m just failing to understand, and if I don’t even properly understand the problem, I won’t be able to come up with a proper solution. I don’t think this is a local issue, so I believe others here might have encountered this in the wild too and understand it better than me.

What am I missing here?

Edit: Great comments all around, I’ll ponder all the suggestions and insights here and see what I can do. Thanks comrades!

  • GreatSquare
    21·
    7 months ago

    But I reckon there’s more to it that I’m just failing to understand, and if I don’t even properly understand the problem, I won’t be able to come up with a proper solution.

    Analyse why they are stuck. You already have the answers while they don’t. Hence you knew what to search for. This indicates your course work has gaps. Gaps that they can’t think their way out without your help.

    Even young adults are building cognitive skills like abstract thinking, organisation of ideas, systematic problem solving, creative thinking etc. It’s more important they develop those higher cognitive skills rather than just solve a particular technical problem you have created. E.g. there should be multiple solutions or paths to getting to a particular solution. Going to internet search is only one path (that seems obvious to you but not them).

    If you need them to do a search, then they have to be able to create that search phrase. That’s a skill in itself that possibly requires exercises.