L Don
L Don
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

I mean it’s great you put in the work for the article, and I know you mean well, but I really couldn’t disagree more with the premise. You said in the second paragraph that people give you projects that you don’t know how to do and that’s the real world.

While that might be the experience you actually encounter at work, its an absolutely awful way to learn. The whole point of going to a site to learn is well……TO LEARN.

Can you imagine going into practically any industry where you’re dealing with safety or human life and the class is like “Healthcare is about helping people….good luck out there”. ?????

Its true that you tend to learn the things best that you struggle with the most and eventually get right, precisely because the amount of effort imprints that experience on your brain, but this is a very very bad way to tackle real world problems when you are specifically trying to learn the right way in the first place. The very serious problem in learning this way is two fold.

#1. Delay in time, confidence and quality.
You can seriously delay your learning process and even learn the wrong way for weeks, months, and in some cases years.

#2. Guessing + trial and error isn’t a good foundation to build on.
You might have a passing answer for many of the questions but it could be for the wrong reason and you wouldn’t know any different.

In short, mentorship is vital in programming for the vast majority of people to go from programmers to effective programmers. There are far too many things you just don’t wind up teaching yourself with a quick paragraph and a pass or fail test. You need to know the why as much as the how, and this comes from being shown in examples. Its true that some people can just explode by learning this way, but it is a very small portion of people. Most of us benefit way way more from a great mentor or program that shows you several different how’s, why’s, and what not to do’s.

    L Don

    Written by

    L Don