Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

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The need of mentoring must be completely voluntary. I was hired to be a team senior of developers who didn’t think they needed a mentor and it didn’t work out so well.

People actively seeking a mentor are likely willing to consider the advice and tough criticism they get as points to self-reflect upon, because they want to improve. They want to become faster stronger developers. As common as that might sound I have found intentional yearning for self-improvement to be rare or severely misunderstood among junior developers in the corporate world. More common than self improvement is interest in specific technology stacks of the moment and persuit of near instant gratification.

EDIT

Actually, I can remember observing this behavior once as a junior developer. When I started learning JavaScript 12 years ago the real big deal then was Java. Compared to me at the time everybody seemed incredibly experienced and talented, but most of the developers were negligent to the point of horrid incompetence at the frontend skills even though this was a big brand web business and 90% of their efforts generated frontend code.

There were a few Java developers who did have a solid understanding of the frontend code, but they intentionally didn’t advertise this. I had to actively observe for it. After badgering some of these people it was clear they were willing to provide mentoring if I asked for it and worked my ass off to chase it.

What I learned the hard way is the people who made the best developers had a secondary skill they actively thought about more than their primary skill and used that to reinforce their primary skill. At first it was Java developers who had a solid grasp of things like CSS, but I also saw it in others who were working out product management skills or business pricing logic more related to finance than programming. These people also tended to make strong mentors. The people focused on only their primary skills weren’t as capable and didn’t seek mentoring themselves or have much to offer other junior developers.

On that topic, if you are the most senior person on the team and the other members don't seem like they want mentoring, my biggest piece of advice is to wait. Sometimes it feels like you are waiting forever (and with some people you will be). Mentoring is as much about trust as it is about passing over knowledge. You can imagine the people you will potentially mentor as wild animals. Even if you have gobs of yummy food on hand, they won't be ready to take it from you at first. The trick is to stand still, keep your calm and keep offering small little treats. Eventually one or two of them will come by and take a nibble. Don't pounce on them. Just stay calm and keep offering treats. Eventually some of them will come to trust you well enough to eat a whole meal from you. Some never will. That's just the way it is.

In front end development trust is universally near absent. People are wanting instant gratification and there is huge peer pressure to concede that a tool or framework will solve all your problems for you. Invented here syndrome is the name of the game. They don’t trust themselves or each other. It really feels that for most frontend developers it really is all about tools and trends until they spinoff into another career path or promote out.

I do agree that trust is huge for mentoring.

I'm not sure about typical front end development culture (the front end devs we have on our team are really very good), but I have been very surprised about how this generation of programmers in general choose to trust people and code. To be fair, it might just be some of the people I've met, but as an old guy, it seems to be more prevalent than I've ever seen before. I find that younger devs are prone to trusting code written by people they've never met before. If it's popular on the internet, it seems that it must be good. On the other hand, they seem to be very cautious about code they get from their colleagues. As you say, invented here syndrome. It seems like if the code was written by someone they know, then it can't be any good.

But I think a lot of that is a lack of confidence and experience. It's hard to talk about this without sounding like a gigantic ass because no matter how I put this, I can't find a way to express how much I really respect other developers. However, I've noticed that there seems to be a big reluctance for actually reading and appreciating the code in the tools people use -- almost as if there is some magic seal on the code and despite it being open source, we are not worthy to gaze upon the code. I think there is a fairly large amount of hero worship going on and a kind of herd mentality. To question the laws that were handed down from on high is blasphemous (almost literally). It is to the point where many people feel that they are transgressing badly if they even deviate from the "community approved" coding standards. Thank god for auto-reformatting tools is all I can say!

When these same people see their colleagues, they realise that it's just some other goofball like themselves. Their colleagues are struggling, making mistakes, rewriting, grinding away. So I think there is a kind of group impostor syndrome going on where they think, "Well, that guy isn't that much better than me and I suck!" What they don't realise is that their heroes in the FANG companies and their nameless horde of community members are just goofballs too -- struggling, making mistakes, grinding away.

I think as well, we often see projects and people fall from grace. Some project grinds to a halt, or the horrible problems it's had from the start become more obvious to the horde. And then all of a sudden it's, "That guy is a joke. Only morons would use that framework. All the cool people have moved over to <some other equally flawed thing>". But again, I think it's just part and parcel of a lack of experience and confidence. Most young devs are secretly, desperately hoping that somebody out there knows "how to do it right". They get disillusioned quickly when they discover that their heroes don't know how to do it right.

And of course, nobody does ;-) But that's a hard message to sell.

As a side story to your wonderful comment I had a colleague recommend I use a different IDE at work because their favorite code beautification tool was only available in one editor at the time. They didn't realize I am a contributor on the project they were promoting or that one of the code beautifiers in that project was mine. The team on this tool were actively working on diversifying to various IDEs but just hadn't gotten there quite yet. That was an awkward moment.

I'm curious: how was that awkward, rather than hilarious or glorious?!

Right, we weren't there but from the description it seems like serendipity.

I still cannot get over how it seems like any marginally complex Javascript library is always full of ridiculous bugs.

I’m talking problems with the core functionality just not working.

I don’t think this is the case for other languages. Is it just that JS is the new hotness?

JS is something like 23 years old, so it cant be blamed on trends or youth. I think the problem is that nobody tests dependencies. There is a misguided belief that everything is community tested, wonderful, and that this community stamp of approval is superior to any decision a person could make. To me this sounds stupid and criminally negligent, but I have heard this very reasoning more than many times.

The reinvention of JS for use in serious projects is only about 10 years old however. A lot of these folks were early career and using a language that's not been historically strict.

Similarly, don't assume you aren't already someones mentor. Mentorship isn't always explicit. I'm always open to helping solve problems, and giving my (admittedly biased) opinions on things. Came as a bit of a surprise when one of my peers wrote "I don't think he knows this, but I consider him to be my mentor" on my 360 review. I definitely don't need recognition for anything, I'm always going to try to help people, but it was an important lesson for me. That realization has helped me understand the things I'm doing are influencing people -- both good and bad -- and has set me in a direction of identifying and eliminating my negative influences.

> The need of mentoring must be completely voluntary.

Good point, you can't force it on someone. What you can do however is explain to new programmers how valuable it is, this is not innately understood. The years where I had someone mentor me were the years where I made immense progress. Even though neither of us even considered it mentoring at the moment.

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