Engineering Mentoring
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Do you have a mentor? Do you mentor others? If not have you considered it? Mentoring is an important part of a successful and meaningful career path.
Mentors help with everything from leadership and technical skills to navigating workplace dynamics. Mentors build their leadership abilities while mentees gain perspective and guidance.
What really is mentoring?
Mentoring is sharing your experience to help others in their career. This can be done through advising on leadership and soft skills, technical advice, and/or coaching. A mentor uses their expertise to help someone else who wants to develop a particular skill set or advance their career in general.
The mentor or guide is a key archetype in mythology and literature (Vogler, 2020). In the hero’s journey, a critical step is meeting the mentor or guide who helps the hero gain the confidence, knowledge, and resources to complete their quest (Wikipedia, 2024).
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Why become a mentor?
Volunteering consistently to mentor other engineers has been one of the best career decisions I made. I signed up to be a mentor at Amazon shortly after joining in 2009. I wanted a chance to show my leadership skills and prove to myself that they would transfer from my time in small companies and the military to a large tech company. I found it quite fulfilling. I never had a mentoring conversation where I did not leave with a positive feeling, and I learned a lot of things myself through mentoring others. This included leadership and soft skills as well as new perspectives around technical challenges from my mentees. As my scope increased over the years it has been one of the ways I kept context on what the larger organization was doing which was important to my own success.
I also learned that teaching someone else forces you to clarify your thinking, and provides a signal of what others find valuable. Getting asked similar questions by multiple people motivated me to start writing externally for others.
Benefits of having a mentor
Some types of experience are bought dearly with time or pain if you have to blaze the trail yourself.
Some projects have roadmaps that span years rather than months. Others involve complex cross-team coordination, where communication challenges often overshadow technical ones. Throughout your career, you’ll only get to personally lead a limited number of these long-term projects. This makes it difficult to gain enough hands-on experience to understand what works and what doesn’t. The feedback loop is simply too long to learn effectively through trial and error alone. That’s why learning from others’ experience becomes critically important.
Leadership is another area where mentorship is important. Tech leads, managers, and more senior peers can have a significant impact on the career outcomes of others. You should try to learn from the best you can rather than inadvertently experiment on other people.
When you are new to a domain or organization you also do not know what you should know. Even if you are a self-directed learner a guide is valuable for showing you where to invest your time.
By any other name
A lot of mentoring takes place informally without being called that explicitly. This is fine - sometimes naming it explicitly isn’t necessary.
Places where mentoring happens without a formal relationship include code reviews, design reviews, one-on-one meetings, and pair programming. Mentoring also takes place in other cases where engineers work together as a team like planning meetings, retrospectives, and whiteboarding sessions.
Formal mentoring also has its place though. For one thing, many mentors readily available to people lack a key attribute that can be very valuable to the mentee: objectivity. The closer your mentor is to you in an organization, the more difficult it will be for them to step back and take an objective approach. The context of working together or nearby can be invaluable in some situations, but perspective can be much more valuable in others.
Another benefit of formal mentoring programs is they make it easier for engineers to receive appreciation and recognition for spending time mentoring others. This helps the organizations and the mentees because the incentives are better aligned.
Mentoring versus sponsorship
Sponsorship is giving access to projects, resources, visibility, or other opportunities to someone else. This can be critically important and may come from someone who is also a mentor, but is a separate concept.
Mentoring for onboarding
When you join a new company or team, mentoring is even more important than normal. Also, this is a situation where the specific expertise does not require someone more senior so much as someone more tenured in that specific organization.
Unfortunately, many organizations do not encourage or set expectations that there is any other type of mentoring, or that it should continue past the new-hire stage.
Coaching versus advising
Coaching, as opposed to advising, is asking questions that help someone solve their own problems. This can help them think through how to overcome obstacles or gain some self-awareness that allows them to be more effective. (Batra, 2020).
Coaching and advising are techniques, where mentoring is more of a relationship and shared outcome or goal. A mentor can coach, advise, do both, or help in other ways, like reviewing work and providing constructive feedback on it.
Topical versus general
When you want to improve your expertise or skills in a particular area, technical or otherwise, then a more defined mentorship goal can be more useful. These tend to have more of a naturally defined lifetime as well. If you are working with someone to build up a certain skillset that is fairly narrowly defined, you will get there eventually and the engagement will either change to suit some new purpose or come to an end.
When you want general coaching and guidance or feedback on areas that take a long time to develop then a longer term relationship with more broad goals is usually more appropriate.
Finding a mentor
Addy Osmani says you should consider two questions when looking for a mentor.
- What are your short and long-term goals?
- Who do you look up to?
Then ask them. You get 0% of what you don’t ask for. If you have a contact in common you can get an introduction if you think it will help, but do not let this be a way to avoid asking them.
You can also ask your manager or tech lead to help you find a mentor, either for identifying them or advocate for you.
