Today I want to talk about mentorship. I have had experience being on both sides as a mentor and mentee and wanted to write up some thoughts I have about how to be a better mentor for people and finding the right way to be able to work and develop the relationship. When it comes to mentoring it is important that both people put in the effort to help each other grow. Whether you are guiding or being guided each person gains something in the process of mentoring. It can be a small thing if the relationship isn’t built in a useful way or it can be a very deep and make you grow exponentially as individuals. Either way I recommend going through this expereince if you can and I want to tell you about mine in hopes you can find some tools to help you have the best experience you can.

First what I want to cover is exactly what makes a mentorship useful. For me the mentoring is all about having myself try to replicate what I know in a way that makes it easier for another person to grok. This means that you need to think about what best way for that other individual to be able to understand you and get what you are trying to put down. This means that even if you mentor two people you need to tailor your approach to the individual and not try to make something that is generic for anyone to try and pick up. Generic advice is something they can get online from videos and conferences but if you are getting mentored you should work hard to give them something that they can’t get from a video.

Getting Mentored

When you are getting mentored you have the most important role in the relationship. The effort you will amplify the growth you can have with any mentor. Each mentor even the bad ones can be learned from and if you press them they will give you useful nuggets and ticks that you can use to become stronger and stronger. In fact I would argue that the people who taught me the most important skills through a mentorship were some of the most unsupportive ones. By making me look at things and forcing me to have to learn by myself I have been able to get into.

The most important part is to be engaged and allow yourself to be dumb with your mentor. The more you are willing to ask questions and even look dumb the more value you can get. It is okay to not know everything you are here to learn.

Take initiative in organzing the planning and how you will want to learn from your mentor. Your mentor has a limited amount of time in his day to be able to help so it is up to you to schedule both of you together to make it more successful. If you neglect this and let your mentor drive all the meeting times you will find that you feel more annoyed then anything else when in reality this is for you and making it work for you as best as you can is key to staying engaged and learning.

I have been mentored about 3 times in my life so far. The first was by a man named Greg but I called him coop. He was a kind hearted programmer with a lot of passion for tech and learning. Everyday we would talk about the different articles we had looked at and our mentorship was to help me understand how to become an engineer and how to develop software for the company I was joining in smart home. He taught me how to judge changes in size and what it would take to finish software projects. These are key lessons that I carry with me everyday. I use them all the time because it in the field of programming you are asked to estimate daily what needs to be done when and the lessons he taught me of breaking down software projects into steps are timeless.

The second master I had was named Aaron and he taught me what it takes to be an engineer that gets things done. He was wild because he was studying medicine while working with us for the side and in trying to keep up with him I learned how to be able to build software and its tests even faster. He taught me the tools and techniques to breakdown existing code and learn how to parse out the meaning of software from its components quickly. He is one of the people I am most proud of and hope I can someday be able to outpace him as an engineer.

The last mentor I had was a man who taught me how to live an honest life as an engineer and how to mentor more people then just me. He originally was supposed to teach me how to hack and all about security of which he was an expert in but after a while our relationship changed and he joined the company that I worked at to be able to contribute so much and show me even more about how mangement of software projects are done. From building runbooks to building design documents I learned how to be smarter about how we document software and how to work with others to build a design collaboratively.

These are the fundamental lessons I learned while being mentored and using the techinques I had mentioned prior to be able to gain the most insight. Being up front with not knowing and even asking the dumb questions.

Being a Mentor

Being a mentor is not as easy as people might think. I order to be a good one you gotta give your mentee the guidance they are looking for. If you try to force them to learn what you know honestly both you and your mentee will be frustrated. I have only been really a mentor about three seperate times so far but each experience has been insightful of how I communicate and how to better try to convey the ideas that I want.

In order to be a good mentor structure is essential to give your mentee something to lean on so they can go further and further beyond with what they want to self learn. A good example structure I would reccomend is to be split up the meeting in 3 parts. A review of what their goals are and set new ones, quick time for questions, then a lesson on something you think is interesting that your might appreciate. With this you can help them build self confidence and something to look forward to weekly so that you can hold them accountable for their education.

Other then that just try and be open and honest with your mentee and help them as best as you can while only doing stuff for them that any reasonable person would i.e. answer questions and not worry about their personal life.

Summary

Overall this is just some ramblings I have on the time I spent doing mentorships and in reality you should try doing things that feel good for both you and your mentee and review with them what they feel is working and what isn’t collaboration is key to make this an effective experience for both people.