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Comment by icxa | Hacker News Reader

Mentorship at the highest level (principle to senior and below) is desperately lacking. I vow myself when I reach that level to pass it along the best I can, but something I desperately searched for when I was starting.

I pair programmed for 3 months (which I consider apprenticeship / live action mentorship) with someone who was a way better engineer than me at my first "career job" out of college. I learned more in those 3 months about software engineering than in my previous two.

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I'm writing the book on senior+/lead to junior/intermediate mentoring with my company. I've been floating my notes and mentoring guidelines around the department heads and other leads. I love it, personally. Department heads and managers see the value but are reluctant when they see that I'm willing to spend months with a junior or that I might myself out there for hours a week with an intermediate. If I come across a particular interesting performance problem, or something like that that is challenging and requires a certain type of experience to get into, I'll schedule time to pair with 1-3 of my team members on it so that they can hopefully benefit from the experience. The real challenge, though, is that not everyone wants to mentor. I personally think that it's critical and a core part of my responsibility but most of the other senior+/leads where I work are not engaging in much meaningful mentorship with their teams.

> I vow myself when I reach that level to pass it along the best I can, but something I desperately searched for when I was starting.

Mentoring is one of my favorite thing. Finding people who want to be mentored is...challenging though. Probably a chicken and the egg (one of the other posters mention how people are put in a situation where they can't be open about not knowing things), but so many entry level engineers just pretend they know everything.

Completely agree with you though that this kind of dynamic would drastically improve the industry.

This is a salient point. I've personally found that most junior/intermediate people want to be mentored but it should always be done carefully and with consideration. I've had a couple of junior/intermediates, though, who, like you are saying, just did not want it. I think that most of them have moved on from the company but there is 1 person who is still around and who is now the type of person who has 5 years of experience but it's all the same year.

> I learned more in those 3 months about software engineering than in my previous two.

Do you mean you learned more than you did in 2 months of school? Did you drop "years" as the last word? Did you mean it wasn't a great experience because you could have learned what you did in 2 months instead of 3?

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