A mentor is literally the most important thing in anything you start doing. Fastest way to be brought up to speed and get going. Even if it's a "loosely" defined mentor, maybe even better so.
I wish I had a mentor during college and post college. I think most of us who are currently established never had a mentor. It was not about the tech though; it was about the "weed out tests". I wish I had a mentor to help me know the "Career Requirements". I usually taught my professor the new tech because they were too busy doing the old stuff and not keeping up. But I became a mentor to people who don't know what CSC is about. Some of them just want to try. Some of them have the right stuff. Mentor is just someone that a student can immediately call about the study. Also a good mentor should have a job ready for whoever seeks a career in it. But its true, you don't need a mentor but be prepared to teach yourself (which takes a long time). Good mentors help decide and discover if you're made for that job. I had mentors in sports. I quickly learned that I ain't made for being an NBA player or an NFL player. I got to play with the top sports guys and I quickly realized, I ain't got it. I also wanted to be a NASA astronaut, but I'm flat footed and also had other (unknown) health problems (until MRI told me other wise). Knowing the system quickly gave me awareness and self perspective. Mentors introduced me to tests. I couldn't imagine studying for 10 years (to be an astronaut) and 11 years later learn that I have a physical incapability that will hinder a astronaut; all that time of studying would have been in vain. Mentors (or gifted professors) help. Also mentors are usually currently active in whatever field. Even if they are retired, they are still in it. When I was starting businesses when I first got out of college, I joined a group called S.C.O.R.E.; they got me up to speed on the things happening within my city. They weren't mentors, but they had access to resources and databases that I could scrape myself.
@@mythbuster6126Nice catch. You dont need the enlightened type, you need more likely the "closest" to your level. Is like reading Kant's phylosophy without touching Socrates first. You can learn, but you will probably get tired really soon.
The annoying thing for me is a person who's in an EARLY learning stage where the main thing they need to do is just write more code. But they keep looking for gurus to give them guidance that they won't even need for months or years. Also at least 1/4 of the ppl who DM me about mentorship just want a job. All to say definitions are important.
I do think there's a benefit to pointing people in the right direction. E.g if they for some reason tell you they're learning subversion you can save them a lot of time by telling them to use git. Also it's useful to tell them the type of stuff that's useful to know like using rest apis or learning the Unix shell. Once I started my job I realised how many things I thought I knew that I didn't.
I have mentored more than 7 people for longer than 6 months. I disagree. Wiritng more code per se does not make you a better programmer. I have seen devs repeating the same mistakes for MONTHS. How do you arrive at the conclusion that writing more code makes you better? I think you are assuming these devs have the "growth" mindset when in fact many do not have this mindset or think they are already pretty good.
@@kidmoseyhmm, i am not a mentor but i would think getting consistent code review is also important. If 10 different people reviewed 10 different projects of yours, they don't know the mistakes u made previously and might not tell if you did it correctly now or not and would just tell you to improve something else.
As a certified trainer, yes, there is a real disconnect there... If you just want a skill gap filled, you need training. But that's not a mentor. A mentor will kickstart you into doing "something", support you to keep doing "it", nudge you if a change of direction is needed (or you get stuck), and hint at things you don't know (yet) but should look into. It's a lot more fun than training people too... Another crucial point is that trainer is a job, so you do your job and get paid, but true mentorship is a relationship, and you won't get it if your mentor doesn't see potential in you and/or doesn't give two tweets about you.
When you start learning something you have stupid questions that no one wants to answer. These questions comes from misunderstanding some core concepts of what you're learning. Most of the times it's hard to find answer online that will unwind this knot of misunderstanding. So you have to either spend huge amount of time to answer your questions completely or you can just ask someone who totally understands the problem. It's easy to ask your teacher or university classmates stupid questions and get good answer but on the internet you (at least I) get either ignored, shamed or given wrong/misleading answers. The harder the topic the harder to get correct answers.
The main difference between mentor and community is that mentor is the active side that takes initiative. Community will only respond to problems that you point out yourself, which usually means you've been on the wrong path for some time already (Stackoverflow is full of XY problems with direct solutions as accepted answer).
It also makes the assumptions that the individuals of this "community" has as much vested interest in mentorship as the mentor, or that all voices of the community are vetted. You see in actual life in discord channels and forums like reddit where a mentee would just get drowned in the sea of information--much of it bad--or their questions not even answered
It helps. My mentors helped me to learn who I could trust and who I should not trust. "All education is self education" is one of the best a mentor said to me.
Yes agree with theprime, a mentor on a software product at the start may keep you inline with the companies focus and goals, we don't want a new interface ( yes it could be better) we need to improve this functionality today. Discuss improvements for the UI at other times when it is the right time.
