Pair programming seemed awesome, until I started mentoring the guy who doesn't believe in holding farts.

I mean, I know everyone needs some relief now and then, but when I'm leaning over your shoulder to point out a bug in your code?

Fuck you, dude. You're on your own

Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.

Yes, senior developers get stuck just as much as junior developers do, the difference is that they get stuck in places that junior developers can’t even access. That is partially because senior developers are expected to do so much more than just simple coding, they need to also grasp and untangle client requirements, communicate clearly and thoughtfully with the team, be some sort of guiding/mentoring/leading figure, make sweeping architectural decisions, and so on and so forth.

A junior developer is struggling with making relevant columns of a table a nice shade of purple. A senior developer is struggling with making sure that implementing new client requirements will not have a destructive impact on the current infrastructure, there will be no regressions elsewhere in the system, tries to pinpoint what prior assumptions the new stuff breaks (it inevitably does), and how to reconcile everything.

Books and command lines.

I don't like teachers.

I think it's because my learning process is very async and chaotic. When I see a snippet in Golang, I relate it to PHP, Rust and Haskell. I jump to resolving the problem in other languages, trying to find out which approaches work in Go.

Then I read about some computer science concept on Wikipedia and get lost in that while my hunger for knowledge and food increases. After a while I look up a recipe for a pasta salad, and while cutting bell peppers, I see the recipe in terms of typed morphisms, I sprinkle and intersperse ingredients through mapping functions, then decide to write an interpreter for the esoteric "Chef" language in Go so I can interpret my salad recipe while eating it.

Voila, I'm learning Go.

I have no patience for linear mentoring, and others have no patience for mentoring me.

But that's OK.

Lying bastard of a teacher.

Context:
This is year I'll graduate from my high school. But before that we have to pass the final examination. One part of that examination is presenting a project, which we should complete within this year. Each student has to choose a mentor/supervisor to help him on them on their project. I chose a professor who'll leave the school in January because of her pregnancy.

This is the part where the bastard, who asked me whether I use HTML or CSS for a website, barges in.
Given the fact that he incompetence be matched by his arrogance, nobody would ever choose him. He has to watch while other ring the other professors. He asks desperately for students, but everyone already has a mentor.

Yesterday he told me that my mentor will leave this January and that she already WROTE him an email where she asked him to continue mentoring her students. I was kinda confused, so I told him I would talk it over with my mentor and guve him an answer on a later date.

Today the truth comes forth. She didn't write anything. This bastard invented all of it. She even told us that she is aware of this guy is incompetent and that she would have asked a teacher with a good reputation.

But I'm furious. Not only did he waste my precious time with that conversation, which he follow up with the most basic way of time managing you could think of.

HE STRAIGHT UP LIED TO STUDENTS TRYING TO BOOST HIS NONEXISTENT REPUTATION.

I am not comfortable with a person like that being able to give me marks. Just yeet him out already!

how to be a man in upper management:
-come into meetings without any context and talk over everyone
-say very obvious and broad things to seem like you're mentoring the team
-waste time

Best mentoring advice I've gotten:

In your career you'll meet three kinds of people.
1) Nice people
2) Indifferent people
3) Not nice people

Treat them all in the same way. That's professionalism.

Sometimes I feel like my job is just babysitting my coworkers. I need to find a way to teach them how to think for themselves.

I'm not a senior dev but I am the one my coworkers turn to for help. I like helping (even if it's annoying some times), so I'm thinking about embracing the mentor role in my team. My plan for now is to stop giving the answers right away (which I usually do to get back to my work) and instead try to guide my coworkers into figuring out the issue themselves. This will take more of my time of course and will require I practice my patience in a possibly stressful environment (depending on how close deadlines are), but I'm hoping that it'll produce better coworkers (one can dream, at least).

Do any of you know of any good reading resources about mentoring or becoming a mentor, specifically in tech/development?

What is it with this team and the developers it attracts. 2 devs joined and left, both had several years of experience, both couldn’t google an issue to save their lives and needed to be helped 24/7.

Now we are mentoring a PHD student for a piece of his project. Dude was left stumped by an error message that said “Can’t find file at path ...” because the path didn’t exist. He spent a few hours trying to fix it before asking for help.

How, HOW are people getting through college / university without being able to read, or debug such a simple fucking error message

The senior dev is mentoring our new recruit.
😨 I know, my face too.

