I'm a recent grad myself, and I've been an SDE-1 at Amazon for around 8 months now, at my first real job. I've done a fair share of question asking myself, but I always try to do my own research first and try to learn from how my more experienced teammates tackle problems. Another SDE-1 joined my team ~3 months ago. He was given a couple of months and some minor tasks to ramp up, following which he was assigned tasks related to what I'm currently working on. My manager has given me the responsibility of helping him out as I've been doing fairly well, and I'm comfortable with everything I'm working on. The new guy clearly does not meet the SDE-1 bar, and I'm not quite sure how he got past the technical interviews. After I spent close to 3 days almost entirely on bringing him up to speed on the system, he started working on his tasks. Since then, he has constantly had 10-15 questions a day for me on silly little things that he should honestly be able to figure out on his own. I've tried taking my time explaining stuff to him, and I've even tried reversing his questions onto him to understand his thought process, but he seems to be drawing a blank at most times. He's trying to learn, and is a fairly hard worker, but logical thinking is just something that evades him. Just as an example, I recently spent half an hour undoing an unholy mess of git commits and merge conflicts he had caused trying to make a simple code change. Helping the new guy has eaten up a chunk of my time in the past few weeks, and I feel that this is hampering my own growth, as I have a lot to learn myself. He has an official, senior mentor in the team, but he still comes to me with all his questions since I'm the same level as him and he's more comfortable with me. I've brought this up with my manager, but my manager encouraged me to keep helping him, telling me that everyone grows at their own rate when they're new, and that recent grads should be given time to grow. My productivity has actually dropped as a result, and I'm not even getting brownie points for mentorship, as I'm not his official mentor. Any advice on dealing with this would be appreciated.
Do the amazon thing and anonymously give feedback in your little system so he gets put on a PIP and eventually takes a long walk off a short pier from the dog park on Doppler
anytime feedback has been scrapped. and the review process is now skewed towards being positive about people.
Talk to him, describe your experience. Suggest some compromise, e.g. send questions in email when they aren't urgent, ask question in dedicated time. Or if you expect him so be autonomous, offer him to spend 1 hour to solve problem himself before asking your help. This will limit his questions to no more than 8 per day. Or suggest using round robin approach to ask teammates. Negotiate ;)
Only the strong survive
Maybe this is the way your supervisor is helping you grow. If you can teach this guy how to be autonomous, you can teach anyone. Maybe he knows someone higher up and you got stuck with the shit end of the stick. Maybe you're really awful at explaining things and should work on that.
Maybe he doesn't have.. Most ICs are very helpful but not teachers by any means. And they don't have to be teachers if they don't want to.
are you teaching him how to fish or just feeding him fish?
Tell him you're busy and schedule a meeting later in the day. He will then start figuring out himself as he can't just sit and do nothing until after a few hours. At Microsoft, we set status as busy in Skype when we don't want interruption. I don't know what you have in Amazon but try to use a tool as well. Or go hide to somewhere else and work so he can't easily find you.
This. Set some time at the end of the day to go over all his time at once.
Going by the example of git...it is hard to conclude that he is not good enough...He was interviewed by senior people in your team..who have more work experience than you...I am assuming he was hired through a fair process ...if that's the case, then the interviewers found him fit enough for the position he is currently working at... You need to have more patience...perhaps I would recommend just talk to him straight forward and ask him why he is taking so much time..everyone learns at different rate..what matters is the willingness to learn and grow.
Or may be you are working at the wrong level if you think you are too good to be working at the same level as him
Set out an organized process of engagement. Set the exact time and day to speak to him. That way you get your stuff done, he has time to possibly figure it out himself and you can answer his questions. I'd do a brief morning mid day and late afternoon catch up. Use this to refine your managerial skills and as a time to learn more on your end. Plenty of below the bar employees become mid tier by just being coached
I hate to just state the obvious thing, but have you talked to him? How can he know he’s a nuisance to you if you keep enabling his behavior by answering all of his questions?
He does know, as he's mentioned a couple of times that he knows he's not the smartest tool in the shed, and that he's asking me too many questions. I've flat-out told him a couple of times to spend more time trying to solve something before coming to me, but he often gets completely stuck on an issue and then has to reach out for help. He's a friendly guy overall, and he's trying, and my manager has asked me to help him, so I can't really bring myself to refuse his questions.