I took a job at a very large semiconductor company last year. The job was doing something that was quite new to me, but I have been programming for 20+ years already. There was a lot of new stuff to learn. The team I was on had a LOT of documentation but as I found quickly the documentation was often out of date or just wrong. I had a "code-buddy" assigned for the first few months. This was kind of a mentor in theory. But what I discovered after a few weeks was that this "mentor" had a pet project he wanted to complete and I was simply a "resource" to use. My mentor was terrible at explaining what he wanted. Wrote very little down. Did few demonstrations of what was needed. And at the end of the day, I came to believe he was trying to solve the wrong problem. I left that job a month or so ago and can't be happier. A bad mentor is honestly worse than no mentor.
Your input on what mentorship is and should be is so valuable. I've been in this industry for like 12 years now and I never had a true mentor. So I never knew what being mentored is like. Now I'm in a position where I have to manage a small team and so I had no idea how I should mentor them! What you said about mentorship being teaching life skills and spotting and correcting flaws in others really resonated with me. Thank you.
The unspoken thing here is that someone who is a great mentor for in-office work might be bad at remote work. Being a good co-worker and person when remote requires a fundamentally different set of communication skills.
Yeah a community is always a circle jerk. That’s the definition of a community. And even in companies you have communities but a good mentor will break those walls and also point you to other departments and stakeholders to pose your suggestions to and get feedback and most importantly find your way, because big organizations can be so overwhelmingly complex to navigate.
I mean communities are important both for learning and the learning you get when helping others. Some kinda studying philosophy about learning a topic well enough to explain it to others or something... but either way whether friendship beyond shared interests or just motivation inside those shared interests a community is great. A community is also no replacement for mentorship. It's like a kid saying, "Why do I need my parents when I got my friends down at the skating rink that are pretty knowledgeable about life stuff?" Yes communities great and mentors are great, but they're not like for like replacements... To really grow you need a healthy combination of both.
One of my best mentors made me say "I dont know" in a conference call in front god and everyone and instead of being mean about he just helped me in the call. After that I just admit what I dont know to people freely and dont care if people judge me for not knowing.
My manager and co-workers are a blessing to have as my mentors. I don’t rely on them for everything but I’m a apprentice in the field (frontend). I’m learning my foundations right now (pure JS and react). Solo Learning and picking up knowledge bombs everyday…I’ve learnt a crap tone in the past 3-weeks than I have doing a Udemy course for 3 months. (This isn’t to discourage you from doing courses, it’s not) If you ever get an opportunity to be mentored by anyone with more skill than you. TAKE ITTTT!!!!
In a sense, I was in the same situation as you Primeagen. I had no social media, no mentors, no support. I just kept pushing through and figuring it out until it clicked. Internet at the time was the old dial-up 56k internet connection and I had a few books here and there. As time went on, it was the same situation until the internet finally got good enough and had more resources to learn more. But I never had friends or family that was interested in software so for a very long time, I just simply did it by myself. So for ME, no mentor was involved. I love helping people out with tech and the software industry as a whole now and I think it is because of the lack thereof that I had when I was younger. I guess the whole "give people what you did not have" thing plays a role. I think a mentor and community are very important, but you don't HAVE to have a mentor. But to get through it without a mentor probably requires a certain person. Hard to say!!
My mentor at my first job really helped me a lot with handling pressure. I used to stress a lot over tasks but he used to give me a different perspective and made things easier to handle for me. I don't think mentorship should be about helping in programming but everything else that is required.
Is there a mentor dating service that’ll pair me up with the man who will change my life? Cuz I never had a mentor, never sought out a mentor, never felt like I needed one, and all the people in college that I know that had one just seemed to be wasting their time with their mentor. Maybe I just don’t get it, like maybe mentor had a more fluid definition and my bosses at work or the engineers above me that helped me with the codebase when I started count as my mentors… idk
As a tutor of computer science who never had a tutor for computer science, I feel the plight of students and parents of students when they approach me for tutorship. I act as a mentor of sorts too, if only slightly. It is crucial to have a sensei/gurudev/mentor figure in any discipline, I think, to embrace it and fall in love with it. Growing up, I lacked that, and had to resort to abstractions to do the job, becoming the figure people relied on instead.
mentorship is not about fostering skills, it's about initiation into a community and fostering the skills required to bear and work with the trust that that initiation requires
A mentor is something I most definitely need at this stage in my dev career. The speed of growth has always been different whenever I've had the opportunity to be a disciple.
True! I guess the confusion came because companies abuse the term mentor. I see a mentor as someone you look up to in some way and you can feel he/she thinks somewhat like you, able to understand what you are going through. Not that easy to find mentors that are also willing to mentor you. A company can assign someone to help you, which is better than nothing, but he/she may not be a mentor to you.
On average, in any online community your absence will be mostly forgotten after a week or two. Make connections in the real world. That’s where mentorship can happen. Mentorship is a mix of brotherhood and fatherhood. From the mentor's perspective, it’s recognising your past-self and mistakes in someone else and helping them to benefit from your wisdom.
