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Ask HN: How do you get technical mentorship?

8 points by mishftw ↗ HN
I'm a recent grad and have been working on small startup teams. With the pandemic, it's been kind of a ping pong because funding has fallen through a few times. I work with subject matter experts but they aren't the technical mentors I've had in prior roles (someone who can review my code, provide meaningful guidance on systems design, etc). I am lucky to have a group of mentors I've cultivated over the years. But it's harder to find technical mentorship - not necessarily day to day but on a rather frequent basis. How do you all find technical mentorship? Open to answers from anyone/everyone who would like to share.

4 comments

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muzani
I've had mentors and I mentor quite often. Mentors want to bounce their ideas off someone. You have to be curious enough to add more to their ideas and skilled enough to criticize it.

Criticism is where the sweet spot falls IMO. You have to criticize a mentor to a point they learn from it, but not where they think you have much to learn. Some mentors and students also tend to be stubborn and don't accept any criticism.

Technical mentors are hard for this reason. Technically superior people tend to be so good at something that it's muscle memory. Recent grads tend to not only struggle, but they stay in groups that reinforces bad habits. There are some unusual habits - like how Paul Graham uses lines of codes as a metric for work done, which doesn't click well with newbies. This creates a knee jerk contempt in the student, and the mentor as well.

So normally, you want to look for a mentor who's just a few years ahead of you. You don't necessarily want to meet the best programmer, but more a big sister figure who's worked in a company for 5 years maybe.

giantg2
One thing to add to the mentor selection criteria, is to look for someone who is regarded positively by management and their peers.
mishftw
Thank you for this insight. I definitely see the value in someone a several years ahead of me - I sought this in college as well. I see your advice is tailored to a larger firm - what about when I'm the sole "developer" in a small team. How can I reach out externally?
muzani
Actually, I meant it as a small team or solo. Most of my mentor relationships starts with someone saying a clever thing on Facebook/Twitter/HN, a radio show, a random community, someone who wrote a book I learned a lot from, a tech talk somewhere.

It's similar to dating. Everyone prefers to be passive and matched to someone, or just bump into someone serendipitously. But it's easier to just muster the courage to talk to the next person on your mind. And they usually get flattered when asked for help as well, as long as it's not Bill Gates or anyone too far above your level.

Speaking of Bill Gates, there's a bit of anecdote from the Bill Gates documentary. At one point he met with Buffett and Buffett just kept asking questions like, "Why couldn't IBM beat Microsoft?" Bill was waiting for someone to ask him a question like that but nobody ever did. That's how mentor relationships are formed.