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!
Google isn’t a bad tool but it’s not what it used to be. And if you don’t know what you don’t know you may not get good results. You could also introduce them to a search engine using LLMs on the backend like perplexity.ai which improves the ease of use for finding real answers substantially. But you would need to teach them about limitations of this, especially for more niche topics where the LLM will make up an answer which is likely wrong if it can’t find anything. They also don’t know what they don’t know so you will need to spend some more time on metalearning about what topics, libraries, algorithms, documentation websites etc. exist in the field. Finally, you should spend some time teaching them memory encoding techniques to improve their ability to learn. Of course this is all in addition to providing most of the necessary information as part of the course work.