Ask HN: How to find mentors?
How do you find mentors? I'm a 30 something engineer who has never had great technical mentors mostly because of working in startups with few experienced engineers. I've had many business people mentors over the years but not as many engineering mentors as I'd have liked.
So how does one go about finding mentors when you do not work closely with them? Is there a better strategy than simply reaching out on email/linkedin and hope for the best?
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadSearch one with experienced engineers then (?).
If you don't contemplate a change of workplace then I guess you shouldn't depend on people. Read books extensively, try to apply, see what works and what doesn't.
That is the plan but that's a much slower process because of vesting, intertia etc.
Filtering for people who are: - good engineers - enjoy helping people - are good at helping people - have the time to help people - are mature enough to appreciate the self development value of mentoring someone else (its a great way to discover ones own weaknesses)
Leaves you with a very small pool of people. My advice is to consider people in areas that might not fit your mental image of what a mentor looks like, so someone younger than you for example.
That has been my approach so far but it feels like that we've sort of taught each other most of what our individual strengths were.
I go up to them, and I ask them.
And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude. People are usually really happy to talk about things they know a lot about, not just to sound smart, but because they really like to think about it, and you get to think about it when you hear yourself talking... I really enjoy ranting, and listening to rants. I learned a lot of CS by listening to hour-long rants at the cafeteria. Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.
Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.
>> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.
This is so true. I do want to work mostly on distributed systems but every once in a while I get AI envy seeing all the amazing progress being made in the field.
If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat. You lose nothing by asking, and if someone's "offended" or something because they received a cold email... well, that's their problem.
That's the start of a mentoring relationship. The first two probably won't be good AI mentors but you'll have learned something cool, and maybe they're curious about distributed systems. But maybe the second or third or fourth time you repeat this process, you find someone you really click with.
I've been on the receiving end of those emails a small handful of times due to a previous job, and I've been thrilled to receive them every time. While none of them turned into a longer-term relationship, I would have been happy if they had. I think in general, (non-famous) people are less busy than people assume and would love to talk about things they're passionate about. Don't track down the project lead; instead go talk to the anonymous people a step or two down the ladder.
I swear fully half the really useful/interesting things I've learned have started with someone just infodumping on me IRL at some event.
This is truly the most important question and one that only you can answer for yourself, unfortunately.
I strongly believe this is entirely what is necessary for the average person to be a good hacker. Put in effort to understand. The rest often comes naturally.
How do you find them to go up to them though?
Not sarcasm, genuine question. How do you find someone who a) you respect and could teach you things you're interested in, and b) has time for you.
I tried trawling through LinkedIn "to expand my network" but that's useless.
I tried attending meetups, that's only slightly less useless. Lots of cool people, no mentors though.
At work, it seems the people who could be a mentor are more senior and everyone wants them as the mentor.
And people who're on the same level often consider you as competition and it takes a lot of work to establish enough trust for truly candid communication.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm sort of mid-career now, and I just feel I have missed out on mentors outside of my very first job. I'm worried about it in general because I feel inadequate to mentor others.
I've wanted a mentor for at least 7 years now, and I didn't find one.
If you're mid-career, you're probably perfect as a mentor for someone.
The question I have for a mentor is "how do I get to the next step?" -- and a person who is either on that step or recently left it would know. Or someone way more ahead who's introspective and remembers well -- but I'm okay with less.
I was never a better classroom teacher than on my 2nd year of university.
Everything was fresh to me, including why people don't get things the first time, because I'd only recently not got it the first time.
I keep them around.
They're like rare pokemons.
Some meetup groups are better than others.
Getting mentorship through work: There are two ways I can think of. 1) Pick a job so that you specifically end up working with/under the person you wish as your mentor. There's simply no way around getting it, because you'll just suck up whatever ideas and opinions they have. 2) If your workplace has a "guild" where the obsessed can meet; this is, in my sample size = 1 experience, most often done half-assed.
feel free to use my referral links to signup https://adplist.org/invite/111309
reaching out to targeted people (eg. engineer working in your domain interest) in HN community also works :)
- Go to other teams and build relationships and ask for mentorship.