When the newbie asked how to deploy, senior dev says, "Well, we copy and paste this folder from your local box to the server you need to deploy it on. Much better than that git shit, you have so much more control!"

😭

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".

I am being mentored all of my life.

Parents mentored me that I won’t get to that school and I should pick other one ( I got there where I wanted ).

Politicians mentor me to make me happier by taking more and more of money I earned ( I am not ).

Advertisers mentor me to buy their products cause those are best products in the world ( I buy cheaper versions produced in same factories by same people ).

My boss ( when I got one ) mentored me that everything is simple and could be done in 5 minutes. ( after reading some dummy article )

Coworkers are mentoring me everyday that it’s not their fault ( It definitely is ).

Telemarketers, emails, sms messages are mentoring me about my future, don’t miss that occasion, it’s best for your life ( No it’s not )

Celebrities are mentoring me how to live my life to become a successful person ( Yeah right, cause they known how to become one right after they were born ).

Now I see I am starting living in times where computer will start mentoring me how to live my life. ( Sometimes it already is )

What’s left is doctors start mentoring me about my illnesses and children ( if I ever have one ) mentoring me about how dumb I am.

Then I can finally peacefully die and don’t come back to this mentoring hell.

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

Some of the best mentoring has actually been from the devRant community on how not to get burned out as a developer.

Take it section by section. Don’t spend a lot of time on one part. Work on it for a bit then move on to a new part and so on.

Thanks devRant Community

The worst thing I've seen another developer do is not give constructive criticism where needed, as well was fail to accept constructive criticism when offered.

As a software engineer, I’ve only *ever* worked remotely. I honestly have no idea what it’s like working in an office as a dev/engineer. Probably makes me weird. 😅

What did you like about working in an office, if you’ve had that experience? Was mentoring different? What did you dislike about it?

Joined this new team which said to have a rockstar teamlead with his right hand rockstar drummer senior dev. Turns out its just 2 socially awkward dudes who come into office once a week and all they care about is doing their own tasks and calling it a day.

The rockstar senior teamlead actually turns out to be an ex QA guy whos doing development only for the past 2 years and is unable yo explain what his code is doing and just starts rambling. I didnt expected spoon-feeding type of mentoring but man calling them and trying to get some advices makes me wanna die everytime. Fuck. My. Life.

I took matters into my own hands, Im doing pretty well actually and already am delivering, but man, if they dont give me a raise after probation ends then fuck this Im outta here. This is not what I signed up for.

These fuckers are pretentious egomaniacs who look good in their linkedin page but in reality are selfish narcissists.

If you are one of all those awesome developers and hackers and I only understand 20% of your rants then props to you and keep scrolling :-D

But if you are a young developer, fresh grad or just learning programming I have an idea, how about a mentor?

This literally just pop in my head right now while cleaning my kitchen!

I'd be learning along your side and also having lots of fun! I don't have any formal experience providing mentoring but have some education credits and patience.

I'm gonna stop the sales pitch because it's annoying even me! but Idk, i just thought that maybe there's someone else out there interested in mentoring services :P

Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.

So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.

Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.

I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs.

Someone I'm mentoring recently told me they wish they could google like me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It has been a week now since a co-worker and I started mentoring this intern who joined our team. I have to say it is quite satisfying. His reaction when I told him about lambda functions and list comprehension in Python was gold. I feel good teaching him stuff and the best part is that he's ready to learn, has a brain of his own that he uses and I'm hoping I learn stuff from him too!!!

Mentoring rocks!!!

I have been lucky to have a wonderful mentor. He helped me to get my master CS after I arrived in Montreal. When I had a housing problem not only did he take me in for a couple of weeks but he even helped me get a new flat!

He's the reason I'm not a dickhead.

I continue to have mentorees. Get them around the last year of their bachelor (they need to know how to code) and follow them for 3 years.

"Be the change you want to see" - everyone who quotes Gandhi

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

I'm in a company with no senior devs I can look to for mentoring. How do you go about scaling with the company without a developer more senior to guide you during development?

I feel like I'm always second guessing decisions.

I was mentoring a group of students and helping them with their graduation project. I taught them NodeJS, MongoDB & few other things.

One time, one of them came to show me her code, and it has the weirdest and most bizarre structure ever!

I asked her, “who told you to structure your code like that? This is wrong! I didn’t teach you this way!”.

