Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well

I have yet to see a more effective method of teaching developers, as this encourages understanding and learning about underlying concepts and problems

[1] http://www.pearlleff.com/seven-tips-for-a-junior-developer

If they got used to your service this might annoy them, but if you explain it beforehand..?

Two in particular were only a few months ago and it still confuses me if I think about it. They did every single thing you mentioned, mostly in private, no written record of any of it, moving goal posts, sometimes really scraping the barrel when looking for negative feedback.

Sometimes it would be in public too - really petty stuff. Sometimes it was basically “Oh, you’ve forgotten that one particular API of the framework we know you haven’t had to use for over a year? Fuck you, you are incompetent.”

I’m starting to think I was hired specifically to work on all the projects no one else wanted to do, while dangling the interesting projects like a carrot.

I too am now extremely suspicious of any one on one arrangements - by nature they are specially designed to favour the organisation without fair representation for the employee their are victimising.

On the other hand, I would decline to mentor you:

> I am extremely suspicious of any such one-on-one arrangements when there are no written records and opportunities for challenging unfair assessments formally.

I'm not interested in wasting my time with a mentee on bureaucracy instead of actually mentoring. Luckily, there are many different workplaces we can pick from, so your need for proper documentation can be satisfied while my wish to use the time for mentoring is also satisfied (possibly in different places).

> I can already predict that there will be more people who think they can mentor than people who think they can improve.

I love to be a mentee. It usually feels better to learn than to teach. It also increases your value more. I quite often struggle that I don't have a mentor (and it is a good reason to change workplace). As compensation, I frequently send out mentees to learn new stuff and teach it to me.

However, I agree that in order for mentoring to be formal it has to be written down, or at least the progress tracked.

Also, where is your manager if you can't report to him such bad things? I think that the bad mentors you had are a consequence of a bigger issue you had at your company.

Mentoring should be voluntary and should just be about helping someone else on the team.

I agree with your point about "forced" mentoring though, some people just don't like to mentor so they shouldn't have to, but an organisation should encourage and reward it if it happens voluntary.

In my experience I have benefited from being on both sides of the mentor-mentee relationship. I learned a lot from mentoring an intern, especially.

I’m unlikely to be called Gen X, but my attitude has always been the same: it’s our duty to make the lives of future generations better than ours. Raise our children better than we were raised. Provide our juniors the opportunities and resources we didn’t have.

So, I don’t feel cheated. I feel happy because my efforts are helping future generations.

Excuuuuuuuuse me?!

Tell that to all the people in this thread who thought I should accept my company's top-down mandate to do mentoring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21229910

Indeed, it feels like saying "oh you two are gonna be friends!"

I feel there's a confusion around terms. Life is a bit more complex. Mentoring is a rather specific thing, and 'real' mentors are a rare (and precious) relationship; it's long-term (at least in perspective, however long it actually lasts) and much more emotional in that there's admiration (reciprocal), there's care (genuine) for the other, it just can't be decided (even for oneself). It's not something you can commoditize with policies or incentives. You don't have 6 or 10 such people in your life, more like 1, rarely, 2 if you're really lucky.

What most of the article seems to be talking about is very good but it's not really 'mentoring'. More like "skill sharing", good "onboarding" (even with seniors as we onboard others onto the systems we happen to know better in the organization or the field at large). It's informal teaching, transmission, it's an organization thing he's describing — not a human-driven relationship that exists around all else.

The platform is more interesting. People with a desire to mentor may find a good match, and stick with it. Reciprocally. But the truth is that no more than online dating, you just can't be sure there's a match right now for you, you may find students / teachers (like find people to grab a drink sometimes), but mentees / mentors (long-term relationship) is a whole other ballpark.

I'd say this: it is a good cultural evolution to value mentorship and try to form minds into engaging in such relationships, like you'd think it good people want to marry or raise kids. It also shows how learning isn't a school thing only, actually very little, but a life-long endeavor wherein all parties grow in the process. But just like Disney movies aren't reality for most people most of the time, a little temperance on the real felt experience of mentorship may be in order when encouraging people to the possibility.

I find it incredibly hard to think out loud and work through a problem with an audience. Going away, to my own workstation, spending 2-3 minutes looking at things and investigating will often get me some ideas. Which I can communicate back. Often describing how I got there.

Put me on the spot and if I don't already know the answer I probably cannot find it under scrutiny. This is my failing, I know, but it's demonstrably true.

We also recommend mentors to sit in on some agile ceremonies with the mentee's team to get a feel for how the mentee's dynamic is with their team, which can spark some discussion as well.

Fundamental, long-term issues can include encouraging the mentee to be more assertive, how to help their team become more effective, and how to approach navigating the inevitable politics of the organization.