Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjclemmy | Hacker News Reader

I too would welcome a mentor!

I've often thought this would be a good social network - online mentoring. Lots of upside for the mentee, not sure about the mentor...

View on HN

The upside for the mentor is that their methods are carried through to the next generation of developers.

People like mentoring, it's human nature.

But that will challenging to capture online.

Many people told me, that teaching and mentoring helped them getting better themself.

>But that will challenging to capture online.

Unless there's some barrier to entry it would be difficult, and it'd probably just end up being a spam or meme fest like LinkedIn or Facebook after a while.

At university, I hold office hours for a mid-level CS course, and it is incredibly rewarding to do so in person, as you can see the flicker of understanding on their face when they get it. That's going to be very hard to capture online.

That's _almost_ the startup we created ~3.5 years ago (still going today!) https://www.uvize.com/

It's not 100% online mentorship though. It's really there to facilitate / manage / help existing mentorship programs at organizations.

We thought about trying to get it to a point where it could work with non-associated mentors/mentees, but it's really a chicken/egg problem at that point.

Vetting mentors is also not an easy thing to solve if you were offering a service for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com