She replies: “<<a local shitty tech startup name>>’s CTO”

When I searched about him, he’s a civil engineer who founded a startup and assigned himself as CTO with no technical background or knowledge whatsoever! FFS students believe that he’s a real CTO and started learning from him 😑 His code was so bad in every way that a fresh would write a better code!

lately my IT mantra in the vein of "have you tried turning it off and back on again" has become "did you check the logs for error output"😡

NOTE to all developers of any level: if you want help do your due diligence! Check the logs, try to step debug and at the very least please at least pretend to perform a cursory search

The only thing I studied from HTML is that you have to close anything you have opened.../>
I already had some experience with C++ and suddenly they suggested me to take a mentoring.
My mentor - Well, we're going to learn HTML.
- I'm busy. I'm learning python...

- What have you done? Did you learn the HTML?
- Eeh I need to do a neutral network project for the uni. Wait please...

- It's time to learn HTML.
- Eeh I have a deadline in these days. I have to make an Ethereum smart contract. Wait please...

- HTML!
- WAIT!

Finally I asked my mentor to stop this fucking recursion. I'm not going to learn it.

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

for the first time in my life I'm in a mentoring position and it is fucking exhausting. we have two interns now, and idk what the hell is the boy's deal. can't seem to do simple tasks, doesn't google anything, stares the ceiling if we're not monitoring.
the girl idk yet. she seems more active and engaged at least, but i have a lot of teaching to do and i don't really have the time for that. i hope that one can at least float by herself, cause I'm pretty sure the other one is drowning

ok. been going full steam since December with 1 day off since. managing teams, review designs, designing, prototyping, code reviewing, mentoring, and doing project. management. i get that it's a "flat" org structure but hire proper PMs and BAs instead of trying to pinch pennies. all the while, i see marketing with deeeeeeep pockets spending money on anything like mommy and daddy are funding their spring break getaway. i need time to disconnect and recharge my spirit.

Almost everyone here has shared a story about their boss whether bad or good at some point in their time on devRant. Here's mine.

I started out in my current company around mid third year in college. I have been doing freelance for about six years which is why I think my boss hired me.

I couldn't be more thankful for these last 10 months in this company, every experience has been epic. Since my boss knows my future plans and how I hope to build my own company some day, my boss has been mentoring me ever since I've knew him.

Last week he even offered to take me along with him and certain other members of our team to the US to meet with a client of ours. (I have nothing to do with the client, he just offered the trip for the heck of it.)

I can't wait to see where my time with this company will lead me.

I committed to some work I probably should have turned down. Great people and enjoyable work but I agreed to a good hourly rate but I have a cap of 20 hours a week. I keep putting in extra hours that I don't get paid for. I want the work to be good and don't think it can be completed in 20hrs per week. The work involves mentoring others and I just can't leave in the middle of helping them. My husband is fed up with my wimpyness. I am putting off a project we are working on together to do this work. The contract will be over in 3 months. What do I do?

Just went through EOY reviews. I found out in my own review that someone made the questionable decision to give me a raise and a promotion I'm not sure if I deserve... however why I'm really stoked is because its the first time I've gotten to promote one of my juniors! Now *that* is a really rewarding feeling because the dude certainly went balls deep and earned it, and I have the power to validate that.

I've had a mentor who talked less and taught more. Before becoming a front end developer, I was doing flash. So, when I started front end, I didn't have any idea even about the basic stuff.
But, whenever I get stuck he will give a keyword for me to search. So, I learned how to survive in New areas & technologies - By googling.

I just interviewed the guy who is interested in my Linux SysAdmin position. He's really cool and I think he'll get the job, but he is a Windows admin actually. (No problem, since he'll work with me for three month's as a mentoring program and it's supposed for him to learn the stuff)

My question to all other Linux Witchers and Witches out there, do you know a mighty spell to seal his windows daemon away, such that he's able to resist the sore temptation by my co-workers (windows enthusiasts)?

