Becoming a mentor for the first time changed a lot for me and set the course for my entire career.
At first, it wasn’t easy, but over time, I started to get the hang of it. I really enjoyed supporting others. Sharing my knowledge and focusing on mentorship outcomes were things I had to learn. Most importantly, learning how to be a good mentor helped me realize what leadership is about, and that it’s a path I want to take.
Through mentoring, I suddenly realized I could influence many things. For new hires, I could teach them about our engineering culture and even help improve it.
I was able to share my perspective on productivity, developer experience, and code quality, which increased awareness of these topics within the team.
I also provided an onboarding experience that I never had myself, helping new hires speed up their learning process.
Mentoring is an important step in becoming a senior engineer and leader. Being responsible for your work and another person is the first step to scaling your efforts and multiplying the outcomes.
You will improve communication, planning and goal setting, coaching, and people skills. The relationship you build with your mentee will be an important milestone in your career.
It’s a good idea to understand what mentorship is and how to succeed in that role, even if your company has no official mentorship program.
I like to think that by avoiding hiring junior developers, you are taking away growth opportunities for senior developers. People just entering the world of apps and code are usually the ones who are the most curious and have not yet been exposed to common ways of thinking. Thanks to this, the mentor usually learns lots of new things, and it helps to become enthusiastic and curious about growing your skills even more. In my career, I learned a lot from junior developers despite it being counterintuitive.
Mentorship offers multiple benefits for you as a mentor. One key advantage is applying your knowledge while helping others learn. Explaining concepts not only reinforces your own understanding but also sparks curiosity and creativity. By challenging your knowledge, you uncover blind spots and gain new perspectives for improvement. That is a Feynmann Technique applied in real life.
If you want to become a leader, one of the things that you need is a network. A network of people in your company who can support you with your leadership issues or subject matter experts who can help with your teammates' issues. Mentoring is a great first step to creating a network. You’re not only building a relationship with your mentees, who might become experienced developers one day, but you will need to expand your network to support them.
When mentoring, you might feel the urge to develop solutions and share ready-to-use answers. By doing that, you will help your mentee achieve some results, but without doing things themself, they will never achieve mastery.
Learning means figuring out something on your own, experimenting, and even failing. Failure is a necessary part of learning. As a mentor, you have to guide people to discover answers themselves. This way, you will allow them to learn.
What you should do is give them the tools to do their work properly. You can teach them how to asses risk, how to analyze problems, and debug. Show them your thought process. Share your problem-solving techniques. Don’t forget to explain why things are done the way they are.
Listen actively and show that you are open to help if necessary. If someone fails to figure out a solution themselves, you can show them how you would approach that and explain why.
It’s a good idea to set clear expectations for the mentoring process. Share them with your mentee from the start to ensure alignment. Discuss their goals, but also keep company objectives in mind.
You can set goals and metrics to easily track progress. Following the SMART framework, which makes goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely, can be helpful. Focus on ensuring they are specific and achievable so expectations are clear, and consider ways to measure progress effectively.
To follow this process properly, the key is to hold regular meetings. You can schedule a recurring meeting to review progress with your mentee. Remember to share feedback often so they can adjust and improve. It’s also a good idea to take notes from your meetings and document progress, as you may need to provide feedback to their leader after the mentorship ends.
The key to a successful mentorship is to guide your mentee, share expectations, and track progress. After the Mentorship process is finished, your mentee will be able to solve new issues independently. You will also notice that you have developed your people and leadership skills, opening you to a new path of growth apart from the technical one.
Here are a few articles I came across recently that I found insightful:
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