I work with a guy. He’s incredibly smart. He’s the seniormost developer here, and if you need to learn something new and get something large done, he’s the guy to do it. We basically dropped him off in the AWS jungle and told him to learn Hadoop and the entire Hadoop ecosystem for a data warehouse project and he did it.
I work with another guy. He’s also incredibly smart. But he asks me for the answer before attempting to find it on his own more often than not. He’s got a point when he says “it’s a lot faster for me to just ask you rather than spend time trying to find it on my own”, because he’s here to do a job after all. I get that. But the best analogy I can come up with is a spin on the old adage -
You can give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.
There’s a third kind of person, though - the person who goes out and finds out about fishing on their own and then teaches themselves how to fish. This person will be your boss, and will always be employed.