Find Engineering mentors and mentoring

We mandate the highest standards for competency and communication, and meticulously vet every Engineering mentors and coach headed your way. I started a list of tech-centric mentor matching platforms if you want to mentor more widely or if you’re seeking mentors and can’t find them around you. Only then is a mentee ready to think with specificity about a future in contrast to the present. Maybe that’s “do more of what I like and less of what I hate”. Or maybe that’s “overcome the things that are hard”.

However impossible it may seem, empathy is a vital tool in any relationship. If you are not a very empathic person, you can get there through conscious and intentional practice. You can start by understanding the difference in people – strengths, background, challenges, and interests – to get yourself to be more empathic.

The Many Benefits of Mentorship

Gabor Zold is a content marketer and tech writer, focusing on software development technologies and engineering management. He has extensive knowledge about engineering management-related topics and has been doing interviews with accomplished tech leaders for years. He is the audio wizard of theLevel-up Engineering podcast. There is an industry-wide lack of developers all over the globe, and it’s worse at the senior level. Companies have to put a lot of effort into getting the best talent with a lot of experience, and this holds back projects significantly. When someone comes to me, they’re usually asking bigger questions not tied to our day-to-day work.

• I view having a mentor as a privilege, so don’t take it for granted.
• Be a supportive mentor, and they’ll think fondly of you.
• A mentor should always be on the mentee’s side, so you should separate it from managerial duties.
• I never thought of myself mentoring others either, even though I was doing it via code reviews, or just giving feedback.
• While you may have excellent advice or industry knowledge to share, leveraging your network may open your mentee up to a whole host of new opportunities.
• Eventually, I started giving similar feedback to people facing similar issues.

” The point is that our topic was getting better at writing readable code, and we spent our sessions discussing how to do this. My mentor is very experienced, with a busy schedule, and she still makes time for me, so it helps to be invested. Two out of three people I talked to said they’re too busy, because they had too many other mentees, but one was up for it.

dapt your approach to benefit each person

Remember, the aim is not to put them down and break their confidence. If you can point out one’s errors and shortcomings without necessarily causing any hurt, do it. You can try giving constructive criticism by sharing a similar experience.

Running a good team meeting used to be a big challenge for me a couple of years ago, but that has changed. I think the beauty of software engineering and a growing company is that things change all the time. Uber today is very different from what it was when I joined three years ago. In tech, your company, your team and your role can change a lot in three years. A software engineer mentor helps mentees to grow to be better software engineers, ultimately achieving their goals. He listens to them and helps them in their quest for viable solutions.

Would you share some things about your book plans?

It could be learning about technology or communication as an engineer. Sometimes a mentee has a specific skill they want to level up. Other times, they’re looking for more general guidance, usually with an eye towards promotion. Also, you can become an excellent tech mentor by teaching good software engineering practices. The provision of adequate resources to help them in their software development journey is also of paramount importance. Code reviews processes entail lots of feedback, discussions, and learning from each other. Working as a dedicated development team, for instance, fosters mentorship either during discussions, brainstorming, or anything similar.

• Uber, however, had an official mentoring program.
• You can connect and introduce them to people that could make their journey a little easier.
• Beyond the short-term benefits of becoming a better communicator and teacher, don’t forget about the long game.
• This means that they will undertake software development tasks more efficiently, and most importantly, in record time.
• When I became a developer, I thought I knew everything, and it took years to figure out that I barely knew anything.
• Find a way to reflect on how the mentoring is going.

At some point, I had a large team, about 15 people. Every week, I sat down with them and talked through how they could grow and where they could be better, and I gave some actionable feedback. Eventually, I started giving similar feedback to people facing similar issues. I’ve been struggling to recommend a book for them about what makes great software developers. It could also help them find areas to improve on, which beats guessing. The first step when you’re looking for mentorship is to make a list of the people who you think could help you. Whether they’re inside your company or outside, reach out to them and be specific.

Closing quotes from mentors who are engineers

What I did not expect is how much senior engineers gained from setting up formal mentorships with more experienced – staff or principal – engineers. The most sought-after software engineers I know, are all generous mentors. People not only look up to them for their coding, architecture, and execution skills.

To get most jobs done in the tech world currently, you need to collaborate with your networks. The tasks come with the business requirements and the description of the desirable result, but don’t explain how to solve the particular problem.