How to find mentors?
Table of Contents
Need a mentor.
Why?
- I’ve never had a proper mentor. Are there any resources to find developer based mentors?
- I struggle with breaking into higher-level functions within an organisation and creating broader impact. This comes from my tendency to be unconfident and thus not naturally bubble up as time goes on. Also it means that my technical skills lack in these areas simply because I often feel incapable. I feel like this is something I need to work on with a supportive ear with non-judgemental feedback in order to know where I am and what I should work on in terms of technical expertise and how to become more influential, which I hope leads to more confidence.
- Wishing for having a Staff Eng as a mentor so I know how to properly aspire to that rank.
- It gives mentees another perspective and someone to talk to. It can be useful for understanding workplace and team, but not for getting any sort of results.
- The problem is not that there isn’t resources out there to learn new stuff but how many they are and how they are not specific.
- Despite my experience, I still find myself facing knowledge gaps, especially when it comes to soft skills, interviewing, and marketing my abilities to companies. I believe these soft skills are holding me back far more than any technical shortcomings. For example, I’ve fumbled HR screenings, which was unexpected considering my background in mid-sized, and large companies. I’ve also seen coworkers with less experience who are much better at showcasing their work, and as a result, they consistently get ahead.
Why it is hard to find one?
- This is one of those professions that is unfortunately sink-or-swim and everyone looks out for themselves. Professional growth in our industry is almost entirely self-driven. Mentorship takes time and effort most engineers don’t have unless the person is particularly dedicated or the company has the resources and incentives in place for it.
- Sometimes I feel like 90% of effort of many managers is managing upwards ( shaping messages, emails, powerpoints, looking smart, etc to their bosses), and 10% goes managing downwards (mostly just milking subordinates for status updates, and commitments).
- It’s a really great luxury a lot of devs don’t get. If you do wind up with a mentor in an capacity that’s actually good, patient and empathetic (IC, manager, etc), don’t let that slip away.
- If you are looking for a mentor who can tell you what you need to work on and where you should be heading, it is really hard to find, especially since it requires someone to really invest in you and who can understand the context of your work environment. Doubly hard to find someone willing to invest or with that context because our industry rewards changing jobs every 2-4 years.
- If you are looking for somebody that could guide you and teach you industry level programming, that is not a realistic expectation.
- Especially since you are asking for enterprise class features (most websites never actually scale to millions of users) which I consider consulting. Industry standard for this kind of stuff is 100+ $ an hour.
- If you want to build this kind of stuff then it’s something you really learn at a job.
- In fact even professional devs generally don’t know the full scope. That’s a multi-person project, not a one man show.
Do you really need one?
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It’s overrated but still useful.
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It’s the kind of thing that can be found but not sought.
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There is no such kind of thing like meeting one Sensei who would show you a path and train your every day…
It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to find help! Just… Ask other people for advices. For example for your current problem (showcasing skillset during interview), instead of asking for mentorship, phrase it like something as:
- I’m looking for tips and tips which worked for you when it comes to behavioural interviews?
- Anyone wants to be my peer in practicing mock interviews?
- Is there any community of people preparing to interviews?
You can apply that same approach to nearly every aspect of you life… And just learn from whole humankind, not one specific mentor.
How can I learn things without a mentor?
- Your own experience
- Put yourself into torturous situations and learning through pain.
- You need to have aptitude and hunger to pick up difficult work.
- If you teach yourself how things should be done, after a while, you may feel that having a mentor is kind of a myth.
- You don’t necessarily need a mentor. Get way out of your comfort zone! Learn a new language (or two!), build something that challenged you, volunteer for something at work which you have no experience in.
- Contribute to open-source projects. Generally it has good senior devs who can give guidance to some interesting projects. Go to open source projects in your area of interest and try to read the code and see what their doing, maybe even submit a PR at some point. Even without padding a resume this is a great way to learn how big projects work.
- Grasp individual insights from environments and then build a comprehensive understanding of how the industry and career progression works by yourself.
- Good jobs, Good teams and Good Co-workers
- As long as you apply to a bigger companies, and lose the ego mentors will come to you. People like to teach people they like. Show humility, own mistakes, and share glory.
