We Need Programming Mentors

A big reason 1-on-1 mentoring is so much better than almost any other form of education is that the teacher is able to build a mental model of what the student knows. You can get close to this with a tight pedagogical track where the teacher can say "You've all taken classes X and Y, so you should already be comfortable with the concepts I'm going to talk about." But Software Engineering is a young discipline and the topics discussed in TFA are nebulous, opinion-laden, and specific to individual companies, tasks, and languages. So precisely-specified pedagogy is not possible, and the only remaining option is 1-on-1 mentoring. Every other option (online tutorials, videos, presentations) doesn't allow the teacher to build a mental model of what the student knows and adapt their lesson based on that. It's not really about being right next to the person or being available right now, as TFA says. It's about being able to understand what the student already knows, which lessons are sinking in and which aren't, and why.

Then comes the extremely hard part for the teacher: having the deep self-awareness to be able to separate out what really matters from what is simply their opinion, or what they're comfortable with. When a company tech lead is mentoring juniors, it doesn't matter as much, because her preferences can basically become mandates without causing any real issue; that probably increases the overall consistency of the codebase. But if you want to set up a website where experienced mentors share real grains of wisdom without the chaff of personal preference, prepare for a lot of religious wars.

There's a reason the master/apprentice model has persisted for thousands of years. It doesn't sound like TFA is advocating for some mass-scale solution, but rather just pointing out how valuable mentoring is and how it should be a priority for senior developers if a company wants a healthy engineering culture. Totally agreed. We're probably not ready for a mass-scale solution to this problem yet.

Credit where credit's due, programmers are great at being open and helping newbies find their footing.

I studied as an electrical engineer, but ended up drifting into the software world because my first preference (FPGA/Embedded dev) was so heavily gatekept and actively hostile to newcomers.

Well, yes? There have been numerous sites trying to offer this but the problem is that the number of mentees outnumber the mentors at 1:infinity. There's little incentive to helping beginners and it quickly becomes expensive if you want to pay programmers market rate for their time.

mmh. been mentoring few ppl.. last 15+ years. it's not easy to find mentees. proper ones. actively interested in being mentored (not taught, lectured, tick-that-course'd, etc).. And when there is someone like that, noone pays for that. so it gets difficult..

ChatGPT can mentor, using humans isn't scalable