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Ask HN: How do you find mentors?

6 points by roflchoppa ↗ HN
A pretty straight forward question, how do you find a good mentor, I'm finding it a little difficult to find someone to ask questions that are relative to developer career paths. I'm almost a new-grad, and the company that I'm interning does not really have anyone that can answer my questions.

11 comments

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FooBarWidget
Maybe there are startup networks or accellerators near you? You can ask there.
roflchoppa
Well I’m located in the SFbayarea, there’s no shortcomings of developers, it’s just networking with others that I find a bit challenging. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the communication, but rather access to pick the brains of others.
djhaskin987
I'd start by finding a good company to work for, one that attracts talented engineers and fosters a culture of learning and respect. I tend to learn the most from the people I work with.
roflchoppa
Actually this was one of the questions that I had, currently the company that I work for offered a full time technical consulting role, but it seems more directed toward enterprise IT (office365). There are not many engineers that I have access to, hence limited room to learn.

Damn, thanks for that perspective. I realize that the learning potential is limited at this company.

mindhash
You could find good connects at Dev conferences. Usually not free but could be worth trying out. Better if your company sponsors
besasam
Maybe try to find tech groups and hacker spaces around you. Here in Europe we have the Chaos Computer Club, there's probably equivalents where you live. Or join hackathons. I've always found it easy to connect to people at places like these and you might find someone who can guide you a bit.
muzani
Every successful person has struggled at some point. Usually someone helps them through it. They are grateful and want to pass it forward, or sometimes resentful of the thing that caused them hardship. These people are satisfied by mentoring.

Very often, if you work hard and struggle, people who have been through the same struggle admire you for it. The key to finding a mentor is to have one observe you through the struggle. Sometimes this means just blindly moving into (and possibly failing) at something. This was how Eminem met Dr Dre. But it doesn't help to work at and fail at something silently.

A potential mentor will sit, observe, and cheer you on. They may offer to help you. But sometimes you have to establish the relationship.

This is a lot like dating. Both sides want a relationship but don't want to seem too eager. It's awkward to say "will you be my mentor?" Sometimes you need to ease into it. Spend time together, discuss similar topics, especially in your field of work.

rc-1140
If I can piggyback on the OP's question, I have my own scenario: I'm still considered a "recent grad" by my current company despite my previous post-college job (not in a software field) and while I can ask workplace/codebase questions and have seniors who keep an eye on me, there's no mentorship available since I think this is the first time the team I'm on has taken on a junior. I've looked on Meetup for events and such, but anything local to me is dominated by web development (there's one woman who owns somewhere around 3 or 4 meetup groups in my area that are supposed to be about different subjects but after researching them, the groups all come back to her site/company Daniweb and the subject matter is all about introducing people to HTML/CSS and surface-level discussion about trending things like VR and cryptocurrency); otherwise, I'd have to commute into the city to attend a meetup during a weekday, which isn't viable considering my commute from work just to get home.

Are there any options for me?

roflchoppa
I think there is, have you spent time within the Freenode IRC server? There seems to be a little older of a generation of devs. In there, most are able to answer and give good feedback.

You solve the commute issue and get a little more in-depth of a knowledge base.