I work at what people would call a 'high-tech' company. I guess you can call me relatively still fresh out of school. This is my first real job, and I have been working here for a year and half.
As such, I've always considered myself being at the bottom of the engineer totem-pole. I recognized that there are many,many,many people out there whose knowledge and skills far exceeds my understanding. So I tried ( or so I think ) my best in terms of gaining new knowledge and skills, step by step. I'm a newbie, whatelse can I do, right?
Namely, I've read books and manuals daily ( and on the way dicovered that once you get used to it, man, perldoc, and RFCs actually tell you most everything you need to know ), read posts at programmer communities such as this, and just tried to experiments with things that I've never done before.
When I would get stuck, I went as far as I could by myself trying to solve the problem, and tried to come up with the most concise question possible.
That's probably a bit of overstatement ( since I know how lazy I am :-), but I think in general I've been faithful to my goal, and within the last year, I took a huge leap in terms of my acquired skills/knowledge. A year ago I didn't know jack about unix programming in general, perl, database, sysadmin, cgi, a bunch of protocols, etc. I now use these things daily, and I am proud that I invested on books and such, and took the time to understand these issues.
So the real question: Is it wrong to expect this to my fellow engineer co-workers?
Most of my co-workers are just incredibly smart people -- I can't believe that they are actually made of organic material, because their knowledge is so vast, and their thinking fast.
But on the other hand it really bothers me that some people don't take the time to really try to learn. I have a hard time understanding, as engineers, that one could go without wanting to know more, to be able to materialize those things that you wish were automated/simpler to use.
This post just came up because I was trying to help somebody with his perl programming. He was new to perl, but it seemed like he was new to programming after all. But I expected him to come to me with intelligent questions if I made clear that I was available for help. After all, he's an engineer, right? Unfortunately, no such luck. He never once came to me with a question other than "this doesn't work". You know how people sometimes ask questions in SOPW, and they only say "my script doesn't work"? That type of question. No details, no nothing.
And now after about 3 weeks, I took over his work. Well, at least the programming portion of it. It's been 2 days, and I already have prototypes done ( I'm not bragging -- it is a simple task ). I think he wrote maybe 10 lines of code total during that 3 weeks. Oh wait, it could have been 5 lines of code and 5 lines of comments, but who cares...
So, is this type of thing common at work places? Are my expectations too high? I'd like to know what the seasoned programmers around expect out of their co-workers. Would it be better if I just accept them as they are, shut up and get on with it?
Anyways, sorry if this was sort of off topic. I just needed to rant badly
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