

Ask HN: How to encourage curiosity in developers - c1sc0

Over the years I've spotted one nefarious kind of developer over and over again in IT groups: The Incurious Developer.<p>The Incurious Developer is happy with what he knows and does not seek out new knowledge.<p>He's happy to apply whatever technology he masters to any problem that crosses his path.<p>She is resistant to change &#38; will do anything to protect 'the old way'.<p>An Incurious developer thinks he's 'too busy solving real problems' to learn new tricks.<p>Now, I'm not talking about developers with a healthy dose of scepticism: doing things 'the old way' certainly has value, but at a certain point resistance to change becomes damaging.<p>The way I see it, is that it boils down to curiosity. Why do developers lose their  youthful(?) curiosity &#38; <i>what can an IT organization do about that?</i>
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werk
Repetitive coding tasks will burn the curiosity out of anyone. The only
solution is to not have "IT organizations".

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pipe2-dev-null
Kill the patient!

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bioinformatik
I'm not sure eliminating IT or 'killing the patient' as you so eloquently
phrase it, is a viable solution for many companies. What can be done to
increase the metabolic activity of creativity in said patient instead of
killing him?

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keefe
With the speed at which technology is advancing, there's really no excuse for
this attitude. It's also a common, general personality failure. If a person
has no love of knowledge by nature and the fear of competition cannot engender
it, then what use is such a person?

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c1sc0
Falls in line with the my colleague's "Fire 'em" rhetoric which prompted this
thread in the first place. What kinds of things can a company do to
_encourage_ learning? Certificates don't count ;-)

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Daniel_Newby
Some people are just afraid of learning, or never discovered that it could be
more than grinding away for a boring teacher. Or they are afraid of falling
behind at the "real work". You could try to help these folks with enthusiasm
and gently leading through the learning process. If it works, great!

Other people probably have a combination of low IQ and highly-focused
attention [1]. Most of this is probably genetically determined; there is
nothing to fix, although it will continue to improve into their mid-twenties.
These folks are perfectly useful, and even trainable, but management _must
understand their cognitive limits_. They are not so good at solving problems
ill-suited to their existing mental tools, and _even worse at recognizing the
possibility of other approaches_. Higher-order systems are probably especially
difficult for them. Understand that they can exude confidence even when
walking straight into an architecture tar pit. Do no let them drive the high
level strategy, and fire 'em if they try to dominate the discussion.

[1] The converse of attention deficit "disorder".

EDIT: fear and activity for the sake of activity create focused attention. An
organizational culture of compulsive activity and rapid action can cause this
is anybody who buys in to it.

EDIT AGAIN: The opposite of compulsive activity is play. Make a regular game
out of trying things just to see what they do.

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keefe
Bravo, very insightful. Particularly the comment on play.

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ra
Yes I'm sorry but large organisations often seem to slowly and inadvertently
replace creativity and enthusiasm with processes and procedures.

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c1sc0
Would budgetting in time set aside for non-productive endeavours be helpful?
If so, how much?

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bediger
Problem solving contests. The "Regular Expression of The Week" challenge, or
solving a Raymond Smullyan logic problem, or smallest program that does X
challenge.

You'll have to mix it up to encourage a lot of participation, as some people
are scared of regexps, others of number theory, and others of prgramming
challenges.

