I generally default to "Yes", but the alternative is "Put this off for later" and folks who are not elementary school English teachers very rarely receive another look to their email if I can't address it immediately. I don't keep track of it but I think this means about 60% of people get yes these days.<p>Things which induce me to drop what I am doing and immediately get to work on someone's behalf:<p>1) Demonstrating that you know me well, either through familiarity with what I've done, what I've written, myself personally, or someone close to me.<p>2) Demonstrating that you have put a lot of work into something and can benefit from specific application of my expertise.<p>3) A precise request which I can satisfy. ("Can you teach me about running a business?" is not a precise request -- well, OK, it is, but only if you accept "I could." as a complete answer. "I have built an application which does X. I want to increase its organic search rankings for X, and having done my homework about SEO, I understand this means I need to get links to my website. Can you give me an idea for an X-related piece of linkbait?" is a precise question.)<p>Things which people frequently try that are not as successful as they probably hope:<p>1) "Help me, Obi Wan, you're my only hope." I enjoy backing underdogs, not losers. There is a difference. Pluck and vim and tales of what you've managed to do make you sound like an underdog. Apologies and lack of confidence and telling me who you've already asked who ignored you totally make you sound like a loser. (By the way, it very rarely improves any negotiation to tell the other party that they were the first person you thought of after the first four people you thought of said no.)<p>2) "This will only take..." Asking me to drop what I'm doing is much more disruptive than many people would assume it is. Also, folks have a tendency to underestimate how much work is required or how thoroughly I tend to answer requests which I answer.<p>3) Napkin stage ideas. Most of them will be culled before shipping. Why should I dedicate my limited time on a project which will probably be shelved, when I could instead work on something which will, with certainty, help people?
D'oh I am somewhat embarrassed that my rants land up on HN.<p>On HN I try to have a measured tone. On my personal blog,I just write(rant!) without regard to "voice" and so on. It doesn't help that, while I enjoy meeting people and parties and such, I am equally content to stay in the shadows and don't care about "personal brand" or building a group to bring change and so on.<p>I just got frustrated at receiving the nth "please mentor me and send me some code so I can do a cool AI project for my bachelor's degree requirements. I need this next week." email.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670453" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=670453</a> is the original thread , with many nice comments.
"Not for one moment did I doubt that you were the Buddha, that you have reached the highest goal which so many thousands of Brahmins and Brahmins' sons are striving to reach. You have done so by your own seeking, in your own way, through thought, through meditation, through knowledge, through enlightenment. You have learned nothing through teachings, and so I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings. To nobody, O Illustrious One, can you communicate in words and teachings what happened to you in the hour of your enlightenment."<p>- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Excellent post. Take responsibility for your own intellectual development and you will do much better than if someone were to show you the exact solution to a problem you're working on.<p>I see this a lot with students in introductory physics. If they come to me and say "I don't get it" or "I can't get started" I actually invest less time than if I get a good student who has hit a wall and can't get through. The student who won't/can't start will get sent to the tutoring center and I will spend the time with the kid who works hard. There's only so much of me to go around and I want to make it count.
I can only agree. Recently I wanted to get better at C and started to poke around in wget's bug tracker. I found an appropriate bug and asked twice on the mailing list if my suggested implementation would be okay. No answer in both cases.<p>Then I just went and wrote the code, put up a repo on Launchpad. I was soon getting many helpful comments.
Mentoring other programmers can be a lot of fun.<p>I knew a student once who was messing around with Java, and I pointed him at Lisp and some code for a metacircular evaluator. He figured it out in no time flat. It's <i>fun</i> to blow people's minds, and to watch them learn.<p>But as the article says, you can't help people who aren't willing to roll up their sleeves and go to work.
I think this is good advice; maybe it could be paraphrased - don't <i>ask</i> to ask (dive in).<p>I think people are often quite hung up on being courteous, and are keen to gain permission to have that initial conversation.<p>While I think that's understandable, this is a nice example of why it's useful to a) be persistent, and b) get to the point of the conversation efficiently and effectively.
I am struck by how much of that seems to echo <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html</a>
This is true even outside of programming, I occasionally get emails from students at my alma matter asking for advice on getting into investment banking, and in general I'm much more likely to respond if they show they've already put some effort in.
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In other words, when you asks for a busy person's time for "mentorship" or "advice" or whatever, show (a) you are serious and have gone as far as you can by yourself (b) have taken concrete steps to address whatever your needs are and (optionally. but especially with code related efforts)(c) how helping you could benefit them/their project.*<p>Funny -- this is almost exactly the advice I wrote in "How to get your professors' attention -- and coaching and mentoring": <a href="http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2%80%99-attention-or-how-to-get-the-coaching-and-mentorship-you-need" rel="nofollow">http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2...</a> . The big thing you need to do if you're trying to get someone's attention is <i>show</i> that you're worth the investment.<p>Most people either don't do this or don't know how to.
We need to define a time associated with the word "mentor" or "mentorship". I'm sure most people that ask someone to mentor them don't expect a Mr. Miyagi style time investment. You'd be surprised how far the occasional IM chat or email will go.
I like the comparison of the arts industry to the technology industry. The same can be said for finance and consulting industries. I feel there has been a complete loss of the apprenticeship and mentoring model because of the growth of information. When you discover that the majority of people are selfish, it really turns you away from mentoring. I want to help people that are willing to give back to the next generation and 'pay it forward', but most people take the help and just leave it at that.
I think what the author is saying is that having done projects on your own helps your credibility.<p>I disagree that ML is something that can be picked up through just an OCW site and such. "Real" ML involves way too much mathematics and does not overlap much with programming. ..unless your idea of Software Engineering is writing stuff in MATLAB.<p>There are so many books and the path to knowledge can be daunting.<p>In the spirit of the blog-post's advice I was trying to gauge whether to take the author's advice seriously, but after some short searching I could not come up with publications in ML. I definitely found several moderately complex projects with an ML "flavor." And that's already way better than most people who try to get into this by themselves and shows Ravi picked up on a bunch of stuff.<p>Ravi mentioned 5 years ago that reading the literature felt like banging your head against the wall and I think most of people who attempt the self-taught route are going to feel the same.<p>You're looking at a year or two of full-time college-like preparation during which you will learn lots of math but little to no ML. Only then can you begin to really learn ML. The books by themselves are simply not enough to learn this stuff. One needs to literally go through as many lectures as possible in the relevant coursework online, and do the labs. Various CS departments that actually have some traction in ML spend a large chunk of time designing the course and labs are incredibly illuminating.<p>If you just want to learn how to apply an ML algorithm taught in an undergraduate-level course, disregard my post.<p>Truly understanding anything written by Bishop or even going through ESL completely is something that is going to take an enormous amount of time (on your own easily a year, if you have the background) and mathematical skills that are typically way outside of what a Software Engineer deals with in any of the projects. I mean Bishop introduces hyperpriors in Chapter 1 or 2 for chrissake.<p>I can see how getting into patricle-filtering based probabilistic robotics can be easier, but try some EKF-based methods and feel the pain, that is, feel the amount of math that you don't know yet.<p>Extra hint for HN readers: take a look at the CVs of hot-shots in ML. Lots of Math and Physics undergrads, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics or Mathematics is not a rare occurrence by any means.<p>I'd also take a risk and say that traditional mentor/student relationships in India are quite different from the less formal ones in the West. My experience with colleagues from India is that they are much more likely to observe the authority ladder. Just look up Anil K Bera's interview with C.R.Rao (of Rao-Blackwell theorem) especially w/regards to how things were going at ISI.