| > But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water. I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs. One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject. The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field. These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things. The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter. It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with. |