So I've been hired as a senior software developer with all the tags included (mentoring, innovating, pushing forward changes) for a company that is trying to move away from waterfall development (yup, it's 2019 and this exists) to a more iterative workflow.
I was initially hired and sent out to do some "field work" abroad for 3 months and then worked "remotely" from the local office with our field partners.
During all this time it seemed that my ideas go through smoothly, there was a lot of chatter about how things are moving forward, how new projects, innovations and new methodologies are implemented.
And yet, after my "remote" work has finished and I have to do things locally more, all of the skeletons fell out. It's just talk, nothing seems to be changing at all and yet any attempts to talk with the brass is like hitting a brick wall.
Not only that, I've been handed a 12 year old project with no possibility to refactor, no technical documentation, very few comments and in a terrible style.
The atmosphere in the company is odd as hell. People are either not very initiative, nor they seem to really care about all of the "changes" that "should be happening".
It almost feels that I've arrived in a company that still lives in 2007 more or less.
Should I quit, or perhaps it's a little "too soon" (have spent 7 months in the place already)? What I don't want is to get in the same train again (work for a company for 8 - 12 months, feel burned out because of the divergence between actual things done and "plans" and then change the job).

I know I'm getting old from small signs like:
- I like mentoring newcomers even fresh graduates, explaining them everything they have to know, answering all of their questions if I can (I had some really bad mentors before as newcomer)
- These newcomers always learns faster than I expect and shortly they works faster than us
- On the other hand senior members asks my opinion about some decisions or technical issues even if I barely know more about that topic. (Did I look experienced somewhat?)
- I hardly take overhours and I discourage fresh graduates to do. (I did enough overnights already in my life)

Mentoring someone in iOS from scratch, then teaching him how to maintain 3 different apps. He is able to maintain them without me now which is testament to how well I taught him, but it was challenging. Especially since I had to simultaneously work on other tickets and live prod issues.

Not specifially one but a couple of minor mentoring moments.

I started out at a rather small company (<10 people) with a completely new language to me (Perl).
I had some trouble following along some tasks since I wasn't familiar with Perl or generally backend stuffs at all.
So the person that was supposed to "mentor" me was just giving me tasks without any hints of how to do things, this is where my "true" mentor came in to play.
I asked him a couple of things after a few unsuccesful searches on the internet and he always seemed to have the answer to it right away! It seemed like he knew everything and I really appreciated his patience and help. He did point me in the right directions when I needed it.

He left the company about 3 months ago and I still somewhat miss his mentoring existance, as he wasn't only a code but also a life mentor.

I really hope that one day I can be just like that guy, helpful, patient and be a mentor for someone else. :)

I started my career almost 20 years ago now.
I had the chance to work in really good environments, and with people trying to be performant. In my first company, the CTO pushed a lot the new/shiny XP method. Then I used the first iterations of Scrum as a Team Leader.
As I became a Service Manager, I found my love in kanban/lean (and my worst nightmare in sigma six).

I crashed startups created with friends and cashed out sometimes.

I also did a lot of "agile consulting", around productivity, product methods, organization (even got certified SaFe, the Agile framework that states" process over people").

When I came back to Europe, I just wanted to get back to the level I was in North America.

I have done a lot of mentoring, but now I lack the motivation (and time) to keep doing it, the way I did. So I stopped.

And now I have to answer the question "do I leave delivery?". Also, it seems that a lot of actual organizations are starting to put the product under " tech top management" ( companies I like at least).
So I wonder, what my next evolution should be...

Should I leave tech delivery to be fully Top-Management...
Do I want to structure/handle/organize the Product Teams...

Covid has given me time to start thinking a lot more about my situation... And it sucks...

Tips on getting promoted on work:

1. Collect a list of all improvements and achievements that u did during your time in that workplace

2. Compare your output with your colleagues output, check their MR's, their complexity and compare with yours.

3. Talk with your manager about a raise. Tell him about your achievements, like maybe you are working on a wider scope than others. Maybe you are mentoring junior devs. Or maybe you deal with a bigger workload than others but still deliver on time. Maybe your communication is good or maybe you document stuff very well and in that way you make your team more efficient and increase team output. Whatever. Pitch and sell yourself. Also provide some personal reasons why you need a raise, like maybe u have kids or maybe your rent doubled. Inflation and so on. Selling point is that u are a human not a greedy bastard.

At the end of that talk the manager most likely will say that he needs to speak higher ups, he needs to gather feedback from your colleagues and so on. Give him a week or two if possible, no more.

He will probably get back to you with an offer. If there is none start applying, get an offer and put in your notice. In my case I waited 3 months for my raise to go through. I put in my notice, had a stressed call from manager, showed him my offer and my raise was arranged the next day.

Tested a script that watches a folder for any missing folders (team members kept moving them), and then showed it to the guy who was mentoring me. It did what it needed to, so we were going to switch it off the test directory on the local box to the network share.