I've never had a mentor in any form. Not from sibling, parent, personal, nor professional. The only consistency in my life is my belief in myself and I've had an overall successful career and I work hard and try and protect those around me. I'm charting 100% my own path, I follow my heart and my faith and it makes me proud when I do that. The decisions I've made that I've felt were influenced by some degree by others are the only ones I regret
Oh also, I have never had someone help me get a job. All this is to say that you can always get there alone, and there is a positive to it where your mind will be less polluted by bad opinions along the way. I question everyone and everything and I'm often the one to come up with "smart" ideas/techniques that others don't think of, I'm sure in large part because of that
Mentor is great for when you're encountering new concepts, you get explanations broken down in simple form from someone who's been in the industry for years. You also absorb their insights which is gained only through experience. If we collectively push our insights so the next generations start at our baseline then we will all improve as a whole. There is no need for humanity experiencing the same problems and coming to the same conclusions over and over. That's not progress.
While having a 1:1 mentor is valuable, it's essential to remember in programming there are often various methods to achieve the same result. What resonates with one person might not with another. So, even if advice is sound, it might not always align with your perspective or understanding. So finding the "right" mentor is absolutely crucial.
Surrounding yourself by people who all think the same way is not a great way to become better. You need to be exposed to different ways of thinking and doing things
You should be exposed to a straight line path of how to do things, then you can slowly expand from there. Of course doing things your own way is satisfying, though you should gain the knowledge of how first before fumbling in the dark by yourself.
I wish I could have had a mentor for most of my career so far. I feel like I'd have less impostor syndrome if nothing else. I am mostly self taught, and at this point I've learned a lot that way through 13 years in the industry, but I still worry that I've got holes in my experience that proper mentorship could have filled years ago.
deleted because too many words. If I want to learn something fast and efficiently to get a grasp on it, I don't want to be exposed to a ton of different options from the very start... cases, perspectives and complexities. I want to get some firm ground under my feet so I have a fucking clue what a baseline looks like. in short: Options mean nothing if you don't have the foundation to evaluate them. People who want a mentor are usually building that foundation. Giving them broader options doesn't do anything useful until they know how to pick one.
A mentor is as good as a second dad that should be the depth of mentorship. Reading a blog is not mentorship. Why a second dad because your first mentors will usually leave a big imprint on you at the start of your carreer.
Seems like the person is arguing that professional networking is better than mentorship, but is conflating those terms into one category. Meanwhile, you can consider yourself very lucky if you come across someone who will dedicate enough time and patience in not only showing you the ropes, but going into the depth of things once you are ready. Getting the same level of advice online is nearly impossible, but you won't know that until there is that level of mutual understanding, i.e you learn very fast in these circumstances
My mentor never talks about specific best practices unless we r working rn on a thing. My mentor teaches me how to go about building a career in tech. How to do meetings and work with people. On the tech I am doing we both agree I am better trained. I write in python they wrote in c++ years ago. Rn they r doing manager stuff.
My mentors are not as good at the technical parts of my job as I am. What I'm learning from them is how to be productive in a corporate environment, how to coordinate a group effort, how our industry (quantitative energy trading) works, narrow technical advice, or just how to live a happy life. To be honest, I don't think seeking technical mentorship is good at all. So few people in software are the all-around killers who I would want to invest in a technical mentor-mentee relationship with. On top of that, the odds of getting useless developer dogma is also incredibly high. So I guess the author is right in the sense that a community is probably better than mentorship for building technical skills.
There’s a big difference between a large community and an intimate community and what you can get out of it, and I think that’s confused and misinterpreted here. You can have many close connections in a small community, especially one that values horizontal mentorship.
The community will make you average. If you are below average in your journey the community will help and pull you up, but once you reach the average stage the community may pull you down.
The anonymous internet community doesn't give a shit about you as a person. A mentor should give a shit about you. It's personal responsability that can not exist in lose groups. I never had a mentor, but everything is easier if you got the support and guidance of someone that cares.
Diverse perspectives is not a good in and of itself. There are a lot of dumb people in the world. If your mentor is actually smart and good, why would you diversify the range of perspectives you consider, knowing that you’re most likely taking in the perspectives of 10 idiots for every smart person? Follow a single mentor until you’re better equipped to make judgements about who has opinions worth considering.
i don't really get it "If you want to become a better programmer, then you're doing mentorship wrong". Isn't the whole point of mentorship to make you better at your work? I do get that you have to work hard, but don't you want that guidance to become better faster than compared to being on your own? I mean, if I'm going to get a mentorship the whole point of that thing is learn things faster, and if its possible, better.
