I have read in various answers by highly influential programmers is to find a mentor. I wanna know how to find a mentor? I'm interested in mostly developing web applications (both front-end and back-end).
A little background, I will be finishing my Bachelors in Computer Science in a month and currently based in India. I have been programming in Python, Java and C# mostly.
Thanks!
You develop a relationship with a person who has more experience than you do, and over time, that person may become a mentor to you. And I say may, because if the person you're working with determines that you don't provide any value to the relationship, they won't be that willing to help you for long.
I say this from experience - lots of people want me to mentor them, and I've had quite a few that, once they got their first job, they just disappeared.
I'm a lot more picky about which college students I mentor now.
The students were much like your property, you could beat them, treat them basically how you liked, even sodomize them if the mood took I'm guessing.... (sorry to be graphic, but I think that's how it likely went down). You did however, have to provide for their basic needs and you couldn't kill or severely maim them, or it was bad for business. After X number of years, the student could go out on their own, and the process repeated.
So this system has some obvious flaws and has slowly been done away with. It might be good if it were to make a comeback in a modern form (without the beating and sodomy of course). Then again, maybe it's not so good. Still, we get lots of people wanting "mentors". What do they have to give back, particularly at first?
My opinion? Want a good mentor? Look in the mirror.
You know, I don't think so. Trades have been around for a lot longer than universal justice. Slavery is only recently going away. Important people in the community have traditionally done what they wanted and as long as it wasn't too egregious, they usually got away with it.
A little light googling turns up no shortage of cases of apprentice abuse, (including sexual) from the relatively recent past (1600's on... a time that is comparatively modern in the "objective" dispersal of justice). One can only imagine what earlier times were like. No doubt there have been plenty of beneficent individuals, but the beneficent treatment of fellow humans is sadly often the exception historically speaking. For most of human history there has been a very different standard of what was acceptable than we hold today. A third party flogging for failing to follow orders (or simply because the flogger was having a bad day) likely scarcely raised eyebrows as long as it didn't get out of hand for most of human history.
Even today we still see remnants of this relationship. Abuse of underlings who put up with it because they think it will get them somewhere. Taking on an "apprentice" out of sexual interest rather than simple interest in their development. Human nature has not changed terribly much... just the rules.
I don't know what kind of relationship OP is after or what he is willing to do to get it. I do wish him the best of luck on his quest.
Define "going away."
Every time I teach my craft to somebody new to web development, I learn something new. It gets me excited about coding again, and it's why I love teaching so much. The students with the most questions are usually the most enthusiastic, so ask any and all questions that come to you. If your mentor doesn't know the answer, even better. I like students who make me think!
Edit: Typo
Like any relationship it works best when both sides have strengths that complement each other.
The nature of a mentor relationship is that the mentor has more experience. It doesn't mean they are more skilled in every way.
A specific example: I get questions from my mentors along the lines of "What's the state of X? Is it ready for prime time?" or "In Y, how does one typically do Z?" because they know I am actively involved in the community for X and Y.
Instead simply be curious, ask questions (to yourself) and find the answers to them (by yourself). And most of all "do stuff". Apply the knowledge you're accumulating. This is the only way you're going to grow as a developer and start to separate the good advice from the bad advice, and start formulating an opinion of your own.
Perhaps what is meant by "find a mentor" is: become involved in a project with people who you respect and want to learn from. Then spend the time soaking in all the knowledge they have to offer. It's not that they've consciously decided to take on a role to "mentor" you. Instead indirectly (whether they know it or not) they're mentoring you with every ounce of advice they offer.
The map is not the territory so to speak.
My last internship (before my senior year of college) and my first job after college boh had me working with people who had been in the industry for 10+ years and were both at the top of their game and extremely patient about getting me up to speed with how things worked at their companies and in the industry in general, technically and culturally.
I know I hit the lottery going 2/2, but I don't know how else it would have happened. I can't imagine going out and just nagging people to teach you would end well.
I have no problem with people developing relationships with me and asking me simple/quick questions on occasion.
Agree. And in fact the other way around in a sense smacks of someone being used regardless of whether that was the intention or not.
I'm guilty of having contacted someone I greatly respect and asking "Will you mentor me?". While I honestly believe that particular individual understood the naivete in the format of my request as shown by the kind response, I would like to improve the manner in which I seek mentorship in the future.
