[pm90]

Setting explicit time frames is really useful for both the mentor and mentee (or manager and employee etc).

If someone is unable to complete a task within a set time, but explains their thought process and what they tried, I consider that to be a completely valid use of their time. Even if they are completely honest and say: "This seemed too hard and I tried for the first 15 minutes and then got bored and procrastinated" that is also ok. We're all humans after all.

Its when someone spends their time on excuses and fobs that is really annoying and unproductive. Generally: most people will invent excuses. People that went to college (I went to college!) get really good at this since you need to invent excuses all the time to get past annoying social activities and classes.

In most cases, providing the space to fail and proceed allows developers to gain the confidence to be upfront. Of course there will always be those that don't get the message, or try to game the system. But they tend to fall really really far behind and it becomes pretty obvious that they're not doing well.

[ethbr0]

Junior developers often can't tell the difference between "I don't have the skill to do this" and "I don't have access/knowledge of internal processes to do this."

You can bang your head against the latter forever without making progress, especially if it's un/semi-documented, mostly tribal knowledge.

And the best way you're able to guess at it is by prior experience at other companies, which junior developers don't have.

[inopinatus]

I like to tell juniors, "if you learned something, you didn't fail".

[hgsgm]

Did I miss something? I didn't need excuses to manage my classes or social calendar. I wasn't great at either, maybe I should have used excuses to dodge consequences and get better grades and be more popular?