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!

  • redtea
    7·
    11 months ago

    The perennial problem! You’ll have to teach them. It’s hard when you realise other people can’t figure out things that come naturally to you. But it’s very common. And there will be things that are opaque for you that seem obvious to others. You have to build capacity and scaffold the relevant skills.

    Break down the task (here, of problem solving in your field) and work out what the key skills are, including how to decide what information is useful and what should be discarded for being unreliable. People new to this might not be able to figure this out for themselves.

    Then you tell them how to do step 1 or what to look out for in terms of reliable information, followed by giving them a small, achievable task that directly follows from what you taught them.

    Then do the same for step 2 and give a task that consolidates what they learned on step 1 and adds the new bit. Then the same for step 3, with a task that builds on steps 1 and 2. And so on. You can give a reminder about what you taught them earlier but this can just be a signpost. Then get ready to be frustrated when you do all this and half of them don’t do it then complain about not being taught.

    For example if I was teaching someone to cook, I wouldn’t get far if I told them they need to look in the recipe book. I need to find a recipe with several steps and techniques, then build the capacity to complete each step in isolation. How to fix a dish when you slip with the salt or what to do if it dries out or if you’ve cooked it for the required time and the middle is still raw. Only then can I send them to the recipe book and tell them to put it all together.