What's community mentorship? Stackoverflow? But with good people? Lol. Community mentorship don't usually work. Unless people meant community learning.
i don't like it for many reasons. first of all it assumes that a community with mentors with different views exists and accessible. maybe it does but i have never seen it. i don't think it's likely. as in the video communities aren't that diverse. it's always narrowed down to a single body one way or another. or there are smaller groups of people within a community. and all these articles just make it very easy. "ah yes it's amazing and helpful and great" but my experience is far from it 90% of the time. especially last 4 months were just miserable. i might as well get advice from a gang of unicorns. my judgement isn't fair because i am introverted and terribly anxious. this is already difficult for anyone but it's 10 times as difficult. i die inside every single time. not fun. meanwhile a 1:1 thing just boost me 10 times with 1/10 effort. you can focus easily and get more specific.
I think the article is wrong. I dont know how to say, but your father is your father as a human being and person and a mentor is something like your father as a professional. Saying you dont need a mentor because there are online communities is like saying you dont need a father figure because there are people on the street you can ask. On a technical level, you probably get similiar answers, but there is a lot more. And similiar to a family, there are aspects of "inheritance", of building up a succession etc. etc..
Devs hate each other hate to share knowledge when a more talented dev appears they antagonize him. Devs are not social creatures. They don't live in comunity or pride.
Good luck actually finding a mentor these days. Communities and self-help are the only ways to really push your career forward. Mentors would be great, but there's no incentive to be a mentor these days.
What a silly argument. Words have meanings and we should learn them and use them. A "mentor" is a mentor and a "community" is a community. From the dictionary: mentor - an experienced and trusted adviser. Note this "trust" part. You trust they have the experience and are not just spouting on. You can trust them to do the best for you, be that telling you answers to problems directly or guiding you to arriving at you own answers with background information and questions. All in all mentor implies a fairly close personal relationship. Their advice is tailored to you as they know you. A "community" or "support group" may well be experienced but can you trust that always? They may well have you best interests at heart but they don't know you well enough or have the time to do what a mentor can do. Arguing that a community is or can be a mentor is daft. Can you get by with a community instead of a mentor? like some people can some time. Which is ultimately better, mentor or community? What ask, now a days one can have both. Actually I think many need a mentor to teach them how to behave in a community :)
Hey prime ! hope that you are doing well... I have this particular question that I wanted to ask you : "how are you dealing with eye strain ?" - upvote pls ; )
Eh, what stops a mentorship from becoming an echo chamber just like online communities? I also don't really think that online communities are just echo chambers. The smaller ones, sure. But there are Discord servers with hundreds of people that can think quite differently. A mentor to me sounds like a single point of failure. If the purpose of a mentor is to also shape you as a person, that sounds incredibly dangerous to me. It's easy to get stuck with people and find out much later that they were horrible for your growth as a person even if you have respect for them.
I've tried this whole 'mentor and student' shenanigans a few times and I can confidently say that it sucks ass (at least for me, but I've seen similar patterns in people around me). Embracing community had given me a 5years of mentorship in 5months. And you're not at mercy of biases of a single person. Everything equalizes when you're gathering intel from multiple sources.
Question is, bad intel can come from singular source, but it is much easier to filter it out. When 20 different people are telling you wrong things how long it's gonna take you to realize that?
What a strange article. There's a time for working solo, working with a peer and working with a community. Bike-shedding is enough to show how group mentorship could go awry. I can imagine how a simple question about "how to do x in framework y" could devolve into a discussion of why you shouldn't use framework y at all, but that's not going to help someone fix their code. Ofc there can also be issues with having 1 mentor. The real issue is "how do I find a high quality mentor who is well suited for me?". Surely, the answer is non-trivial but it doesn't seem related to having some specific quantity of mentors. Probably, it's easier to find 1 consistently good mentor, than a consistently good community mentor since quality, and emotional investment in the student, will vary according to community size.
A mentor is literally the most important thing in anything you start doing. Fastest way to be brought up to speed and get going. Even if it's a "loosely" defined mentor, maybe even better so.
I wish I had a mentor during college and post college. I think most of us who are currently established never had a mentor. It was not about the tech though; it was about the "weed out tests". I wish I had a mentor to help me know the "Career Requirements".
I usually taught my professor the new tech because they were too busy doing the old stuff and not keeping up. But I became a mentor to people who don't know what CSC is about. Some of them just want to try. Some of them have the right stuff. Mentor is just someone that a student can immediately call about the study. Also a good mentor should have a job ready for whoever seeks a career in it.
But its true, you don't need a mentor but be prepared to teach yourself (which takes a long time). Good mentors help decide and discover if you're made for that job. I had mentors in sports. I quickly learned that I ain't made for being an NBA player or an NFL player. I got to play with the top sports guys and I quickly realized, I ain't got it. I also wanted to be a NASA astronaut, but I'm flat footed and also had other (unknown) health problems (until MRI told me other wise). Knowing the system quickly gave me awareness and self perspective. Mentors introduced me to tests. I couldn't imagine studying for 10 years (to be an astronaut) and 11 years later learn that I have a physical incapability that will hinder a astronaut; all that time of studying would have been in vain.
