Previous discussions - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mentor
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well this is embarrassing.
For others reading, this is a Ask HN on the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400288
Readit News- Reach out and ask external and internal.
- Go to other teams and build relationships and ask for mentorship.
- It's your team's more senior members explicit responsibility to mentor you.
- Ask your company what they offer for training and mentoring.
- I _think_ some people charge $0 on mentorcruise.com.
Not having technical mentors really hold me back from getting the staff/principal level so as a manager now (one reason I switched but not the main one) I push hard for to enable mentoring for my teams and the org. Push hard to find one.
Thanks for the advice.
Being stuck in roughly my current skill level is why I want to make more connections with people more experienced / senior to me. I have poor management skills and that doesn't look like a path I'd do well on.
> mostly because of working in startups with few experienced engineers
Search one with experienced engineers then (?).
If you don't contemplate a change of workplace then I guess you shouldn't depend on people. Read books extensively, try to apply, see what works and what doesn't.
>>Search one with experienced engineers then (?).
That is the plan but that's a much slower process because of vesting, intertia etc.
I was in a similar position for years. Paying for weekly session with someone can start you off, but its difficult.
Filtering for people who are: - good engineers - enjoy helping people - are good at helping people - have the time to help people - are mature enough to appreciate the self development value of mentoring someone else (its a great way to discover ones own weaknesses)
Leaves you with a very small pool of people. My advice is to consider people in areas that might not fit your mental image of what a mentor looks like, so someone younger than you for example.
>> so someone younger than you for example
That has been my approach so far but it feels like that we've sort of taught each other most of what our individual strengths were.
https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/
It's not mentoring per se, but the list of people I speak with ranges from CS students asking for advice regarding their career to industry veterans. Sometimes we talk only once, but some of these relationships have lasted for more than a year so far. The latter are rare, still fairly casual.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I'm trying to focus a bit more on the product/business side of things. I've been mentoring engineers for 10+ years (and introduced the practice to several orgs). The irony is that I've ben struggling with finding a mentor for myself. The impromptu way seems to work better.
Also I second the comment made my sshine: "I go up to them, and I ask them." I sometimes reach out to people in my area just to learn about their work. We generally meet in person. This has been a bit harder since I left London, where it's hard to avoid interactions that are _not_ networking. But it's still doable even in my current location.
This looks great. Thanks! I should also put up something like this.
> How do you find mentors?
I go up to them, and I ask them.
And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude. People are usually really happy to talk about things they know a lot about, not just to sound smart, but because they really like to think about it, and you get to think about it when you hear yourself talking... I really enjoy ranting, and listening to rants. I learned a lot of CS by listening to hour-long rants at the cafeteria. Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.
Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.
Thanks for the advice.
>> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.
This is so true. I do want to work mostly on distributed systems but every once in a while I get AI envy seeing all the amazing progress being made in the field.
What do you expect from a mentor? For example, if you work with other engineers (preferably, experienced) in the same codebase on the same project, won't code reviews – a routine practice that a team ought to have anyway — count as continuous mentorship? Won't tech talks about ideas relevant for your field from various conferences count as mentorship? Don't books, blogs, or even tweets/toots by people you look up to count as mentorship?
Ideally yes. But I work with other engineers who are much less experienced than I am. The other experienced engineers work on different projects.
That being said I don't regret anything at all.
If you're looking for someone to trade notes I'd happy to hop on a call and see where it goes.