So, you hear a lot about these younger guys in the workplace, right? Full of beans, new ideas, sometimes a bit all over the place. I’ve been around the block a few times, seen ’em come and go. And every now and then, one of them really makes you stop and think. This isn’t some grand theory, just something I saw, something I went through watching.
My little project observation
We had this particularly nasty bug, one of those that hides deep in the system. The kind that makes seasoned developers like myself sigh and grab an extra coffee. We’d been poking at it for a couple of days, the usual routine: trace the logs, reproduce the error, bang our heads on the desk. You know the drill. Then, the boss throws this younger fella, let’s call him Sam, at it. Fresh out of college, or near enough. My first thought? Oh boy, here we go.
I mean, what was he going to do that we hadn’t? My initial checklist of doubts went something like this:
- He’ll probably just Google the error message and get stuck.
- He won’t understand the legacy code we’re dealing with.
- He’ll ask a million questions that show he’s in over his head.
- This is gonna be a waste of his time and ours, babysitting.
So, I sort of kept an eye on him, you know, from a distance. Didn’t want to crowd the kid. And what I saw was… interesting. He wasn’t doing what I expected. He wasn’t meticulously stepping through the debugger like I would have, not at first. Instead, he pulled up a bunch of tools I barely recognized, some open-source logging thingamajig, and started throwing these weird, targeted tests at the module. It looked like chaos to me. Pure, unadulterated button mashing.
I remember thinking, “This kid’s just flailing. He’s going to break something else.” I actually got up, ready to step in, offer some “gentle guidance,” you know? But then I stopped myself. Part of my own practice these days is to just watch, to see what happens. Sometimes you learn more by shutting up.
And you know what? After about half a day of this frantic, what I thought was aimless, activity, he pipes up, “I think I found it.” And damn if he wasn’t right. He’d approached it from a completely different angle, attacking the problem with a kind of brute-force creativity enabled by these newer tools I hadn’t bothered to learn properly. He hadn’t just found the bug; he’d also highlighted a couple of other potential weak spots we’d all missed because we were too stuck in our old ways of looking.
It wasn’t that he was “smarter” in the traditional sense. It was that his way of doing work was just… different. Less constrained by the “this is how we’ve always done it” mentality. He was willing to try wild stuff, to fail fast, and to use every new trick in the book. It was a bit humbling, to be honest.
So, yeah, these younger guys doing work. Sometimes they just need the space to do it their way. My “practice” now involves a lot more observing and a lot less assuming I know best. You can teach an old dog new tricks, or at least, he can learn by watching the puppies figure stuff out. It’s not always pretty, but sometimes it gets the job done surprisingly well. Made me rethink a few things, that’s for sure.
