Mentoring

Mentoring

I’ve mentored a lot of people. I worked with people I met at the meet ups that wanted their first professional jobs. We picked a project and worked on it together in the evenings, using Slack or Google Hangouts to communicate. A lot of what Fournier points out worked for me.

In addition, I gave them the Dreyfus model of learning from Andy Hunt’s work, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We used that to focus their attention around how it feels to take recipes or tutorials and start building whole systems with it. This is the one area where new developers seem to get discouraged.

Intern Mentoring

When mentoring an intern, spend the first few days getting them started. Make sure there’s a physical and digital space for them to work. Choose a project that would take a new programmer about half the time the intern has. This leaves room for training and ensures the intern has the opportunity to succeed. They haven’t completed their formal education, so give them time to work out things that aren’t easy yet.

As their mentor, you have an important role in their lives. Respect them and this opportunity.

Listen, communicate, and adjust. This is the main thing you do over and over. Together with the intern, break the project down into milestones. Ensure you hear the words coming out of their mouth when they speak. They will often hide when they’re lost because they don’t want to look stupid, so communicate clearly and adjust when things aren’t working as planned.

[Fournier, 2017]

Rules Explicit and Implicit

Every workplace has explicit and implicit rules. For example, there is a policy about how many days employees can take off, but if you work in retail, the implicit rule may be to plan on working the week after Thanksgiving.

In an engineering organization, these rules may involve how often to check code into a repository, how to review software, style standards for code, the rhythm of the work day, and how long to work before asking for assistance.

[Fournier, 2017]

New Hire Mentoring

Mentoring a new hire is similar to working with an intern, only their project is probably a little more important to the team and their success is more important to the employee and the company.

Spend time to pair with the new hire, ensure they are able to get work done. Talk about the implicit and explicit rules at the organization. Remove obstacles to their success.

[Fournier, 2017]

References:

Fournier, C. (2017). The manager’s path: A guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. Retrieved from http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4822919