Ask HN: My 16 year old brother is job shadowing me, what should I do with him?

[imns]

I'm a UI Developer and my 16yr old brother is job shadowing me this week. The current project I'm working on uses backbone.js and I fear he will be lost if I try to explain it to him. He's had one semester of Java so far and knows HTML / CSS fairly well.

I'm open to any suggestions on how I should fill my day with him.

[shoo]

i recall doing a couple of days of work experience at a similar age, perhaps a bit younger, where i was parked in front of an old linux machine and left to learn/play with some interpreted language i'd never seen before.

given i was only there for two days, this wasnt going to turn into some ongoing work, i think giving me some hands-on and engaging thing to do - despite it being totally independent to the project they were working on - was probably a good idea. from memory i found it pretty interesting.

[dropdownmenu]

Is it possible to include him on some sort of design / architecture meeting with your team? That might give him enough to think about and learn from while keeping him engaged.

[imns]

That's a really great idea. I think I will try to schedule a lot of meetings that day.

[serf]

why not do your job, and let him shadow you? Have some faith that he'll ask questions if he's lost.

[Mz]

When I was a teen, I visited my older sister at work one day. I ended up doing stuff like stuffing envelopes for her. After I left, the department hired some assistants to do more of that kind of thing for people in her position so they weren't doing so much admin type tasks.

When I had a corporate job, I did an hour of job shadowing here and there for specific purposes. When in another department, I just watched as they did typical work so I could better understand what they did in a department that supported ours. In my own department, there was more explaining because I was shadowing someone faster and better than me with the express purpose of improving my speed and general process.

At age 14, I was introduced to computers by a friend of my sister's. My sister was in college and I was visiting her. The friend was surprised at how much I was able to grasp given that I had no computer background (this was in the dark ages, when I had a yellow rotary phone and pet dinosaur).

So I think: A) Just letting him watch is perfectly fine. B) If he asks questions or has a specific purpose, you can tailor it some at that time.

[imns]

Don't you think he will get bored sitting in a chair next to me for 8 hours, staring at code that is way above his head? I fear he won't get much of that and since he's going into computer science I want to make it exciting for him.

[stevejalim]

While what I'm about to suggest may well hamper your coding productivity that day, why not 'think aloud' as much as possible that day and narrate [the core of] what you're doing? Help your brother get a better idea of the kind of decisions that you're making and how you're solving problems.

[Mz]

It is very possible you are underestimating him. A lot can be picked up from context. There are plenty of discussions on HN about how hard it is to learn to code and that there is "something missing" from current methods for teaching it. Since he can ask questions, assuming you are someone he feels comfortable "bugging", the odds are good he can decide for himself how much to ask and when in order to foster actual understanding.

I learned to code when someone hand-coded a small site for me and then gifted me the code. My then husband was double majoring in history and computer science. He had to explain FTP program to me and some other very basic things. Then I began playing with the code by just substituting color codes for the ones already there and seeing what it did. This is not very different from my school experience with French where they would give you a sentence ("The house is red") and have you substitute the one descriptor ("The house is blue", "The house is yellow").

Perhaps he will be bored. Or perhaps this will be a unique learning opportunity for him. Helen Keller learned to sign in spite of being both deaf and blind and a small child. Her parents already had some homemade "signs" for her to use to engage in crude communication and the teacher was just persistent in signing things into her hand over and over and over until, one day, she realized the signs had meaning. It just suddenly clicked. Then she ran around asking, in essence, "What's this?!" and "What's this?!" about everything she could get her hands on.

We don't fully understand how that happens, but it does.

FWIW: I homeschooled my two gifted-learning disabled sons for many years. My oldest thinks in pictures and needs broad context before the details make sense. Other people need all the details to build the broad context. Different strokes for different folks.