It is also reasonable to have multiple mentors, whether or not the relationship is formal. Different people have different skills, availability, and perspectives.
It is better for either party to pass if the goals and abilities do not fit in the relationship. It is not a slight of anyone to say that you do not have the bandwidth to do it properly or that your skillset does not overlap enough with the areas of growth they are seeking to achieve.
Being a more effective mentor
Listen, and be interested. Listening is more than just not talking at that moment. Try to delay talking about yourself or something you did as long as possible.
Camille Fournier, author of the The Manager’s Path has this to say about listening.
Listening is the first and most basic skill of managing people. Listening is a precursor to empathy, which is one of the core skills of a quality manager. You need this skill wherever your career takes you; even principal engineers with no reports need to be able to hear what others are really saying. So, when your mentee is speaking to you, pay attention to your own behavior. Are you spending all your time thinking about what you want to say next? Are you thinking about your own work? Are you doing anything other than listening to the words coming out of his mouth? If so, you’re not listening well. - (Fournier, 2017).
Be supportive and show empathy. You don’t need to judge or be correct about everything. Everyone deserves validation and support when facing challenges, regardless of whether you agree with their conclusions. Sometimes just listening is most valuable.
Maintain confidentiality. Keep your discussions private unless your mentee explicitly gives permission to share. Trust is the foundation of any mentoring relationship.
Strive for objectivity. Help mentees see past their assumptions, biases, and blind spots to gain self-awareness.
Avoid being prescriptive. Instead, ask questions to help mentees solve their own problems. Start by asking what they think they should do, then follow up on their reasoning. Sometimes people already know what to do and just need the confidence to act.
Be curious. Develop your Socratic method and coaching skills. Practice asking questions to understand their situation and concerns more deeply when they face challenges.
Embrace silence. One of the most effective ways to encourage people to share more is to simply wait. Most people dislike silence and will fill it, often revealing unplanned insights into their thoughts.
Provide broader context. As a more senior professional, you likely have valuable perspective to share, whether from your company or industry experience. Use this context to help mentees see past their assumptions and blind spots, fostering greater self-awareness.
Leverage your network. Connect them with others who can help. Most mentors have broader networks than their mentees.
Stay humble. Remember, they’re the hero of their own story. You’re just a guide.
Getting the most from a mentor
Learn about each other. Understand the background, strengths, weaknesses, and current focus area of work on both sides.
Keep an open mind. Be flexible and receptive to new ideas. Be willing to step outside your comfort zone and take feedback as a gift.
Set expectations on both sides. This includes goals, challenges, interests, cadence, and forms of communication. The mentee needs to provide some clarity on what they hope to get out of the relationship. It is also fair if they want to ask the same of the mentor. Depending on what the goals are, a shorter or longer-term arrangement may make more sense.
Be organized. Come prepared with agenda items. These could be new career developments, topics, challenges, questions, or reflections on prior discussions. Take notes and capture any follow-ups.
Conclusion
Mentoring is pivotal for professional growth, with benefits that extend beyond technical skill development. For mentees, having a guide provides shortcuts through challenging terrain, offering perspective that would otherwise take years to develop. For mentors, the experience strengthens leadership abilities, clarifies thinking, and maintains connection to the broader organization.
The most effective mentoring relationships are built on active listening, empathy, and mutual respect. While formal arrangements can work well, valuable mentoring often happens organically through code reviews, design discussions, and collaborative problem-solving. The key is taking action – whether you’re seeking a mentor or considering becoming one, reach out to those you admire, be clear about your goals, and remain open to different perspectives.
Ultimately, mentoring transcends individual growth. It’s about strengthening our entire engineering community by sharing knowledge and building bridges between experience levels, making us all better and stronger together.
References
Batra, N. (2020). Mentor, coach, sponsor: a guide to developing engineers. LeadDev. https://leaddev.com/mentoring-coaching-feedback/mentor-coach-sponsor-guide-developing-engineers
Coding Coach contributors. (2021). Mentorship Guidelines. https://codingcoach.io/guidelines/mentorship-guidelines
First Round. (n.d.). How to Be a Career-Changing Mentor — 25 Tips From The Best Mentors We Know. https://review.firstround.com/how-to-be-a-career-changing-mentor-25-tips-from-the-best-mentors-we-know/
Fournier, C. (2017). The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change. O’Reilly Media.
Orosz, G. (n.d.). Developers mentoring other developers: practices I’ve seen work well. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/developers-mentoring-other-developers/
Osmani, A. (2022). How to find and become a great engineering mentor. https://leaddev.com/mentoring-coaching-feedback/how-find-and-become-great-engineering-mentor
Vogler, C. (2020). The Writer’s Journey - 25th Anniversary Edition: Mythic Structure for Writers. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN: 978-1615933150.
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, July 25). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TheWriter’sJourney:MythicStructureforWriters