[snarfy]

This reminds me of an intern that recently went through our company.

A part of his summer project was to make some api calls to a soap endpoint. We were all very busy so he tried to be as self sufficient as possible and not ask questions. After about a week, he comes to me with questions about soap xml schema and implementation details.

He did not understand it's already built into the tooling. You literally drag-n-drop a url endpoint into your project and get a proxy class for calling the soap endpoint. He was way off into the weeds trying to finish his project. A little guidance helps.

[fnord123]

Hopefully you lot took it as your own failure and not the poor intern dropped into the field with one of the most over complicated technologies and 'magical thinking' tooling.

[snarfy]

Sure, we shouldn't have been so busy to not support our teammates.

Still, I don't consider it a big failure. A lot of people go through life using technologies without really knowing how they work. He could have very well drag-n-dropped the soap endpoint and never learned a thing about soap. Now that he knows a bit about it he may alter his decisions in the future knowing the guts e.g. 'don't do that because it won't work through soap' etc.

[fnord123]

Fair enough. I was mostly concerned that it doesn't become a 'haha stupid interns' thread.

[btschaegg]

Not saying that is necessarily the case, but situations like this can also develop if you have a lot of basic knowlege (especially regarding tooling) that is neither documented properly nor spread amongst most of the team.

I've had scenarios where I spent an afternoon building a little one-off application I needed for some specific debugging task only to be told a month or so later that someone already built a proper tool for that - but only one developer knew about it, and it was stored in a different repository I had no access to.