I had been testing against the live folder for a couple of days, didn't notice, and didn't screw anything up. There was a, "good job you idiot," and he added it right to his big script that runs 24/7. FeelsGoodMan.jpg

DREAMS: I was given a junior, my journey for leading a team is starting!
REALITY: this guy works 4 hours per day, 3 days off per week, during those 4 hours 2 of them are spent solving trivial supposed he's supposed to handle on his own by now, he doesn't write documentation, on top of that he takes vacations here and there and I'm honestly not sure what task I'm even supposed to give him because at this point it's just easier to work a couple hours overtime and just do his stuff myself.

Very difficult task is mentoring for those who didn't know anything about programming.

How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?

I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..

70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.

My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.

I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…

My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.

Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.

I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.

In my company there is a weekly employee benefit that each employee can get. The advantage is not carry over to next week if you don't take it the current week.

There is a junior in my department who is not taking a weekly benefit. I am sure he know about the weekly benefit because I have explain it to him before.

I said to him if he is not taking his portion of weekly benefit , can I take his instead? I explicitly said it to him that he can said "No" if he wanted and he don't need to consider the junior-senior relationship since I was mentoring him.

He said "I can take his portion if I want".

I know I got his permission but he is a quiet and reserved person (nothing wrong with it) , I am a reserved person myself.

I have to initiate a conversation and give him a chance to speak up like "What do you think about ... ? " , "X,do you think it is a good idea to ..." ,

My question is that does my junior give his permission to take him weekly benefit because he is a reserved person and doesn't like to tell "No".

What do you guy think?

I'm supporting my language learning with an app that puts users in touch with other users who are fluent in the language you want to learn. You specify the language, and also your current ability on a scale of 1-5.

Does anything like this exist for programming? Like a small scale site with mentoring, something to support people who are learning a particular programming language. I've been thinking that I don't know of any really supportive site where beginners can talk to and learn from expert coders.

If it doesn't exist, is it something that would work and be worth setting up? I really like the idea of helping more people learn coding and giving them someone to turn to when they get stuck or need some encouragement, or even just some positive feedback on their work.

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

!rant

27 days ago I asked here for advice on how to mentor software engineer student that was terrible at coding.

So, we are in the middle of the mentoring, my approach is for her to get used to normal engineering tools, in this occasion she is learning Git and "kanban" (basically we are using Clubhouse for this one) and Github PR submission and approval (I'm the one who approves them, naturally) by doing.

With git, things are hard because we cannot share a terminal session (via upterm) due to her using Windows on her laptop (WSL is an option for using upterm but her internet is so damn slow doing the configuration takes way too long), otherwise teaching her use git would be smoother than it is currently, with the other tools she is gaining a good grasp of them, it pleases me that the bottleneck is with Git itself.

She is working on a hangman game with Python, nothing fancy just the terminal. I made the stories with the requirements in Clubhouse for her to work on each as a unit removing some "thought process" of reading requirements and implementing solutions (at Uni it seems the professor writes a document of several pages detailing the background of the project and the requirements, I can see how it can become confusing for some students like her).

She will start Uni again this August 10th, there is a chance that our first "session" at this will end by then, my fear is that she forgets how to use the tools she learned, so I need to find a way to encourage her to keep using them somehow.

Guess, I'm slithering my way out from "tough dev days" by mentoring. I tell you, it's very convenient.

Just told the dev I'm pseudo mentoring for like a week or two about devRant...here's to hoping I don't get fired!

How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?

Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.

We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).

My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.

My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.

Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?

P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.

!rant
My boss has influenced me the most at work. He was the first person to introduce me to software development. Though I'm self-taught since, I still owe him my career. Now I teach support techs and junior devs how to code, as well as oversee the architecture of major systems. It's crazy to think now that my computer building hobby would turn into something like this, and it's all because someone convinced me to try what I thought would be terribly boring.

Not mentoring per say...

But I've had some colleagues that took quitting the job to another level, which can be just as inspiring as a good mentor

So.

a few good old firends of mine wish to learn some coding to make a simple game. Probably for lolz, I do not think that they´re up to anything _too_ serious. Guess who they contacted for mentoring...

They´re up for boot camp, I say.

I'd probably try to become a professional tabletop game master and also focus on getting better at arts to do commissions for some extra cash.
If that would not work out as well, I'd probably try to get into mentoring or teaching.

