

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

I&#x27;m a UI Developer and my 16yr old brother is job shadowing me this week.  The current project I&#x27;m working on uses backbone.js and I fear he will be lost if I try to explain it to him.  He&#x27;s had one semester of Java so far and knows HTML &#x2F; CSS fairly well.<p>I&#x27;m open to any suggestions on how I should fill my day with him.
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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

