Interacting with a number of developers every week keeps reminding me of an article about Spoon feeding programmers in Java Programming Forums. You can easily categorize the developers into the smart ones and the ones that need to be spoon fed. The former are those who want to understand the approach to solving problems and the latter require quick-fix solutions to problems.The article talks about the scenarios when you can spoon feed the developers and when not to.
Few points in the article are really worth mentioning.
Problem solving is not only fun, it’s one of the fundamental skills required to be a good programmer, and it’s one of the hardest to teach. Anybody can memorize syntax, but how do you learn how to work through a problem? The answer is by working through different kinds problems, over and over again. Offering a full solution before a person has worked through the problem is robbing the person of that process, and that prevents the person from becoming a good programmer. A better option is to help the person work through the process by suggesting breaking the problem up into smaller pieces or thinking about how a human would solve the problem in his or her head or with a pencil and a piece of paper.
You can read this article here.