Mentoring a Software Engineer: Part 0

This is a series of posts I want to start as a way of thinking through how I approach mentoring. This may not follow the narrative structure of a journal, but they are notes to myself. I am not writing this as instructional material, but if you find value in it, do let me know.

Goals

I find a mentor/mentee relationship to be effective when it is goal-oriented and time-bounded. When I mentor someone in a professional context, I have three goals, and they’re all about helping a mentee with their goals.

Goal 1. Establish context. A mentee should be seeking a mentor to reach a goal. Am I a good fit to help them reach it?

Goal 2. determine the areas that need growth in order to reach the goal. Why do they need help reaching their goal?

Goal 3. nurture that growth with suggestions, encouragement, and check-ins.

I have the explicit non-goal of presenting a rose-tinted view of myself from the mentee’s point of view. I don’t need to feed my ego with someone that looks up to me. I need my mentee to see that flaws and limitations are everpresent in the human experience, but we can still manage to improve upon ourselves.

Goal 1: establish context

Maybe someone wants help formulating more specific goals on their way to their main goal, say, a promotion. This is what I typically have people coming to me for. At Google there are plenty of resources about this. I need folks to dig a little deeper for a more intrinsic career goal.

What I find to be fascinating to watch is how unprepared a person is when asked, “would you be happy in that role?” Certainly more money is motivator. The stress of working a role with more responsibilities that you can’t handle may tip the scales away from the cash bump.

I need to determine someone’s motivations in order to effectively guide them. As a mentor, there’s no point in my suggesting someone do something they’re entirely unmotivated to do since they likely won’t do it. They won’t try and they won’t improve.

Are these person’s motivations even scrutible to me? If so, I might be able to take them on as a mentee.

Goal 2: identify growth areas

This can take a fair amount of the mentorship time. I need to get to know someone and their concrete struggles to determine where they need help. A meeting with a mentee is typically only 30 minutes, so it’s important to try to drive the conversation away from being just a gripe session.

Is this person an arrogant “misunderstood genius”? Is this person too hesitant about their own ideas to try to advance them? Is this person stuck in a rut and looking for a way out of a common grind?

I can only do so much with our limited time together that I try to pick out just a couple aspects to work on, with concrete goals attached. If a mentee and I can agree on what to prioritize to work on, then we can get to work.

Goal 3: nurture growth

I will try to have my mentee internalize the three Hs:

• Be Humble.
• Be Helpful.
• Be Hungry.

I find that staying humble will improve your relationships with people. People are generally more willing to hear you out when they like you.

To be more than likeable, I think you need to contribute something more than comic relief–to be helpful. Being helpful doesn’t just mean picking up an on-call shift for someone going on vacation. Helpfulness can extend to all areas of the team and the business, depending on how you structure your help.

If you’re “fat and happy”, you have little motivation to improve. Therefore, I find that keeping momentum in self improvement requires carrying an intrinsic amount of hunger to have a greater impact.

Closing time

I plan to go into more detail about how I go about achieving my goals as a mentor in later posts. Next, I want to detail some goals folks have had (abstractly) and how I went about or would go about getting more information about them.