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!
For me, link to documentation whenever possible. Like, not in a “go read this for yourself” sense, but more of a “I’m citing my sources” sense. if you CAN answer a question by pointing to a line or paragraph in the official documentation that answers it, or by linking a couple different bits of docs together, do so. Bonus points if this is a live scenario, where you can do this research live in front of them. Eventually, they should start getting the clue that you’re not pulling your knowledge out of your ass, you’re just using the same resources that are available to them.
The other thing I do a lot, for folks who don’t seem to want to think for themselves, is to enter only-questions mode. It’s trickier to avoid being condescending with this, so be careful, you have to be able to recognize when to go back to real answers, or they’ll just spiral into frustration. If someone asks “How do I XYZ?” (well, usually I’ll have to ask leading questions to get them to ask that in the first place), I’ll come back with “Which part are you having trouble with? X, Y, or Z?” If I’m helping someone and they say “I don’t know” I’ll often come back with “Why not? Which part don’t you know, A or B? Not knowing something is a solvable problem.”
My experience is heavily in one-on-one teaching, so it all amounts to “lead by example” for me. YMMV.