Mentors (or gifted professors) help. Also mentors are usually currently active in whatever field. Even if they are retired, they are still in it. When I was starting businesses when I first got out of college, I joined a group called S.C.O.R.E.; they got me up to speed on the things happening within my city. They weren't mentors, but they had access to resources and databases that I could scrape myself.
@@mythbuster6126Nice catch. You dont need the enlightened type, you need more likely the "closest" to your level. Is like reading Kant's phylosophy without touching Socrates first. You can learn, but you will probably get tired really soon.
I've never had a mentor. I'm not sure how you would get one.
The annoying thing for me is a person who's in an EARLY learning stage where the main thing they need to do is just write more code. But they keep looking for gurus to give them guidance that they won't even need for months or years. Also at least 1/4 of the ppl who DM me about mentorship just want a job. All to say definitions are important.
I do think there's a benefit to pointing people in the right direction. E.g if they for some reason tell you they're learning subversion you can save them a lot of time by telling them to use git.
Also it's useful to tell them the type of stuff that's useful to know like using rest apis or learning the Unix shell.
Once I started my job I realised how many things I thought I knew that I didn't.
@@sarjannarwan6896 Yep! Having mentored a crap ton of ppl, I'm not arguing against it wholesale. The term is just floated in error sometimes.
I have mentored more than 7 people for longer than 6 months. I disagree. Wiritng more code per se does not make you a better programmer. I have seen devs repeating the same mistakes for MONTHS. How do you arrive at the conclusion that writing more code makes you better? I think you are assuming these devs have the "growth" mindset when in fact many do not have this mindset or think they are already pretty good.
@@walterlol Ok.
@@kidmoseyhmm, i am not a mentor but i would think getting consistent code review is also important. If 10 different people reviewed 10 different projects of yours, they don't know the mistakes u made previously and might not tell if you did it correctly now or not and would just tell you to improve something else.
I read the title and thought "yeah dude, you just need some friends"
As a certified trainer, yes, there is a real disconnect there... If you just want a skill gap filled, you need training. But that's not a mentor. A mentor will kickstart you into doing "something", support you to keep doing "it", nudge you if a change of direction is needed (or you get stuck), and hint at things you don't know (yet) but should look into. It's a lot more fun than training people too... Another crucial point is that trainer is a job, so you do your job and get paid, but true mentorship is a relationship, and you won't get it if your mentor doesn't see potential in you and/or doesn't give two tweets about you.
When you start learning something you have stupid questions that no one wants to answer. These questions comes from misunderstanding some core concepts of what you're learning. Most of the times it's hard to find answer online that will unwind this knot of misunderstanding. So you have to either spend huge amount of time to answer your questions completely or you can just ask someone who totally understands the problem. It's easy to ask your teacher or university classmates stupid questions and get good answer but on the internet you (at least I) get either ignored, shamed or given wrong/misleading answers. The harder the topic the harder to get correct answers.
The main difference between mentor and community is that mentor is the active side that takes initiative. Community will only respond to problems that you point out yourself, which usually means you've been on the wrong path for some time already (Stackoverflow is full of XY problems with direct solutions as accepted answer).
It also makes the assumptions that the individuals of this "community" has as much vested interest in mentorship as the mentor, or that all voices of the community are vetted. You see in actual life in discord channels and forums like reddit where a mentee would just get drowned in the sea of information--much of it bad--or their questions not even answered
It helps. My mentors helped me to learn who I could trust and who I should not trust. "All education is self education" is one of the best a mentor said to me.
Yes agree with theprime, a mentor on a software product at the start may keep you inline with the companies focus and goals, we don't want a new interface ( yes it could be better) we need to improve this functionality today.
Discuss improvements for the UI at other times when it is the right time.
wait yall got mentors?
I took a job at a very large semiconductor company last year. The job was doing something that was quite new to me, but I have been programming for 20+ years already. There was a lot of new stuff to learn. The team I was on had a LOT of documentation but as I found quickly the documentation was often out of date or just wrong. I had a "code-buddy" assigned for the first few months. This was kind of a mentor in theory. But what I discovered after a few weeks was that this "mentor" had a pet project he wanted to complete and I was simply a "resource" to use. My mentor was terrible at explaining what he wanted. Wrote very little down. Did few demonstrations of what was needed. And at the end of the day, I came to believe he was trying to solve the wrong problem. I left that job a month or so ago and can't be happier. A bad mentor is honestly worse than no mentor.
Your input on what mentorship is and should be is so valuable. I've been in this industry for like 12 years now and I never had a true mentor. So I never knew what being mentored is like. Now I'm in a position where I have to manage a small team and so I had no idea how I should mentor them! What you said about mentorship being teaching life skills and spotting and correcting flaws in others really resonated with me. Thank you.
The unspoken thing here is that someone who is a great mentor for in-office work might be bad at remote work. Being a good co-worker and person when remote requires a fundamentally different set of communication skills.
