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Comment by syspec | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated rant, and not saying this is the case here I'm sure it is not from reading the authors blog. However, anyone notice how 4/5 developers describe themselves as mentors? I've intereviwed so many people who describe themselves as mentors yet could not answer fizzbuzz

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4/5 developers could (and maybe should be mentors) - assuming they are all competent and all have different skill levels, you could have

L5 mentors L4 who mentors L3 and so on.

Related, more cynical take - being a mentor is often a factor in promotion & hiring, and being viewed as a mentor will make you more likely to be promoted or hired.

It is known (and proven) that most people grossly overestimate their experience and abilities.

In software development it is even more egregious because, due to exponential growth of number of developers, most developers haven't had a chance to work with a real, good, expert developer.

You need probably at least 10-15 years and more realistically about 20 years to grow to be expert at your field. And even then only small percentage grow to be truly experts, the rest become stuck somewhere along the way.

How do you asses whether you are mentor material if you've never seen a real deal?

You don't hear people who decided they are not mentor material yet -- you only hear from people who did.

So this is the false positive problem -- given even small chance of false positive on deciding you are mentor material, given huge population of developers and very small population of actual good mentors, you are bound to have a lot of false positives.

But why do you need to be an expert (20 years experience, and whatnot) to be a good mentor?

You don't need to be an expert mathematician to be a great Math teacher; you don't need to be a happy well-rounded person to be a good therapist.

Because you need to:

- have the knowledge (duh!)

- have the experience to have had enough time to observe things in reality (vs theory) and have had the time to internalise and digest all of this

- be mature

While it is easy to get the knowledge, the rest usually cannot be skipped so easily.

As to math, that is not a good example. Math is almost pure knowledge and intelligence and so a bright kid can acquire that knowledge and quickly pass to his peers assuming they are intelligent enough.

Unless you really mean Mathematics. Like how to advance the field. Then it is not as easily transferable knowledge. I know, I studied theoretical mathematics.

Software development is only in small part driven by knowledge. If you think software development is knowing programming languages and frameworks and AWS and certifications you are waaaay off the target.

I think your advice holds for people who are well on their way into their careers, but even with someone with half the years of experience (i.e. 7-10 years) can be invaluable to someone starting out in the field.

I don't think I would've been able to right my career had I not had a dev with about ten years experience mentor me for a year. Granted, he might be an edge case since he learned teaching before becoming a programmer, but nonetheless his empathy and encouragement on top of some lived experiences was invaluable to me.

Nobody said mentor is the only way to get help.

I have this model where you can get regular help with what you want and mentor help with what you need.

Mentor will be mature and experienced enough to be able to recognise your particular needs and be able to adjust to you. Mentor will be able to understand their own limitations and adjust for it, too.

The term has simply gotten diluted, just like the phrases "good at math" or "being good with computers" can mean I can do basic addition mentally and I can setup your email software. It's not a fight worth fighting as people will tend to find the path of least resistance that gives them the most gains. Its the opposite of the imposter syndrome, also the 'fake it till you make it' mantra. IMO, its not really that bad in s/w dev because "Talk is cheap, show me the code".

Exponential growth also pushes down the time when you need to become a mentor. If the field was totally stable (retirement rate = graduation rate, and everyone retires after 40 years in the field, greatly simplified model), then each new joiner could be paired with a mentor of 20 years experience, and only needs to become a mentor after 20 years. But if the field is growing exponentially, the age drops significantly. I'm sure someone could calculate this; it's almost like the inverse of the retirement age, population change, and social security question

On one hand I agree with you that experience matters a lot, and is often undervalued by SV/VC youth-worshipping culture. There's no substitute for having seen many different ways of doing things, the effect of decisions as technology ecosystems evolve over time, and the underlying human dynamics that drive outcomes in any large-scale human endeavor.

On the other hand, experience is mostly orthogonal to technical and pedagogical skills. After decades of experience I've seen mentorship come in many forms, and I would never put some kind of litmus test on who is qualified to be a mentor. Ultimately it's about individual strengths, weaknesses and chemistry.

Perhaps this is because for some programmers, their career path takes them from writing code to a broader leadership path (mentoring, management, tracking problems, organizing consensus between groups, etc), and they may have stopped actually being a programmer years ago without necessarily even noticing. Unused skills atrophy, so it wouldn't surprise me to see candidates who are experienced mentors and leaders but can no longer write code on a whiteboard (although failing to fizzbuzz is a bit extreme).

Of course, maybe I'm rationalizing and it's just that candidates who aren't fresh out of college need to claim some leadership credentials, and they don't want to lie and say they've formally led or managed anybody, so they just make vague statements about mentoring in the hopes that you check the right box on the hiring rubric.

The failure here, is engineering leaders are rarely chosen for their soft skills and ability to mentor vs their technical expertise. Sounds like you only care about the latter, adding to the current system

I would argue that you have to have competence and ability in the area you seek to mentor in, otherwise you are simply spreading bad advice around. If you can't complete FizzBuzz you probably shouldn't be mentoring others in software engineering. That doesn't mean you have to be a savant at your occupation but there is an expected level of capability.

Disagree, you can find mentors in many areas. Outside of core competencies. It really depends on what level you're at in your career. Yes a Sr engineer mentoring a Jr engineer, absolutely. A director of engineering mentoring a engineering manager, not so much.

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