I believe that in 2018 I have learned a lot but haven't used that knowledge to the maximum. So my 2019's main goal is to use things that I've learned or currently going to learn. Along with that I want to see people grow together, so mentoring people is another goal that I have in my mind. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or idea regarding this, that would be very much helpful.

Very Happy New Year to all.

I have an idea of starting my own business and I need your feedback guys. Literally appreciate any kind of feedback.

So Im an android dev who has 3 years experience under his belt. I am working fulltime and I think its time to scale. I want to open my own agency where I would take on big clients and build apps for them. I personally am able to manage/see through the whole project, handle all communication and also work on the android side if necessary. I would start from smaller projects worth of 30-40k for startups, basically create MVP for them and charge for support after that.

Problem is that as far as I understand if you want to "open your own kitchen" you need to be well connected. I dont know any big clients who would trust and purchase my services, because after all who I am? Im nobody just a dev at this moment. So I need a strategy to build some relationships with businesses.

So Im thinking long game. What if I would first open a recruitment/hiring agency? I would focus in specifically mobile dev recruitment. I have the soft skills and I already participated in dozens of recruitment processes. I also have the tech skills, I would be a competent recruiter. Maybe I could do that for a year, just communicate between devs and clients and place devs. My thinking is that in around one year I would be able to build a massive network of clients and devs.

And then, I could try opening my own dev agency. Using my gathered contacts hopefully I could land some decent projects for start and build my team or outsource from that point on.

Ofcourse Im not sure if I could pull this off alone, I would need a detailed strategy and some mentoring. But what do you think is this a viable plan?

Mentoring experience, Hm..

I think the internet taking an shit down my throat when I make the tiniest mistakes pretty much sums it up.

I've been for the last year mentoring two employees from 0 knowledge to now working on QA development. However, they tend to get back to their starting point every couple of months and lack confidence. Do you have any advice on how to mentor someone and keep them on growing their confidence in their skills?

My best mentoring experience was the teacher that taught me puppet. The way he explained it, the way he walked you through a very intense course of three days consecutive puppet knowlegde rammed into your head...and still manage to actually learn almost all of it. Great attitude, and meanwhile, he is a esteemed collegue and friend...

Without you Johan, i would not be an independent entrepreneur and making bank at my current client

Johan the white, to me one of the greatest sysadmins ever

How much of mentoring should I expect as a junior dev? 4 weeks in this job. I get assigned a ticket, tryhard for 3-4 days on it only for my implementation to be replaced by a mid/senior with another broken solution with new bugs which I dont even know how to debug. They are not even in the office, I have to call them and mentoring that I get is max 30min a week. Is that normal? I expected at least 30min a day mentoring. I feel that I cant grow here as fast as I would want to. If I wanted to waste my time on digging through dozens of articles to learn what senior could tell me in 10 minutes, I wouldnt have accepted this job.

#question
I've got some juniors at my college to who I'm mentoring a website project. Thing is i want them to learn stuff from scratch but it will take so much time while if they use a framework it'll save them and me time but they'll not actually understand what's happening internally. Any suggestions on how to move ahead? Language is php db mysql.

(Asking for someone I’ve been mentoring.)

TLDR; Looking for recommended resources on how to code email templates from scratch.

I’ve been helping a friend transition their career from sales to web development and recently he applied for a position as a jr developer for an ecommerce startup. They liked him and they’re willing to create a new position for him where he’ll work with both the marketing department and the development team. He’ll start with building email templates for the marketing department and eventually move on to development as he grows his skills. I’d really appreciate it if I could get some recommended resources for learning how to code email templates from scratch and from PSDs. This would be a life changer for him and I’m trying to do as much as I can to help me out.

Do y'all rock with mentors anymore?

I literally think I need one to get to the promised land. Ideally, someone with Startup experience and/or Software experience.

Okay so I have a choice for my final project based around the development of PWAs.

Choice is: Recipe App Vs a Student Mentoring app (social network type thing).

I feel as though a recipe app has been built a thousand times, even though it's just a vehicle for me to learn about PWAs.

Which one should I go with?

My best mentor was at my first tech job. I’m pretty sure he’s a big reason why I got the job. Not me specifically, but he advocated for hiring out of a bootcamp that represented minorities.

I was just out of bootcamp. I was very sure I was not prepared. No, this was imposter syndrome. As evidence, I was offered a lesser role than what I had interviewed for. I was pretty sure I was only hired because the company was trying to fill a diversity quota, they could get away with paying me less, and I would take training well.

