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Comment by roberta_welch | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a mentor who belittles you, exaggerates your flaws, and brings up false accusations only in private, during one-on-one meetings, and only picks on you in secret. But outside they are very friendly.

I have had two such mentors.

I am extremely suspicious of any such one-on-one arrangements when there are no written records and opportunities for challenging unfair assessments formally. There has to be second opinions from disinterested parties.

Now imagine an office politician who relays to you bad things other people said about you, and relays to others bad things you said about them, and encourages retaliation between staff. I have worked with one such person. Again here, under the guise of mentorship of one-on-one feedback there is a lot of gossip being generated.

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

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I totally agree that mentors and mentees should be free in their choice with whom they partner. So if you had bad experience with your mentors it should be easy and penalty free for you to change.

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.

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

Here's a thing. If both of you knew each other personally, started becoming friendly, then you might end up mentoring GP and I'm sure GP wouldn't demand written records. This is how mentoring looks like. It's not some top-down prescribed job task, and it's not done by matchmaking.

Same here. I believe I’ve had two, possibly three “mentors” like this. Except instead of mentors they were managers and their managers.

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.

I think that can happen even without the mentoring context. Office politicians know how to throw bombs even when they just say hi.

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.

How would reporting change anything?

I have a close friend who were harassed by a colleague, but only when they were 1-1. Whenever they were in a group, the harasser were the friendliest sunshine you could imagine.

Everyone my friend talked to would not believe them, and instead started questioning if they were feeling alright.

> How would reporting change anything?

There are still companies that give a shit about this sort of things. Depends obviously on who is the perpetrator. (... sadly enough).

I've experienced something similar as well, although I think the 'mentor' was sincere they were also incredibly neurotic and a bit paranoid from my point of view. The few people that bought into their advice remained under their wing/control for over ten years and probably experienced less career development as a result.

I suspect that's because no one can really supply you with a mentor who's going to be good. There are only two reliable ways: you catch the eye of the person you want to be mentored by, you bug them till they mentor you.

Yep, and this kind of behaviour can't be fixed by having a formal company culture despite what many organisations think.

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

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