Senior engineers, do you make an effort to ensure junior engineers are following your technical conversations? If not, it’s very likely that they’re walking away with an incomplete understanding of what you said.
Yes, junior engineers should be asking questions, but it’s also your responsibility to make yourself understood.
🤨 Why is it a senior’s responsibility?
Your juniors are probably too intimidated to ask what they think are stupid questions, especially if they’re in a group setting.
As a senior, you should be delivering through your team. You ideate, they implement. How will they deliver on your ideas if they don’t really understand them?
Understanding advanced technical concepts is important for your juniors’ growth - and helping them grow should be one of your core priorities.
🤷♀️ So how do you do it?
Deconstruct the topic you’re trying to explain and build it up using concepts your audience already knows. For e.g, if you’re trying to explain how large language models work, don’t just say, “They use transformer models on vector embeddings of tokenized text”. Does your audience know what transformer models or vector embeddings are? If not, start with explaining those concepts and then build up to your topic.
Employ the Feynman technique - learn the topic well enough to be able to explain yourself to a small child.
Show some empathy. You were a junior engineer once, what helped you understand your seniors better?
Vocally encourage questions. Ask if you’ve made yourself clear.
Bonus tip: Ask your juniors if they’d like to explain the topic back to you at a later date - this will encourage them to learn by teaching.
I’d like to conclude with a Sanskrit saying which translates to:
Knowledge can neither be plundered by a thief, nor can be usurped by a king. It cannot be divided between brothers, and does not reduce in amount on consumption. The more your knowledge is shared, the more it grows.
Happy knowledge sharing! ❤️