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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

Just choose very wisely who you invest your mentoring effort into. Nothing hurts more than putting years of energy into helping someone who simply never gets it and stays a beginner. Being highly selective with that does a service both to yourself and to those who actually deserve it.

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I love mentoring engineers. It’s been my job for the past 5 years.

But after some introspection, I’ve realized that I love teaching _smart_ people, or at least, people that are engaged and want to learn.

I can’t imagine being a traditional teacher, and having to teach kids that don’t care.

As a side note, some of the sharpest engineers I’ve mentored are interns. Maybe my company is exceptionally good at hiring interns. I swear, it’s been like that for the last 5-6 interns I’ve worked with.

When you’re in intern the meat grinder hasn’t ate you up, yet. Everything is new and exciting. The longer I’ve been in my career the less motivation and the more discipline gets me through learning new technologies.

“I can’t imagine being a traditional teacher, and having to teach kids that don’t care.”

What I’ve seen is igniting that spark and moving folks from not caring to caring (or realizing they can affect change) can be even more rewarding than the other mentoring being discussed

Never seen that in my experience. My concern is mentoring people who end up abusing their earned skills/position for unethical things, which I've seen many times.

Over the years I've seen a handful of curious characters on Usenet and mailing lists who stick around for 15, 20 years or more and are still asking the same beginner questions, with scant evidence of having learned anything. Could be anterograde amnesia.

Can you give some examples of this?

Personally I think it's more about whether or not the mentee is making an honest effort to learn that dictates whether or not they're worth one's time. If a student is not 'getting it' then that's an invitation for the teacher to examine their teaching style and try to find different ways to pass on the knowledge; it's not a sign that they're not worth teaching.

Never had that problem. In general there aren’t very many people that are interested in what I have to teach. If we get past that it goes really well.

You’ve piqued my interest. What do you have to teach?

Nothing mysterious. Architecture. Systems programming. Distributed systems.

I've heard this called "pushing a rope".

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