In your examples, you offered to help improve a project of a prospective mentor with work you had already completed. If you don't know what work may help that person, would you ask directly how you may provide a benefit to him/her?
My next question is about the type of advice I seek. You suggest "[...] have gone as far as you can by yourself" before seeking mentorship. I'm not stuck, but there are a few paths I might choose. Each is a considerable time investment, and making the wrong choice would be a setback I'd really like to avoid. The conventional advice I have sought online hasn't provided a clear answer to my specific situation. What is the best way to ask someone if he/she has the time to offer advice? I don't want to start by presenting the questions and making them feel obligated to answer something that may take more time than they have available to consider.
"If you don't know what work may help that person, would you ask directly how you may provide a benefit to him/her?"
No I wouldn't. I get these sort of emails myself,though I am just a programmer and have no world class expertise even in programming, and I know what timewasters they can be.
More importantly I let my work lead to potential mentors than the other way round. In other words, I'll work on what interests me/I think is important even if no mentors are available. Mentors are an occasional aid, not a dependency, to doing good work. Which leads me to
(b) The desire to take the "optimal path" (no such thing exists for most realworld situations) can in itself be a paralyzing factor. Taking some paths, realizing they are not right for you and then backtracking is part of the learning process. This time is not "wasted". Seeing it thus only shows you are at a certain stage in learning how to learn, and need to move a little further.
Doing this exploration and backtracking improves your skill in choosing and walking paths. Sure, too much of it can be debilitating, but knowing when to stop and when to continue is itself a valuable skill, which can be acquired only by gaining experience and reflecting on it, not by someone else trying to guess the 'right path' for you.
If you completely avoid these situations, waiting for someone else to give you an "optimal" path, you end up (in the best case) as someone who can take a path only when someone else lays out all the pros and cons of each path. And that is not a good place to be, even if such a situation were possible (which is usually not the case, though in some highly structured environments like studying for an academic degree, it might be possible)
I agree that one should not be dependent upon a mentor's guidance. I think, based on your response to my second question, I may have inadvertently implied that I was seeking a mentor to enlighten me with the 'right path' or that I wouldn't start until I had received the advice. In fact, when I considered the circumstance prompting my second question before I had written it, my thoughts were very similar to your answer.
The guidance I expect a mentor can provide is similar to the reading list provided by tptacek for those who wish to learn more about security (http://www.amazon.com/lm/R2EN4JTQOCHNBA/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view...). Someone who wants to learn who blindly chooses the first few resources may eventually come across the same books or learn the information elsewhere, but may take far longer than necessary, pick up some bad habits, and not gain more expertise for the extra time spent stumbling along tangent resources that turn out to provide little or no benefit.
I think your strategy of delving into the work and in turn the community surrounding it is a great way to promote the serendipitous mentor-like relationships that will naturally form as a result.
My only disagreement is that you seem to find little value in seeking out those who aren't necessarily 'famous' but definitely are experts in a particular subject, researching more about them, and asking for mentorship if the research suggests it would be a good decision and could provide mutual benefit. There's likely a very low chance of success, but that person (who may have been a great mentor) may not have noticed you otherwise. I've decided that I'll do what I can to avoid any more reasons to think to my future self "I wish I had tried." A single mentor who I may not have been acquainted with otherwise would be worth all of the rejections to me.
Thank you again for taking the time to respond with such a well-thought-out comment.
Most people who could benefit from an advice end up not just ignoring what they are told, but arguing from the position of ignorance. Hence most people who could give a useful advice keep quiet. Unless they can clearly see they are being listened to, then they talk.
For programming Mentors/Guides, if you're in Bangalore, Jaaga[1] (Richmond Road) has something or the other at all times. I've met quite a lot of awesome programmers there, hired developers whom I met there. Hasgeek[2] (Indiranagar) also has lots of interesting people in their rather open Office.
The other option is to intern at a Technology-led and/or focused Startup.
@k__
It is confusing when you say the mentors didn't have time! I don't think you expect them to schedule out their time to _teach_ you. Do and then ask them to review your code or critique your code.
Recently, there was a nice article on HackerNews - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9396694
I've started something similar (http://thelycaeum.in/) to what he does myself. It's a lot smaller. I've currently working with my second batch of students and it's going okay.
1. Become interested in something esoteric in programming, then find people more knowledgable than you who are interested in the same thing. This always works for me when I get interested in something new.