He was assigned to be my mentor. He was very helpful with teaching me the team’s practices and overall tech practices. Mentoring is hard and he was great at it. He almost inspired me to mentor, but I know I’d be shit at it.

When I was job searching, he wrote my recommendation. He helped me in so many ways.

Right guys and gals, I need your opinions.

Recently was approached by a recruiter who thought I’d be a good fit for a role, a role that is a step up from senior dev but without moving into people / project management.
More like a bridge between architects and senior devs.

I thought what the hell, why not. So I agreed to go for it.
It could be quite a decent payrise (though that wasn’t my motivation for going for it) and I like the idea of doing more mentoring, design and research than I do now. It would involve stuff like learning new tech, coming up with examples and implementations of how the dev team need to use it to churn out user stories.

For the last few years I’ve been mainly a back end developer, which didn’t start by choice and I always liked to be full stack.

But the recruitment process for this role has been quite slow (number of reasons) and since then I’ve been given a new piece of work at my current employer doing some greenfield angular work, plus the c# back end.

I’m really, really enjoying this angular work. Haven’t done it for a while and it feels great to get back into it. Seem to be picking it back up with no problems, like the old magic is still there.
Also the money at my current place is good enough.

So now I’m wondering if I should bail on this other role in favour of seeing this out and maybe going back to being full stack (tho for reasons I’ll outline below in the long term that might have to be elsewhere)

But I’m also trying to remind myself that up until enjoying this work there’s a reason I decided to go for this other role.
Current place is a small company that has no project management process. It’s chaos, and everything’s an emergency. There are no requirements for anything, not enough people etc. No one has a clue how to run an IT project.
The one thing we do have is good development practices in our team and we have been greenfield for the last 12 months working on a new product. But we do tend to be pigeon holed into looking after a specific service/area.

But this new place if I got the role, is a bigger company (I’ve worked in small, medium and massive companies so I know what the difference is like), they’re a household name, they have resources for learning, putting people through aws certs, etc. They give people time each week to invest in themselves. Much more agile.
And thinking about it now you don’t often see a role that allows you to ‘move up’ without having to take on people/project management and still having time to be hands on.
(Just maybe more hands on with strategic work than delivering user stories for business as usual)

So just in general, what do you think?

I point out to a guy which documentation and which section he should read to solved his problem, 30minutes later I swing by and the dude sits and watches tutorials on YouTube. I ask him "did you figure it out and solved the problem?", he replies " nah! This tutorial is really great, it shows step by step...blah blah.. I can send it to you! We should all watch it tomorrow after standup" ... Really? He honestly believes were getting paid to drink latte watch tutorials on YouTube? I almost imploded at that point, went into "whatever"-mode and seriously pondered how much mentoring sucks some days. But seriously tutorials on the tube were targeted for 14year old beginners a last time I checked,did the world do a double revolution and left me behind?? Or is that guy just plainly trying to hide the fact how incompetent he is at reading docs?

As part of mentoring folks was having a round table. All wanted tech help. lists of things to do, learning syllabus, techs to bet on, projects, promotion mantras etc etc.

I asked them how's the work. All started rating about overload and overworked. How difficult it is to find time to do anything else. It became noisy.

So asked how they will find time to do all the above without time. Do they really need mentoring on time management and prioritisation ?

Felt like my invisible tws anc headset turned ON at that moment

App idea: Platform for ongoing entrepreneurs

I just come from a start-up weekend. I really enjoyed the support we got from 17 different mentors (most of them founded in the past on their own).

Back home start-up funders don't have the access to that mentoring. My idea is to create a platform specialized for founders, where you can share your idea, believes and ask question all around your business.

I think especially in the early founding stages entrepreneurs are full of questions. Helping and discussing with other selfminded people is probably very enjoyable for us founder folks. A difference to the f.e. reddit concept: Users can create "diaries", a place where all storys, questions and posts about your project are stored. Reading a diary from beginning to end shall be a fun experience, reviewing your or others history of their "babys" and following the entrepreneurs thoughts through all stages of founding. Users of course can create multiple diaries.

Functionality will be suited for the listed usecase, for example a "Post as Anonymous" function will be added, if you have to deal with company sensitive data and more stuff like that.

What do you think about the idea? Do you like it? Would you use it? If not, tell me why?

Cheers