- It's your team's more senior members explicit responsibility to mentor you.
- Ask your company what they offer for training and mentoring.
- I _think_ some people charge $0 on mentorcruise.com.
Not having technical mentors really hold me back from getting the staff/principal level so as a manager now (one reason I switched but not the main one) I push hard for to enable mentoring for my teams and the org. Push hard to find one.
It's not mentoring per se, but the list of people I speak with ranges from CS students asking for advice regarding their career to industry veterans. Sometimes we talk only once, but some of these relationships have lasted for more than a year so far. The latter are rare, still fairly casual.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I'm trying to focus a bit more on the product/business side of things. I've been mentoring engineers for 10+ years (and introduced the practice to several orgs). The irony is that I've ben struggling with finding a mentor for myself. The impromptu way seems to work better.
Also I second the comment made my sshine: "I go up to them, and I ask them." I sometimes reach out to people in my area just to learn about their work. We generally meet in person. This has been a bit harder since I left London, where it's hard to avoid interactions that are _not_ networking. But it's still doable even in my current location.
It's about someone with wisdom knowing your particular context and guiding and dialoguing on questions like
- should I learn this tool/lang/framework
- is this general approach feasible for my problem?
- I'm thinking of accepting a job at $corp, am I missing a blindspot based on culture or some other factor
Not all results match
For others reading, this is a Ask HN on the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400288
No worries. I tried to only add more content :-)
I randomly found one in his only appearance at a ruby meetup, giving a presentation that changed my life, opened me to the community where I met a now dear friend who also became my mentor.
I wish I had a suggestion, it seems like it just happened randomly, even though I was searching for ages.
This is an under-appreciated cost of working at startups. It's fun to be the big fish in the pond, but it means that you have less access to resources for this sort of thing.
You've identified something that you think is high value to you, and should reasonably be supplied by your employer as part of your job -- access to a mentor. This is something to consider when looking at jobs.
I work at a bigcorp and have had great mentors, and now that I'm an old fart, I try my best to mentor others. It's a huge plus to have access to a large community of talented engineers
I totally get what you’re saying though. It can be a situation of the blind leading the blind.
Startups don't have to comprise merely junior employees. Sure, the senior employees rarely have a skill-for-skill match to your profile. Startups can't afford that kind of redundancy.
But, any competent startup should have a good balance of senior 'ship steerers & NO men' alongside dynamic starry eyed juniors. For product & work-life mentorship, you don't need a technical peer as your mentor. So any senior leader in your startup will do.
For technical mentorship, I do think it is a bad idea to join a startup as your first company. Kind of leaves you without reference. Some avenues for technical mentorship that have worked for people around me are:
1. Universities sometimes have alumni mentorship programs
2. If you worked in a lab in undergrad, your professor or his ex-PhDs are great references
3. Friend of a friend, friend of family. 2 degrees of separation casts a wide net that often catches 1 person who is a good match.
4. If you can find a good technical mentor who just doesn't have enough time, then getting access to their wikis or favorite blogs also works. Sometimes the hardest part is understanding workflows and curating the right information. If someone has already laid it out for you to read, then it's about separating the wheat from the chaff.
Our mentors are mostly in the data science world, but many are senior software engineers.
Most of our mentees are 1st time job seekers (who appreciate our ISA model), but we did just launch more flexible payment options (e.g. pay by the hour) for folks like you!
Though you do have to pay, mentorships on SM often result in long-term relationships
Disclaimer: I run the company
https://github.com/ag91/emacs-buddy
That being said I don't regret anything at all.
If you're looking for someone to trade notes I'd happy to hop on a call and see where it goes.
I'm being serious though is the non-obvious part, I'm not making a quip. A mentor to me is someone who isn't teaching me "how" or even teaching me "why", they are teaching me "hmm"
I'm in my mid 40s and I try to remain receptive that a me from 20 years ago is looking for me now, and try to pay backwards what I couldn't steal forwards
Relationships are a trade. Mentorship is a trade of guidance for volunteership.
A lot of people will gladly help but don't do it because most people in general react badly to unsolicited advice. I have been trying to help people in the past but I wised up and now I am only offering help if they ask for it.