- Dudes with decades will recognize that and come to you. The biggest issue with most SWE right now is many are arrogant little shits living through big fish in small pond syndrome.
- Just showing a passion for learning and being humble about your talents can go along way.
- Try to work with lots of really smart people, and take every opportunity to learn from them and try new things on company time.
- Work at a place with people who are better than you.
- Find a new job with a large team of senior devs. You have enough experience where you can pick up on things quickly, you’ll learn more in a month with a team of solid devs around you than you would with a mentor in a year.
- The closest I ever had to one was a coworker that was at my same level. He and I would hang out and talk about work and how to solve different issues (technical or non). I’ve had plenty of managers but the only decent ones that I’ve had were after I was already a pretty senior SWE.
- Look for coworkers that you can learn from. It won’t really be a mentor relationship because you’ll likely teach them some things too. If you’re stagnating that means you learned all you can from your current coworkers.
- Scrape what you can from other coworkers over the years and mesh them into your own framework, both on what to do and what NOT to do that they did (actually works pretty well).
- Just keep hopping around, seeing different code bases to the ones you are used to and just kind of watch other people’s PRs and copy their style so you don’t look like you totally do not know what you are doing. You don’t really need a mentor, you can sort of passively glean stuff of other peoples commits.
- Always pay attention to those who are better than you in one way or another (coding, problem solving, communication, whatever) and observe, then reflect on it and try to understand it. Sometimes, you may have to reach out and pick their brain on something. It’s a process, but piece meal stuff like that adds up over time and doesn’t bind you to a mentor who may or may not be good, may or may not be accomplished in multiple areas where you would benefit.
- When you hit a real problem, reach out to people and ask for advice. You don’t really need one mentor, you need a few people you can reach out to for advice once in a while.
- You don’t need to have 1 mentor, I never had. You need to take advantage of the situations. Something is broken in the pipeline? Ping the DevOps guy and ask what was the issue and how he fixed it. Want you learn some testing ? Ping SDET and ask about their framework. And so on.
- Find a workplace with good software practices and do pair-programming (I hate it but probably it’s the fastest way to learn and reflect)
- Try to search for peers who are interested in sharing insights, which is not as much as mentorship that is almost an one way street.
- Books, talks, devs on social media
- You can also take a more non-traditional mentor route and look to books, talks, devs on social media, etc for examples and advice
- Books are a resource but usually books state best practices vs industry specific good enough practices.
- There are tons of resources online FOR FREE to gain tons of knowledge and wisdom. There are tons of books, blogs, videos, etc. from MENTORS all over the world, across all conceivable subjects. Why settle for one person mentor, that may of may not know what he is talking about. Gain the wisdom from experts, read books, blogs, videos, etc. Then, you can learn to be the mentor that you wish you had and mentor yourself and others.
- Helpin other devs
- He who waters will be watered himself.
- I’m also finding that I learn a lot by helping other devs that I work with, including those that are more junior than I am
- Write very descriptive reasonings on my suggestions in PRs for more junior devs.
- Online
- https://exercism.io/ is pretty good. I use it, and the mentors take a lot of time explaining the concepts to you
- https://www.meetup.com/fullstack-coding/
- It’s not exactly mentoring in the traditional 1:1 sense, but an instant chat service is a great way to connect with experienced devs for free. We’ve got a decent discord server here, and we do exactly that, with a focus on all sorts of programming: https://discordapp.com/invite/9zT7NHP
- It might be possible to find one online. If you go that route, I’d say you should have a pretty clear idea of what you’re looking for. I’ve had people from the internet ask me to mentor them and, since I’ve never really had that, I don’t know what that would involve. But I’m happy to answer questions that people ask me
- Reach out to people
- Reach out to people you admire, or whose careers look like what you would like to achieve for yourself, and ask them if they’d be willing to have a coffee with you, and be honest and tell them that you are interested to learn a bit about their career path.
- Meetups, hackathons. They seem like they have the benefit of helping build long-lasting relationships and maybe even people who will look out for you in the future for work
- Look for meetups in languages you know. Go to hackathons. Ask people if there’s a citywide Slack channel for devs in your area.