Yeah a community is always a circle jerk. That’s the definition of a community. And even in companies you have communities but a good mentor will break those walls and also point you to other departments and stakeholders to pose your suggestions to and get feedback and most importantly find your way, because big organizations can be so overwhelmingly complex to navigate.
I mean communities are important both for learning and the learning you get when helping others. Some kinda studying philosophy about learning a topic well enough to explain it to others or something... but either way whether friendship beyond shared interests or just motivation inside those shared interests a community is great.
A community is also no replacement for mentorship. It's like a kid saying, "Why do I need my parents when I got my friends down at the skating rink that are pretty knowledgeable about life stuff?"
Yes communities great and mentors are great, but they're not like for like replacements... To really grow you need a healthy combination of both.
One of my best mentors made me say "I dont know" in a conference call in front god and everyone and instead of being mean about he just helped me in the call. After that I just admit what I dont know to people freely and dont care if people judge me for not knowing.
I totally agree that online communities can evolve in echo chambers... and that is not a good thing
Yea, Im sure you make an effort to hear out the side you dont like.
My manager and co-workers are a blessing to have as my mentors. I don’t rely on them for everything but I’m a apprentice in the field (frontend).
I’m learning my foundations right now (pure JS and react). Solo Learning and picking up knowledge bombs everyday…I’ve learnt a crap tone in the past 3-weeks than I have doing a Udemy course for 3 months. (This isn’t to discourage you from doing courses, it’s not)
If you ever get an opportunity to be mentored by anyone with more skill than you. TAKE ITTTT!!!!
Every good boss is a mentor
In a sense, I was in the same situation as you Primeagen. I had no social media, no mentors, no support. I just kept pushing through and figuring it out until it clicked. Internet at the time was the old dial-up 56k internet connection and I had a few books here and there. As time went on, it was the same situation until the internet finally got good enough and had more resources to learn more. But I never had friends or family that was interested in software so for a very long time, I just simply did it by myself. So for ME, no mentor was involved. I love helping people out with tech and the software industry as a whole now and I think it is because of the lack thereof that I had when I was younger. I guess the whole "give people what you did not have" thing plays a role.
I think a mentor and community are very important, but you don't HAVE to have a mentor. But to get through it without a mentor probably requires a certain person. Hard to say!!
My mentor at my first job really helped me a lot with handling pressure. I used to stress a lot over tasks but he used to give me a different perspective and made things easier to handle for me. I don't think mentorship should be about helping in programming but everything else that is required.
Is there a mentor dating service that’ll pair me up with the man who will change my life? Cuz I never had a mentor, never sought out a mentor, never felt like I needed one, and all the people in college that I know that had one just seemed to be wasting their time with their mentor. Maybe I just don’t get it, like maybe mentor had a more fluid definition and my bosses at work or the engineers above me that helped me with the codebase when I started count as my mentors… idk
As a tutor of computer science who never had a tutor for computer science, I feel the plight of students and parents of students when they approach me for tutorship. I act as a mentor of sorts too, if only slightly. It is crucial to have a sensei/gurudev/mentor figure in any discipline, I think, to embrace it and fall in love with it. Growing up, I lacked that, and had to resort to abstractions to do the job, becoming the figure people relied on instead.
The only thing I got out with from this video is: you can never be sure of anything. - back to stage 0.
mentorship is not about fostering skills, it's about initiation into a community and fostering the skills required to bear and work with the trust that that initiation requires
5:26 YOU HAD A DISCORD ALL THIS TIME?!?!?!?
I was subbed for a whole year and din't even know
A mentor is something I most definitely need at this stage in my dev career. The speed of growth has always been different whenever I've had the opportunity to be a disciple.
True! I guess the confusion came because companies abuse the term mentor. I see a mentor as someone you look up to in some way and you can feel he/she thinks somewhat like you, able to understand what you are going through. Not that easy to find mentors that are also willing to mentor you. A company can assign someone to help you, which is better than nothing, but he/she may not be a mentor to you.
I love the intro, gg Flip
🙏🙏
BTW this is why I watch your videos/ streams (and maybe other people, too) ❤
For the mentorship process to be effective, it needs to abide by the law of equivalent exchange
Yes it's a 2 way street, the learning goes both ways and that's why I love being a mentor and being mentored
On average, in any online community your absence will be mostly forgotten after a week or two. Make connections in the real world. That’s where mentorship can happen. Mentorship is a mix of brotherhood and fatherhood. From the mentor's perspective, it’s recognising your past-self and mistakes in someone else and helping them to benefit from your wisdom.
