2016 - Mentoring Software Developers
My story with mentoring mix with my story as a teacher. Since very young I liked to help others, and I did that both in school and in the roles I played over the years.
The interest
My interest with mentoring started in college. During programming classes, I used to help friends to understand and solve complex algorithms, and since then people started seeing me as someone they would be able to ask for help.
Later on, in almost all my positions, if I had the opportunity I would gravitate to become the mentor of the junior people, helping them with their duty, and also giving some advice on how they could perform better.
When it got serious
Mentoring started becoming some important and serious with my first leadership positions. I always saw mentoring a way to speed up the process of building autonomous teams.
I have started studying about how to become a better mentor and a servant leader. And combining that interest with my previous experience as a technical instructor, I could see in the mentees' eyes that I was really being able to help them.
General Assembly
General Assembly is a school which provides software developer bootcamps. I have become a mentor for their fresh developers.
I had the pleaser to help new developers to have their technical questions answered, as well as helping them in marketing themselves, creating blog posts, side-projects, curriculum, and LinkedIn profiles so they would have relevant information to present when asked.
One of my mentee, who was in NYC, got an amazing job after 3 months of really hard work, putting together all side-project live, and writing blog posts about each new technical discovery found.
Non-technical skills
Another very nice thing that happened to me while mentoring other developers, was that most of them lacked a bit chunk of soft-skills.
It was also part of my job, to help mentees to identify what they were lacking beyond code, and figure tint out questions like why they were not getting the promotion they wanted even if they had all the experience required to do so.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking was one of the things I tried to make the mentees to develop the most. It is easier to follow steps of a mentor who comes from a similar path to yours, but when your paths are different or when the mentee has no more mentor, something else needs to happen.
That is why I was always playing openly with the mentee. Playing open in this situation means that we would put all the cards on the table, to identify a diversity of opportunities and learn to pick the ones that applied the most for them and their situations.
If you are a mentor, please consider helping your mentees to learn thinking for themselves. How to analyze their situations, preferences, and anything else that would interfere in future decisions they would have to make without you by their side.
Wrapping up
During the years, I had the opportunity to mentor several other developers. Most of them, people in need of guidance for both looking for new opportunities or willing to join the technology world.
Regards,
Renan de Azevedo
Updated at 2020/06/26 12:53.