How to spot a false teacher

Throughout your life, you will encounter various mentors, people who catch your attention and who you want to learn from. Some of this will be voluntary and some of it won't be.

We don't quite choose what information comes into our lives. We end up with the education we have because we were born in one particular place and were exposed to one group of people instead of some other group.

You probably didn't pick your first programming teacher, if you even had one at all. If you are self-taught, you probably picked whatevever material was popular at the time, and since you were new to this, you wouldn't have had a way to figure out if the information you were getting was any good.

Sometimes you don't know what's holding you back, and it might be some unconscious thought hiding in the back of your head from long ago when some mentor taught you something.

I remember graduating college back in 2006. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I knew I liked to snowboard. So I signed up to be a snowboarding instructor at one of the local ski resorts in Colorado.

I came into it with a rather naive mindset. I thought the other instructors would teach me how to snowboard better. After all, they were instructors. This was their job.

Of course, it didn't take me too long to figure out the opposite was actually the case.

I just wanted to hit the big jumps and rails all day. But the instructors insisted that we perfect our turns and "warm up" on the small jumps for hours on end. They would constantly critique each other with this or that pedantic bit of advice, usually when nobody was asking for it.

If you weren't doing something that looked cool or didn't have picture perfect form, they always had some sort of explanation for it. If only you would just listen to them more, you would get whatever thing you're trying to do.

Now I don't mean to denigrate the practice of teaching. A good mentor in the right circumstance can be incredibly valuable. Such a person really can be the difference between being stuck on a plateau and taking your skills to the next level.

But there is a subtle difference here, and it is often hard to pin down.

After just one season, I concluded that most of the instructors didn't have much to teach me. I came to this conclusion after noticing this funny empirical fact that nobody seemed to want to point out.

Most of the instructors weren't actually good at snowboarding.

By "good", I don't mean what might be acceptable for a tourist who has never gone skiing before. To a tourist, the instructors were like norse gods.

When I say "good," I mean exceptional. They hit the biggest jumps in the terrain park, go highest out of the halfpipe, do crazy things on long rails, the kind of stuff that just blows your mind the first time you see it because it is so far outside of your normal day to day experience.

There were people like that at my ski resort, but not many of them instructed or coached anyone. Most of them were local teenage kids who simply grew up with the sport.

To the actual pros, what they were doing wasn't special. It didn't require some long-winded explanation laden with this or that ideology. It was just snowboarding.

Pros have a totally different mindset and routine. Unlike the instructors, they show up at the terrain park at 9 A.M. sharp (someties earlier if they are doing a video or photo shoot), and they get right down to business on the biggest jumps.

Pros don't waste the good part of a day warming up on small jumps. They spend one or two runs getting the speed right, maybe another to practice some basic tricks, and then they go straight into the hardest tricks they know (double flips, 1080s, that kind of thing).

Pros don't think too much about the "exact" number of turns they need to take into a jump, nor do they ponder their equipment. They go by feel and trust that the mind's intuitive sense of "the right speed" will guide them.

Pros are not pedantic. They obviously care deeply about form and doing things right. They do analyze videos of themselves, but they don't get into what you might call "analysis paralysis."

Pros know when it is time to do the thing, and they don't fuss too much about just doing it.

I only got better at snowboarding when I ditched the instructors and started emulating the pros. I went from being scared of the big jumps to regularly doing tricks on them, first thing in the morning.

In the process, I noticed something. In terms of actual form, the people hitting the big jumps weren't that much better than the people hitting the small ones (okay that's a slight exaggeration).

The small jumps just don't give you enough airtime to do something that looks stylish. They really do hold you back.

The instructors never got better because they were too afraid to do what they needed to do to get to the next level. They were being pedantic because they didn't have any real accomplishments backing them up.

You will encounter all sorts of mentors in life. Some of them will be legitimate. Others less so. I can't tell you which is which.

But I will say this.

Be wary of people who tell you pointers are "dangerous," your code isn't "clean" or that you've accumulated all this "technical debt" because you don't have a unit test suite with 100% coverage.

False teachers will tell you to rename things, reduce the length of your functions to some arbitrary number like "25 lines" because someone told them sometime that functions need to be small and only about one thing.

They will say "don't reinvent the wheel" and try to discourage you from doing ambitious things like making your own game engine, compiler, or fully cross-platform application written in a lower level language.

They'll insinuate that you won't become a "real programmer" until you fully adopt functional programming, object oriented programming, or some other popular ideology. If you give them three easy payments of $24.99, they'll be happy to teach you about that thing.

None of it is important. The most accomplished programmers in the world, the ones working on challenging and interesting projects, shipping gigantic game worlds and pushing computers to their limit don't adhere to any of this.

They know how to program because they've been doing it since they were 12. Listen to them and unlearn your college education.

All you need to program is a computer and a manual telling you which commands do what. You'll figure out the rest over time, and a good mentor will do little more than give you a slight nudge in the right direction.

If your program solves the problem you set out to solve, then the code is good. That is what programming is about. All else is noise, and it can hold you back.