On 2010 Jul 15, at 02:30, Trey Darley wrote: > Suppose you have a junior colleague with bang-up technical skills but who > gets thrown off-track whenever things don't work as expected. Suppose this > person gets routinely blocked from working until a more senior person has > the availability to unblock them. Suppose this person routinely gets > blocked and it turns out that there is a common-sense workaround. What > would you do to help them to see the light? > > The way I see it, problem-solving skill is a kind of mental framework, > dependent on various heuristics and whatnot. [iinap : psychologist :: > iinal : lawyer] So this isn't really a question of technical skills but > rather more along the lines of personal development.
I would give the junior SA a problem that can be worked during the business day. I'd give them deliberately vague instructions, little more than some rough pointers, then send them off to work on it. I'd check back with them, and as long as they were making steady progress in roughly the right direction, I'd offer no further input. If they started down a slightly wrong path, I'd keep an eye on it, but going down wrong paths is normal. If they got too frustrated, or started on a direction they really shouldn't, I'd step in and give them just enough information to set them back on the right path again. This method was used successfully with several junior SAs. They would learn by doing how to check things, how to investigate. Usually it took several cases like that before they were comfortable with really solving problems of more than a trivial nature on their own. Often, the problem I gave them would be one clearly non-time sensitive so they could spend weeks on it if necessary. ---- "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." Edward R Murrow (1964) Mark McCullough [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
