How do I teach this kind of skill?
Jan. 6th, 2012 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexI'm feeling sort of pleased with myself for coming up with an answer to a problem at work. The challenge? How do I teach this kind of thinking to anyone, particularly my kids.
At work there was a massive fire drill this morning. It could have cost us a LOT of money; the assignment for the tech folks was "Help! How bad is it?" Determining how bad it was in the end involved processing a lot of log/text files to extract the key information. Several of us were attacking different aspects of the problem. In the end, I got to a solution before someone whose day job it is to munge these kinds of things.
I got there faster not because I'm a command-line whiz kid (I'm not, he is) but because I was able to understand that the problem was, essentially, do a set difference on those two lists. I then Googled "linux command line set diff" and sure enough there's a way to do that. When I explained my solution to the tech whiz he agreed it was a good solution, but noted he never would have conceived of the problem as "find the set difference."
I don't think I'm all that much brighter than anyone else, nor am I especially creative. But I am good at this: seeing problems, analyzing them quickly, recognizing patterns, and getting rapidly to solutions. Except I haven't the foggiest idea how I do it, how I learned to do it, or how I would go about teaching that kind of skill.
Comments, thoughts, share-your-own-story all welcome.
At work there was a massive fire drill this morning. It could have cost us a LOT of money; the assignment for the tech folks was "Help! How bad is it?" Determining how bad it was in the end involved processing a lot of log/text files to extract the key information. Several of us were attacking different aspects of the problem. In the end, I got to a solution before someone whose day job it is to munge these kinds of things.
I got there faster not because I'm a command-line whiz kid (I'm not, he is) but because I was able to understand that the problem was, essentially, do a set difference on those two lists. I then Googled "linux command line set diff" and sure enough there's a way to do that. When I explained my solution to the tech whiz he agreed it was a good solution, but noted he never would have conceived of the problem as "find the set difference."
I don't think I'm all that much brighter than anyone else, nor am I especially creative. But I am good at this: seeing problems, analyzing them quickly, recognizing patterns, and getting rapidly to solutions. Except I haven't the foggiest idea how I do it, how I learned to do it, or how I would go about teaching that kind of skill.
Comments, thoughts, share-your-own-story all welcome.
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Date: 2012-01-06 06:52 pm (UTC)Another factor is often being a generalist rather than a specialist. Specialists are really good with their normal set of tools, so they always try to use those first. A generalist, being handy with many tools but not being particularly good with any specific one tends to put their initial work into figuring out which tool will be best to solve the problem. So when the specialist is right, they'll have a solution much faster than the generalist, but most of the time the generalist will have the problem solved about the time the specialist figures out they've taken the wrong approach.
Teaching people to not just go with their first impulse, to always try to come at the problem from another angle helps a lot with this.