> Having someone who’s happy to spend time “just talking”, without any specific goal to solve, will go a long way.

This is actually something I love doing with our junior developers: Often they have a question every once in a while, or they don't have any questions for too long so I ask them what they're doing currently. Both often leads to me taking a look, and discovering that they're like five miles deep into a dead end without realising it yet, and we spend an hour or two working on their problem together.

I love that time, since they usually start asking more and become increasingly confident calling my decisions into question, which in turn leads me to reflect on why I do things the way I do them, and we both end up smarter than we have been before.

One other thing I often notice is that when you're good at something, you don't care about looking good doing it. I have no qualms admitting I don't know something, or that I'd also start asking AI, or just throw some at the wall and see what sticks. This tends to build up a lot of trust with the juniors, since they realise I'm also just putting my trousers on one leg at a time.

Sure, it can be frustrating sometimes to wait for them to just… get the obvious right in front of them, but that usually comes very quickly. I can wholeheartedly recommend spending time with your juniors!

It's weird that the author contrasts experts with novices. There should be layers upon layers of expertise in between those two options. What happened to the people who do solid work in their field with varying levels of experience without being necessarily experts? Are they irrelevant?

>Don’t study the “common” things, but go all-in on the niche pockets. The common things are common enough that you’ll learn them through osmosis regardless of what your main activity is. But the niche things require active study, and ignoring the niches is how you remain a novice.

I'd add, work on the niche things that no one else wants to work on but need to be done. That's how I quickly advanced in my career, becoming knowledgeable about systems no one else wanted to touch.

Any idea where to find the "Hard" and "Expert aesthetics" articles mentioned in the article?

The links are giving me 404s.

https://boydkane.com/hard https://boydkane.com/expert_aesthetics

I find the article interesting and well written. There might be some theory crafting but it resonates with my personal experience, especially this:

> The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts.

I really like spending time with novices, especially if they are truly interested in the domain. It’s symbiotic because it also challenges my own opinions and judgements and the boost often is for everyone.

It’s not surprising though that it is hard to explain rationale. How one can fit 2 years of pain in a sentence, a paragraph or even day long story?

Direct interaction allows to shorten distance because it aligns on exact personal level. We find the efficient channels of communication based on prior experience, so it’s not building one filar from ground up to have a bridge, but instead use the almost-same-level and build upon it on both sides.