I've never had a mentor in any form. Not from sibling, parent, personal, nor professional. The only consistency in my life is my belief in myself and I've had an overall successful career and I work hard and try and protect those around me. I'm charting 100% my own path, I follow my heart and my faith and it makes me proud when I do that. The decisions I've made that I've felt were influenced by some degree by others are the only ones I regret
Oh also, I have never had someone help me get a job. All this is to say that you can always get there alone, and there is a positive to it where your mind will be less polluted by bad opinions along the way. I question everyone and everything and I'm often the one to come up with "smart" ideas/techniques that others don't think of, I'm sure in large part because of that
I really love your videos, recently subscribed
Mentor is great for when you're encountering new concepts, you get explanations broken down in simple form from someone who's been in the industry for years. You also absorb their insights which is gained only through experience. If we collectively push our insights so the next generations start at our baseline then we will all improve as a whole. There is no need for humanity experiencing the same problems and coming to the same conclusions over and over. That's not progress.
Why does he think having a mentor and a community around you are mutually exclusive?
Yeah, I always try to learning with other what I'm not really good and make sense in my career.
Mentors also learn by being a mentor
People have a very hard time seeing faults in themselves.
00:55
Maybe prime wants to bring back the homosexual acts of mentorship from ancient Greece also.
"Now, bend over so I can review your code..."
Agree about friends/mentors, can be good/bad
I used to make excuses about why I wasn’t writing more code, now I make a new repo on GH and make excuses about why my code sucks. 😂
No need to excuse that. All code sucks. Some just sucks more.
While having a 1:1 mentor is valuable, it's essential to remember in programming there are often various methods to achieve the same result. What resonates with one person might not with another. So, even if advice is sound, it might not always align with your perspective or understanding. So finding the "right" mentor is absolutely crucial.
Surrounding yourself by people who all think the same way is not a great way to become better. You need to be exposed to different ways of thinking and doing things
You should be exposed to a straight line path of how to do things, then you can slowly expand from there. Of course doing things your own way is satisfying, though you should gain the knowledge of how first before fumbling in the dark by yourself.
I wish I could have had a mentor for most of my career so far. I feel like I'd have less impostor syndrome if nothing else. I am mostly self taught, and at this point I've learned a lot that way through 13 years in the industry, but I still worry that I've got holes in my experience that proper mentorship could have filled years ago.
that java book, the memories of nam
deleted because too many words. If I want to learn something fast and efficiently to get a grasp on it, I don't want to be exposed to a ton of different options from the very start... cases, perspectives and complexities. I want to get some firm ground under my feet so I have a fucking clue what a baseline looks like.
in short: Options mean nothing if you don't have the foundation to evaluate them. People who want a mentor are usually building that foundation. Giving them broader options doesn't do anything useful until they know how to pick one.
A mentor is as good as a second dad that should be the depth of mentorship. Reading a blog is not mentorship. Why a second dad because your first mentors will usually leave a big imprint on you at the start of your carreer.
Seems like the person is arguing that professional networking is better than mentorship, but is conflating those terms into one category. Meanwhile, you can consider yourself very lucky if you come across someone who will dedicate enough time and patience in not only showing you the ropes, but going into the depth of things once you are ready. Getting the same level of advice online is nearly impossible, but you won't know that until there is that level of mutual understanding, i.e you learn very fast in these circumstances
Facebook has been available to everyone since 2006
My mentor never talks about specific best practices unless we r working rn on a thing.
My mentor teaches me how to go about building a career in tech. How to do meetings and work with people.
On the tech I am doing we both agree I am better trained. I write in python they wrote in c++ years ago. Rn they r doing manager stuff.
My mentors are not as good at the technical parts of my job as I am. What I'm learning from them is how to be productive in a corporate environment, how to coordinate a group effort, how our industry (quantitative energy trading) works, narrow technical advice, or just how to live a happy life.
To be honest, I don't think seeking technical mentorship is good at all. So few people in software are the all-around killers who I would want to invest in a technical mentor-mentee relationship with. On top of that, the odds of getting useless developer dogma is also incredibly high.
So I guess the author is right in the sense that a community is probably better than mentorship for building technical skills.
There’s a big difference between a large community and an intimate community and what you can get out of it, and I think that’s confused and misinterpreted here. You can have many close connections in a small community, especially one that values horizontal mentorship.
that is fair
While I concur with certain aspects of her argument, she seems to favor community over mentorship? I think it all depends on the mentor after all.
So a mentor is like... therapy?
idk why but now i want a mentos
The community will make you average. If you are below average in your journey the community will help and pull you up, but once you reach the average stage the community may pull you down.
I believe that this should also apply to the mentor-mentee paradigm.
@@teodor-valentinmaxim8204 But with the community you have the greater chances of bumping into the problem and less chance of noticing it.
The anonymous internet community doesn't give a shit about you as a person.
A mentor should give a shit about you. It's personal responsability that can not exist in lose groups.
I never had a mentor, but everything is easier if you got the support and guidance of someone that cares.
