Hacker News Reader

Those are my thoughts exactly. I see these "I am a mentor" posts on HN all the time. I think the developers (senior or not) fantasize about being a mentor to feel important. It is likely an unsolved ego issue. I help my friends at work or outside of work with bugs and any other type of work-related things and never consider myself a mentor. Also wanting to be a mentor type of fetish feels like BDSM to me.

View on HN

This. Practically anyone claiming to be a mentor or wanting to be a mentor has issues. It's selfish ego boosting stuff. Additionally, in almost every discipline the world changes so much and the real decisions are so context dependent that any "mentor like" advice is as likely wrong as right. And if it's simpler stuff then it's just a random tidbit of advice from one person to another, or it's in a book somewhere and a random comment "dude i read awesome book x about y the other day" works - the person either doesn't care and won't read it or they do and they will.

Mentoring is making sure the person feels supported and knows you have their back in what they are doing. it’s “it might cause an outage, but I’ll help you fix it if that happens”

edit: but yea, 100% agreeing with you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com