Hacker News Reader

Comment by kshacker | Hacker News Reader

How does mentoring work within the same team?

I have worked under managers where you designate a point person for a project who can review and as a process mentor people.

But I have also worked under managers who have some kind of subconscious pressure to treat all reportees equal so they hesitate in even acknowledging that 2 people have different calibre and thus everyone either works independently or collaborates : so if you find something bad, you either fix it yourself and move on, but you don't talk about it (part of this is driven by the need to protect bad hiring decisions but if you do not mentor them you make things even worse a year down the line - ok this may be my bias showing up here but hey we are all biased) except in a weekly staff meeting where with many people and limited time you can cover very little.

So just curious what mechanisms do people set up to mentor people within a team without designating a reporting relationship?

View on HN

I think that's a problem where you don't have well-defined ladders, so there's no "obvious" way to distinguish newgrads from greybeards.

There are lots of teams at Google where an L6-7 manager has reports who are anywhere from L3 to L7; this, in fact, has been my experience the entire 5 years I've worked there. This shouldn't be a problem at all, and hasn't been in my experience.

I have, in fact, been in exactly the situation where I'm mentoring a new-grad who is assigned my subteam. I'm the TL, but not their manager, so the relationship and responsibility is very clear.

> what mechanisms do people set up to mentor people within a team without designating a reporting relationship

As someone who went through this myself, it's a lot easier to set up mentoring within the same team as just knowledge transfer at the beginning.

In one place I worked it was about helping junior engineers reinforce the things that were otherwise a difficulty for them, and it happened with both sides wanting it and evolving goals throughout the months. Assess the needs and discuss them if there is a disagreement, establish actionable items, set up metrics together that can be tracked more or less loosely depending on the subject and the people, and when necessary figure out ways to communicate to the team or to higher up any request related to that project for growth (time to learn, structural change, etc). And when it doesn't make sense to do the mentoring anymore, just stop. It doesn't have to be a permanent thing at all.

Sometimes practically it might have been about technical stuff, but really it was mostly about helping people communicate better and helping them navigate the structure of the company to feel more at ease with its different parts. Sometimes it enabled them to bring to the surface skills they weren't confident they had or that they had but weren't being put to use. People outside the team would also tend to notice the change positively, which can have an impact on a junior's career path. IMO, for most people in tech the problem is fairly frequently anything-that-isn't-tech-itself.

It can be very empowering within a team to have people who grow beyond their comfort zone with the perspective of a more experienced person who also knows your day-to-day struggles.

Of course that implies working in teams where there's an investment in the teams, in the individuals, in the value of long-term returns of such growth, etc. Not a fit for every company - I just happen to have experienced such things at a very nourishing place.

> I have also worked under managers who have some kind of subconscious pressure to treat all reportees equal so they hesitate in even acknowledging that 2 people have different calibre and thus everyone either works independently or collaborates

IMO that kind of manager is just a bad manager. Same with school teachers who treat to treat all the kids exactly the same. I get the sentiment, but in reality everybody is different with different strengths and weaknesses, and also different needs.

> So just curious what mechanisms do people set up to mentor people within a team without designating a reporting relationship?

I think in many cases (esp. if there is a big difference in experience level between the mentor and mentee) it is quite similar to a reporting relationship. The main difference is that a mentor doesn't have the authority to make a mentee do something in the way that a manager does. If everything goes well, then such conflict should never arise, or only rarely.

a "team lead" designation is useful for this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com