2. Just reach out. I've gotten questions on LinkedIn from people I've never met before, and as long as they're not obnoxious, I always reply. Even if this doesn't work for everyone, try to make enough connections, and some will work out. Just be respectful, and show you've put thought into your questions. Questions like, "how do I data science?" won't get good responses.
That said, if you decide to find a mentor, start with people closest to you. Ask your family members and friends first. You'd be surprised how many great people are within 2-3 degrees of separation. This is old school, but works.
Steve Blank has a great article about how you need to provide value to even begin getting into somebody's space. http://steveblank.com/2013/08/12/how-to-get-meetings-with-pe...
Now you might say, I'm a student, what could I do? But there's a lot you can offer, from your story and perspective to the skills you have. Even just writing from the perspective of somebody offering value rather than just trying to take it makes it easier for you to get meetings with the mentors too busy to see you--the kind of mentors you should aim for.
Starting a relationship is always easier than maintaining it. You want to make sure you could grow with the person you're reaching out to, and that ideally, the conversations you have with them will be mutually beneficial. After a while, you'll be learning from them and they'll be learning from you as well--if you plan for that relationship rather than sitting back and trying to grab a "mentoring" session you'll start seeing your thinking about mentor dots evolve into long-lasting line relationships.
My last note on this is that it's also a lot easier to learn from people if you're working for them.
To sum up
1) provide value to everybody you talk with 2) think long-term 3) work for people you REALLY want to learn from
I've found that the mentors I've found informally have been the most valuable.
I've found the app Weave to be actually pretty useful in meeting interesting people. I wouldn't have the mindset of finding a mentor but rather one of sharing ideas with interesting people. A mentor implies a one-way value exchange, whereas my best mentor relationships have been those where we've learned from each other. For example, one person might have first hand experience in raising money while I would have experience in building apps in the current mobile app ecosystem.
My former workplace had a mentor program where senior marketers can be paired with junior marketers. From my experience these formal programs are a bit flakey and I didn't get too much out of it. Same goes for the mentor program at my university.
I've also found going to hackathons to be a good place to find mentors. My background is marketing but I build mobile apps now. I learned a significant amount of my practical programming skills by working with new teammates at hackathons.
Most mentors want something back in a relationship, I did it just to help out other people with no reward for me at all.
I got sick one day, stressed out and mentally ill, and went on disability. Been trying to get back on track and get back into programming. I'm 46 now and could use a mentor, but I lack people and social skills due to my mental illness and trying to rebuild them. I often get confused as someone whop suffers from autism in the way I write and talk. But I don't have autism, I have schizoaffective disorder which is rare and like bipolar with schizophrenia.
Because of my mental illness friends and family abandoned me, and my career was basically over. Nobody wants to hire a programmer that is mentally ill. But if I find the right company and the right mentor, I could get back into things.
The traditional advanced education path will usually form this sort of relationship. If you are fortunate, your bachelors program will allow you the opportunity to work with and learn from someone that can mentor you. If you haven't yet formed these sorts of relationships with your professors and are graduating already, you could start a masters/doctorate program in which you will be the student again and have (perhaps greater) opportunities to form these relationships.
Outside traditional education, you could find a junior developer / engineer position of employment in which a mid or senior engineer is assigned (or volunteers) to be your boss. Learn everything you can from this person, take their criticism, code reviews, etc. and improve yourself. Even if you are hired as a developer and there is little processes in place, you can take lead and find more senior co-workers that are willing to help you. Be direct and open about the fact that you're looking to improve your skills/abilities, and that you're not just looking for them to do the job for you. Don't take criticism personally, use it as a way to improve yourself and your code.
Outside traditional employment situations, you can participate in open source projects. Pick something and start working on it. Fix bugs, and ask questions about all the things you find. Be active in the IRC channel for the project, and/or the mailing list. Voice your opinion, ask questions, ask why things are done the way they are done, etc. Again, don't take criticisms personally, use it as a way to improve yourself and your code.
Go to hackathons, go to meetups, go to events and be friendly with everyone. If there aren't these sort of things in your areas, start them. Attend both social events and 'building' events where people are working together to build something together.
There is something you can learn from every person you meet. Establish this as your attitude.
So my advice would be not to head out with the intention of acquiring a mentor ... just head out into the job market to make friends with the attitude of a good student, and with any luck a mentor will find you.
Both of them came as products of my environment.
