👨‍🏫 How I Think About Mentorship

Mentorship is a powerful tool for achieving career success. Learn how to identify mentors, have productive mentor-mentee relationships, and expand your tribe of mentors.

Welcome to the fourteenth issue of the Software Mastery newsletter.

In this issue, I want to share how I approach mentorship as a software engineer.

Having a mentor is important because it is valuable to get different opinions when navigating new situations and making big career decisions.

I think about mentorship in three stages:

  1. Finding a Mentor

  2. Having a Productive Mentor-Mentee Relationship

  3. Expanding Your Tribe of Mentors

Finding a Mentor

To figure out whether someone is a good mentor for me, I ask myself one question:

Do I want to become more like this person?

To answer this question, get to know a prospective mentor beyond their career achievements. What are their career goals? How do they make difficult decisions? What beliefs and habits do they have?

When you let someone mentor you, you let them influence how you think and make career decisions. Over time, you will inevitably become more like them, so consider if that’s a desirable outcome.

Once you’ve identified a prospective mentor, you can either explicitly ask them if they’d be willing to be your mentor, or you can have implicit mentorship relationships.

For prospective mentors you don’t already have a close working relationship with, the explicit route might be your only option, while for friends and colleagues, the choice is up to you.

Having a Productive Mentor-Mentee Relationship

I believe mentees should be the ones driving mentor-mentee relationships.

As the mentee, it is your job to:

  1. Work with your mentor to find the right meeting cadence. Thirty minutes to an hour once a month works best for me. If I have more frequent meetings, I won’t always have new topics to discuss and if I have less frequent meetings, my mentor’s feedback might be too late.

  2. Come to meetings with agenda items and leave with learnings and action items. Respect your mentor’s time. Before the meeting, think about the topics you want to discuss and share them with your mentor so they can prepare if needed. Take notes during or after the meeting to summarize any new insights or things you should do before the next meeting.

Remember that mentors are human too, not miracle workers. They often don’t know the “right” answer to your questions, especially if they’re open-ended (e.g., Should I leave my team/company?). They’re using their experience as a basis for their answers.

To help them help you, be as specific as possible.

Generic questions get generic answers. For example, if you ask your mentor how to break into FAANG, they’re probably going to regurgitate the same answer everyone gives:

  1. Do side projects to build up your resume and learn new technologies.

  2. Do LeetCode problems and study system design to prepare for technical interviews.

  3. Apply to job postings and try to get referrals.

Instead, provide more context, like what your resume looks like, what roles you’re interested in, what projects you’ve done, and how prepared you are for technical interviews.

Additional information allows your mentor to tailor their answer to your specific situation.

Expanding Your Tribe of Mentors

Once you’ve learned how to start and maintain a mentor-mentee relationship, aim to build a diverse group of mentors.

Include people with varying levels of connection to your organization and expertise in different areas like technical skills, career development, and communication, so you can benefit from a wide range of perspectives and guidance.

For example, have a mentor inside your immediate organization, as well as one that is outside.

The mentor inside your organization is tactical, as they are familiar with the codebases, culture, and people you interact with every day. The mentor outside your organization is strategic, as their perspective is broader because they do not have a stake in your organization’s politics or hierarchy.

Your Turn!

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. I hope you learned some valuable ideas about the value of mentorship and how you can begin building your network of mentors.

If you have any thoughts on this newsletter, leave a comment below or reply to this email to let me know!

To your success,

Sammy

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