Say I’m a freshly minted newbie, eager to tackle a challenge, such as debugging a program. When the rubber meets the road and I find that every supposed fix I try seems to set off ten other bugs and I’m sure it’s something simple but I can’t quite get what that simple thing is, I call my geeky mentor. The question is, at what level does the mentor-mentee relationship become a burden on the mentor and self-defeating for the mentee, in that the mentee isn’t learning anything, but rather using the mentor as a Help Desk?
When it comes to technical work with computers, there is a lot that goes on that I as a newbie would do better not to try right off the bat, like how to make my own CAT 5 computer cable or how to code an operating system. However, I might need to debug a program that does require knowledge of these systems, and a mentor would understand that this was outside of the scope of my experience and pitch in. On the other hand, if I as a newbie ask the mentor to debug my program and it is within my knowledge to do it myself then that is asking the mentor to take on the burden of thinking for me. So the rule of thumb would be that a newbie should expect to have to analyze problems at least to the point of knowing whether he or she has the knowledge base required to fix it. If the newbie can’t figure that out, the mentor will become a crutch and correspondingly less interested in helping the helpless.