[PragmaticPulp]

> But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.

I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs.

One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject.

The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field.

These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things.

The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter.

It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with.

[cgriswald]

Students can learn The One True Way from their teachers as well. I think that has more to do with who is learning and who is teaching than it has to do with whether they learned from a teacher or from a video.

[squeaky-clean]

Even without the junior getting overconfident, being able to read an article about something you're trying to learn and also being able to detect bullshit on a subject you don't know about is a skill in itself.

If I decided to learn Rust today, I'd be able to catch the sentences that go against my intuitions in programming and double check them. If I were to read an article about, say, superconductors, I don't have that same intuition as I do for coding. I'd have to fact-check every single sentence or just take it as truth.

[nyokodo]

> It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources

As long as it’s kept in check I think it’s practically a necessary development stage for many. Everyone needs a starting point from where they evaluate and integrate other values and perspectives. Humility and pragmatism are learned through the process.

[karmakurtisaani]

It's also extremely motivating to learn a new field if you think you're shortcutting your way to expertise by following a big guru. By the time you realize how things really are, you're already deep enough in the topic to go further with ease.

[mhb]

Doesn't the same potential problem exist regarding the selection of a personal teacher? And the same potential solution.

[ohthehugemanate]

A great conductor once said to me, "I really like your new voice teacher, he really knows what he's doing. Not like your last voice teacher, he didn't know anything. Your first teacher was on the right path, too bad you didn't understand the message yet."

I heartily agreed the whole way through, until he revealed he had no idea who any of my teachers were. It's just that everyone feels that way.

The lesson is: blindly following a series of teachers like oracles is the way of the beginner. The path of the master is accepting that YOU are your own teacher, and everyone else is just providing tools.

[beej71]

Amen. I'm a teacher and I absolutely view my role as that of an overarching resource.

[SoftTalker]

This is junior developers, not anything to do with internet influencers.

Used to see the same thing with every junior developer who went to a conference or read a new book. I did it myself at that point in my career. All kinds of enthusiasm (which can be good) and ideas (which might not be good because the junior developer does not have the experience to be a good judge).

[chris_st]

I largely agree with you (and saw this a lot during my working years), but sometimes it's the only way new knowledge (of new frameworks, languages, ways of working, etc.) come into a company/project.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Javascript and "engineering solutions" somehow do not rhyme.