I did most of what I have now without a mentor I wish I had one tbh would’ve made things way easier
Diverse perspectives is not a good in and of itself. There are a lot of dumb people in the world. If your mentor is actually smart and good, why would you diversify the range of perspectives you consider, knowing that you’re most likely taking in the perspectives of 10 idiots for every smart person? Follow a single mentor until you’re better equipped to make judgements about who has opinions worth considering.
i dont want to be mentored on being a good or best programmer i just want to know how to approach it (doesnt make sense ikr).
i don't really get it "If you want to become a better programmer, then you're doing mentorship wrong". Isn't the whole point of mentorship to make you better at your work? I do get that you have to work hard, but don't you want that guidance to become better faster than compared to being on your own? I mean, if I'm going to get a mentorship the whole point of that thing is learn things faster, and if its possible, better.
What's community mentorship? Stackoverflow? But with good people? Lol. Community mentorship don't usually work. Unless people meant community learning.
This guy never read ‘mastery’
more editor comments plz lmao
i don't like it for many reasons. first of all it assumes that a community with mentors with different views exists and accessible. maybe it does but i have never seen it. i don't think it's likely. as in the video communities aren't that diverse. it's always narrowed down to a single body one way or another. or there are smaller groups of people within a community. and all these articles just make it very easy. "ah yes it's amazing and helpful and great" but my experience is far from it 90% of the time. especially last 4 months were just miserable. i might as well get advice from a gang of unicorns.
my judgement isn't fair because i am introverted and terribly anxious. this is already difficult for anyone but it's 10 times as difficult. i die inside every single time. not fun.
meanwhile a 1:1 thing just boost me 10 times with 1/10 effort. you can focus easily and get more specific.
Let's cut the bs. tldw is that programmers need a supportive friend who's also good at programming.
I think the article is wrong.
I dont know how to say, but your father is your father as a human being and person and a mentor is something like your father as a professional.
Saying you dont need a mentor because there are online communities is like saying you dont need a father figure because there are people on the street you can ask.
On a technical level, you probably get similiar answers, but there is a lot more.
And similiar to a family, there are aspects of "inheritance", of building up a succession etc. etc..
Devs hate each other hate to share knowledge when a more talented dev appears they antagonize him. Devs are not social creatures. They don't live in comunity or pride.
Good luck actually finding a mentor these days. Communities and self-help are the only ways to really push your career forward. Mentors would be great, but there's no incentive to be a mentor these days.
You need to diverse your Sources of mentorship , to avoid getting perspectives after all the truth lies between the different point of views
What a silly argument. Words have meanings and we should learn them and use them. A "mentor" is a mentor and a "community" is a community. From the dictionary:
mentor - an experienced and trusted adviser.
Note this "trust" part. You trust they have the experience and are not just spouting on. You can trust them to do the best for you, be that telling you answers to problems directly or guiding you to arriving at you own answers with background information and questions. All in all mentor implies a fairly close personal relationship. Their advice is tailored to you as they know you.
A "community" or "support group" may well be experienced but can you trust that always? They may well have you best interests at heart but they don't know you well enough or have the time to do what a mentor can do.
Arguing that a community is or can be a mentor is daft. Can you get by with a community instead of a mentor? like some people can some time. Which is ultimately better, mentor or community? What ask, now a days one can have both.
Actually I think many need a mentor to teach them how to behave in a community :)
Hey prime ! hope that you are doing well... I have this particular question that I wanted to ask you : "how are you dealing with eye strain ?"
- upvote pls ; )
Eh, what stops a mentorship from becoming an echo chamber just like online communities? I also don't really think that online communities are just echo chambers. The smaller ones, sure. But there are Discord servers with hundreds of people that can think quite differently. A mentor to me sounds like a single point of failure. If the purpose of a mentor is to also shape you as a person, that sounds incredibly dangerous to me.
It's easy to get stuck with people and find out much later that they were horrible for your growth as a person even if you have respect for them.
I've always found advice from others was the wrong advice. Blazing your own trail alone and embracing the grind is the way to go.
Like the ignorant takes about Angular from React devs?
I've tried this whole 'mentor and student' shenanigans a few times and I can confidently say that it sucks ass (at least for me, but I've seen similar patterns in people around me). Embracing community had given me a 5years of mentorship in 5months. And you're not at mercy of biases of a single person. Everything equalizes when you're gathering intel from multiple sources.
Question is, bad intel can come from singular source, but it is much easier to filter it out. When 20 different people are telling you wrong things how long it's gonna take you to realize that?
What a strange article. There's a time for working solo, working with a peer and working with a community. Bike-shedding is enough to show how group mentorship could go awry. I can imagine how a simple question about "how to do x in framework y" could devolve into a discussion of why you shouldn't use framework y at all, but that's not going to help someone fix their code. Ofc there can also be issues with having 1 mentor. The real issue is "how do I find a high quality mentor who is well suited for me?". Surely, the answer is non-trivial but it doesn't seem related to having some specific quantity of mentors. Probably, it's easier to find 1 consistently good mentor, than a consistently good community mentor since quality, and emotional investment in the student, will vary according to community size.
you need a mentor ... I chose chatgpt 😂❤