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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

> How do you find mentors?

I go up to them, and I ask them.

And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude. People are usually really happy to talk about things they know a lot about, not just to sound smart, but because they really like to think about it, and you get to think about it when you hear yourself talking... I really enjoy ranting, and listening to rants. I learned a lot of CS by listening to hour-long rants at the cafeteria. Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.

Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

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> Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.

I swear fully half the really useful/interesting things I've learned have started with someone just infodumping on me IRL at some event.

> I go up to them

How do you find them to go up to them though?

Not sarcasm, genuine question. How do you find someone who a) you respect and could teach you things you're interested in, and b) has time for you.

I tried trawling through LinkedIn "to expand my network" but that's useless.

I tried attending meetups, that's only slightly less useless. Lots of cool people, no mentors though.

At work, it seems the people who could be a mentor are more senior and everyone wants them as the mentor.

And people who're on the same level often consider you as competition and it takes a lot of work to establish enough trust for truly candid communication.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yea, I've gone up to a lot of people at work, outside of work, by cold emailing, etc. Most people are pleasant enough and will exchange a few emails, for example, but for the most part, I have never had extend beyond that. And some basically do not want to converse beyond being polite. The best success I've had is that I have attended courses at local universities why still working full-time, and by just showing up to professors' office hours is basically the only way I've gotten good mentorship.

I'm sort of mid-career now, and I just feel I have missed out on mentors outside of my very first job. I'm worried about it in general because I feel inadequate to mentor others.

> I'm sort of mid-career now, and I just feel I have missed out on mentors outside of my very first job. I'm worried about it in general because I feel inadequate to mentor others.

I've wanted a mentor for at least 7 years now, and I didn't find one.

If you're mid-career, you're probably perfect as a mentor for someone.

The question I have for a mentor is "how do I get to the next step?" -- and a person who is either on that step or recently left it would know. Or someone way more ahead who's introspective and remembers well -- but I'm okay with less.

I was never a better classroom teacher than on my 2nd year of university.

Everything was fresh to me, including why people don't get things the first time, because I'd only recently not got it the first time.

> How do you find them to go up to them though?

I keep them around.

They're like rare pokemons.

Some meetup groups are better than others.

Getting mentorship through work: There are two ways I can think of. 1) Pick a job so that you specifically end up working with/under the person you wish as your mentor. There's simply no way around getting it, because you'll just suck up whatever ideas and opinions they have. 2) If your workplace has a "guild" where the obsessed can meet; this is, in my sample size = 1 experience, most often done half-assed.

Thanks for the advice.

>> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

This is so true. I do want to work mostly on distributed systems but every once in a while I get AI envy seeing all the amazing progress being made in the field.

As a suggestion for finding mentors, maybe just track down some senior software engineers at OpenAI and the like and drop them a cold email explaining that you're curious and would love some time to chat about how <some new tool they're working on> works?

If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat. You lose nothing by asking, and if someone's "offended" or something because they received a cold email... well, that's their problem.

That's the start of a mentoring relationship. The first two probably won't be good AI mentors but you'll have learned something cool, and maybe they're curious about distributed systems. But maybe the second or third or fourth time you repeat this process, you find someone you really click with.

> If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat.

I've been on the receiving end of those emails a small handful of times due to a previous job, and I've been thrilled to receive them every time. While none of them turned into a longer-term relationship, I would have been happy if they had. I think in general, (non-famous) people are less busy than people assume and would love to talk about things they're passionate about. Don't track down the project lead; instead go talk to the anonymous people a step or two down the ladder.

> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

This is truly the most important question and one that only you can answer for yourself, unfortunately.

> And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude.

I strongly believe this is entirely what is necessary for the average person to be a good hacker. Put in effort to understand. The rest often comes naturally.

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