Growing competitors or investing in the future? How mentoring is useful for a programmer

Mentoring as a way of transferring knowledge and experience to young specialists is a popular practice among IT specialists in the West, while in our country it is not so well known and not understood by everyone. Does it make sense to engage in mentoring and pass on the knowledge acquired over long years of work in the specialty to young specialists? Opinions differ on this matter. However, most reputable experts, and not only in the IT field, agree that the spread of mentoring is of decisive importance for the professional growth of any industry. Therefore, today we’ll talk about mentoring, why it is important and useful, and also how to become a really strong mentor. Like Master Yoda.

Benefits of mentoring

So, how is mentoring useful, first of all, for the mentors themselves as a practice that helps programmers and the IT industry as a whole develop professionally?

• Awareness of gaps in your own knowledge.

  It's no secret that teaching others is one of the best ways to learn something yourself. It is a little less obvious that this process helps an experienced person first of all to pay attention to those areas in which he lacks this very knowledge. Mentoring allows you to gain a more adequate perception of your own value as a specialist, see more clearly in which directions it makes sense to develop, and know about your weaknesses.

• Development of communication and interaction skills with people.

  The notorious soft skills that many programmers lack. The success of mentoring largely depends on how well communication is established between the mentor and his mentees. Just as in work, the success of a project depends on the level of communication between different team members. Therefore, when it comes to developing soft skills, mentoring can really be an excellent tool that will be useful in your work and for career growth.

• Image and pumping of emergency personnel.

  Without a doubt, mentoring gives you a special status: the fact that you, having reached certain heights in your profession, help others develop and are in demand among them, speaks of you as an accomplished professional and, possibly, a future leader. The latter can help prove your qualifications when considering your application for any leadership position.

• Involvement in the development of the industry.

  The fact that you are involved in preparing the next generation, helping them to be more effective and avoid the same problems and mistakes that you yourself faced at the beginning of your journey, is not only a source of pride and a status symbol. Developing the industry in the right and healthy way benefits all parties, from ordinary workers to managers and company owners. If we talk specifically about programming and the market in ex-USSR countries, increasing the number of qualified programmers available for hiring in the country correspondingly increases the chances of large international companies and projects entering this market.

• Investing in the future through the development of social connections.

  Another undeniable benefit of mentoring is that it creates new long-term contacts in the industry, expanding your network and making new connections. Well, there’s probably no need to talk about the fact that connections in any field play a very important role.

• Keeping your skills and knowledge up to date.

  For experienced programmers who have been working in the profession for several years, another problem is relevant - skills and knowledge that they do not use in their work on a regular basis begin to “melt” quite quickly. Mentoring is a great way to solve this problem while keeping your skill set up to date.

What is the job of a mentor?

Ok, we’ve sorted out the benefits of mentoring, now let’s take a closer look at what exactly a mentor should do.

• Show students how to learn effectively.

  Let's be honest. Despite all the assurances that anyone can learn and become a programmer that you can find on the Internet, programming is still a rather difficult subject to study, and some concepts in coding are generally extremely difficult to master alone. A mentor's job is often to show mentees the most effective ways and approaches to learning.

• Reinforce and support good programming approaches.

  The job, as well as the function of a mentor, is to establish and maintain a high level of professionalism, instilling in the younger generation the correct approaches to coding and explaining the importance of certain aspects of programming. If we talk about specific approaches and practices, then first of all this is the correct documentation of your code, allocating sufficient time and attention to planning and thinking about the code, maintaining a unified style, etc.

• Support and motivation.

  Knowledge is knowledge, but even without banal friendly support, it is also sometimes difficult, and it is also included in the list of those things that are expected from a good mentor. And this requires having a certain reserve of empathy, which many coders have problems with.

How to become a mentor for beginning programmers?

Here are some tips for those who are interested in becoming a mentor, but it is not entirely clear how the mentoring process generally works and what exactly needs to be done for this.

• Start writing articles and/or posts with useful information.

  Make yourself known and gain some fame in professional circles through publications on specialized resources, as well as on blogs and social networks. If we talk about topics, most often experienced programmers write about the technologies they work with, sharing unique knowledge and observations that they acquire in the process of work.

  In particular, many experts write guides on the platforms and technologies they have mastered, or describe projects and cases that they have to deal with at work (however, in this case, one must not forget about the NDA, if one has been signed).

  As for specialized sites, resources such as Hackermoon, DZone, FreeCodeCamp and a number of others are popular on the English-language Internet. There are also quite a few different sites on the RuNet where an experienced programmer could publish his article, including the “Groups” section on JavaRush . Also, many people prefer to publish articles on the social network for professional communication LinkedIn.

• Answer questions from newbies and provide advice online.

  Another good way is to help newbies online by answering their questions and providing recommendations on relevant sites. This allows you, again, to gain a reputation as an experienced specialist and mentor, while at the same time providing real help to beginners in your free time and without having to spend too much energy on it. You can do this, for example, on the English-language question and answer resource Quora, or on our website in the Help and Forum sections (if we are talking about learning Java, of course).

• Start helping individually as a teacher and mentor.

  If you feel confident enough to provide full-fledged mentoring, and also have enough free time, you can take on students and mentees. For example, among iconic people who would like to master this profession, or among beginners, but capable and motivated programmers. One of the most common pieces of advice that experienced mentors give to their novice colleagues and their mentees is to set rules and boundaries from the very beginning: decide what kind of help you can provide to your mentees. This could be periodic consultations, assistance with a project or learning the intricacies of a technology. The most important thing is that both parties, both mentor and mentee, know what to expect from such a relationship and understand where the line is (i.e., so that mentees do not bother their mentor too often).

• Speak at specialized conferences and other events.

  Well, the most serious and, probably, large-scale manifestation of mentoring will be speeches at conferences for programmers and other public events, not necessarily large ones. This will help not only to significantly strengthen your reputation, but also, often, to receive many requests from novice programmers who want to become your mentees.

Tips for new mentors

Well, instead of concluding, we will give some short advice to those who are just embarking on the path of a mentor.

• Be the kind of mentor you would like to have.

  If you've never had a mentor and learned everything on your own, imagine how much easier the process would be and how much faster you'd achieve results if you had one. Try to become such a person for representatives of the new generation, protecting them from the mistakes typical of beginners.

• Learn together with your students.

  Experience shows that this process is most successful in cases where both parties, mentor and mentee, strive to learn something new and enrich themselves with knowledge. Therefore, strive to learn together with your students.

• Be a mentor, not a teacher.

  Don't confuse mentoring with regular teaching and lecturing. Your task is to show the correct approaches to learning and protect against mistakes, but responsibility for the learning process itself, as well as its results, should lie with the one who is learning.