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> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance

That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?

What senior or principal engineers?

I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.

It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.

I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.

I don’t mean this as a slight against you because there’s a place in the world for every type of developer, but your description of work and collaboration is very cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the world and thus you’ve never met anyone worth collaborating with, or, more likely, you’ve not attracted those people in your workplaces.

I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.

The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.

your description of work and collaboration is very cynical.

One man's cynic is another man's realist.

In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.

I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.

I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).

Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with

I STRONGLY disagree with this universal claim.

One thing I got out of mentorship is that it’s one thing being correct, and and entirely other thing having people actually want to listen to you. It happens often enough that you have one and not the other. Until you have both, you won’t have impact and will grovel about others.

Not every person works in a company organized this way, even IT people. In all my working years and all companies, I always had managers that were technically inferior to me (not bragging, most were not technical people at all, some had some basic tech skills). My only mentoring was for management skills, not guidance in any technical matter.

I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I don’t need any help, but as soon as I get into a situation I’m not very good at, it’s criticism all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many managers don’t seem happy being managers, and that only a minority get significant career development value from managers/leads.

Have you ever received constructive feedback that did not feel like criticism?

Yes, especially from clients/customers. Most manager feedback, though, is of the form “you need to/should do X.” If you press them on HOW to do X, they often don’t really know, especially when it comes to soft skills issues or personality clashes. They see their role as providing the feedback, and it’s your job to figure out how to fix it. It feels like criticism because you’re left with the critical part and no clear path forwards. Of course knowing the problem exists provides SOME value, but I wouldn’t call it mentorship, guidance, or even constructive.

I've never had any mentorship too from engineers in the company where I started my career. I learned a lot from books.

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