No one owes you a single thing, and time is the most valuable resource any of us have. The common tie I see between the two people I would call this are simple:
1. They saw I wanted to build things, could admit I was wrong, and was willing to learn
2. I kept in touch with them regardless of circumstance, seeking nothing but a hello and how are you doing.
If you want someone to just magically come along and guide you, this is the wrong path. Relationships are two sided and though you cannot offer expertise mentors often have a personal reason for investing their most precious resource into someone: They see something. Demonstrate this.
The landing page is all about student veterans right now (two of my co-founders and I are former military), but feel free to check it out: https://www.uvize.com/
If you have any questions about our service, feel free to send me an email: parker@uvize.com
For example, in Php we have http://phpmentoring.org/
I don't know what Python, Java and C# communities are currently offering
If you're from Chennai, I can suggest the Chennai Python User's Group. It's a great bunch of people and pretty welcoming for newcomers. A quick search on Meetup shows a lot of other language-based meetups popping across the country. Take your pick.
What city are you in? I might be able to introduce you to a few startups in Delhi/NCR (or a couple in Blr and Bby as well) if you're looking for a job after graduating. Send me an email.
Just a thought.
I worked in a a few companies, but the only skilled people there who could have mentored me didn't have the time.
As others have said, if you are _actively_ looking for a mentor, you are wasting your time.
If so, how?
Good luck.
I've learned lots of stuff from more experienced developers I've worked with, and passed on that knowledge to less experienced developers who needed it, but none of that was in the context of anything resembling a special relationship like mentoring.
IMO, once you have the basics that people usually get from a CS education (meaning the more abstract stuff like algorithms and data structures, not the stuff that's tied to a particular platform or language), there really isn't any more common or universal knowledge to be had. Quite a bit of what most people learn after graduating tends to be technical minutiae- the specifics of how to use various languages, libraries, and tools.
It's also the nature of the game that this technical minutiae changes all the time, and has an expiration date that's frequently only a few years away. So, one aspect of being a professional programmer is that you never stop learning throughout your career, and quite often you're just spending time learning how to do something in some language that you already knew how to do in 10 other languages. That's why I called it minutiae: it's critical stuff to know, but it's ephemeral knowledge that will someday be irrelevant, and you'll find yourself learning how to do the same stuff all over again in some other language in a few years.
I guess the whole point of this is that you've already got the somewhat universal basics of being a professional software developer, and all a mentor would do for you at this stage is help you learn the technical minutiae of a particular set of tools. But really, you will be having to do this learning on your own throughout your entire career, and you won't have a mentor to help you with it. So the very best skill you can have is the ability to learn things on your own with minimal help from others. Having a mentor might even be an impediment to gaining that skill, because it'd just be postponing you becoming self-sufficient.
The main thing to remember is that no matter how experienced you get, it will always feel like the set of things you don't know is growing faster than the set of things you know. It's not like you just get a certain amount of experience and all of a sudden you know most or all of the things- it's the exact opposite in fact. The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. So try not to feel bad about your lack of experience, but do try to become a lifelong learner if you aren't already.
I feel dirty quoting Eric Raymond but he's written a lot of things that can be insightful when taken in isolation. One of them was that the best way to get better is to alternate between reading books and hacking on code. It's easy to spend lots of time reading tech books and then never applying that knowledge to writing actual code. It's also easy to spend lots of time hacking on code and never reading anything, but this can drastically reduce how much new stuff you get exposed to. He suggested people get into a pattern of reading a book, write some code, read a book, write some code... When it comes to personal projects, just do stuff you want to do even if you have no idea how to do it.
The key to being a great programmer (IMO) is to never allow yourself to flounder or feel lost. If you are successful in your career, you may frequently be expected to complete a project using a language you haven't learned yet with some libraries you never even heard of. It's easy to get frustrated, but the way to get out of it is always to just put one foot in front of the other. Don't waste time feeling bad for not knowing how to do something, just always think about what the next step is and take it. Take everything one step at a time. You may not know how to get to where you want to go, but you can almost always figure out the next step you should take to get there.
I have been reading Coders At Work by Peter Seibel, and one common pattern which I noticed among all the programmers mentioned in the book was they worked under another good programmer in their initial years (Jamie Zawinski under Norvig), which was implicit mentoring IMO.
All my college life, I have worked on a lot of projects (Personal & at Internship) which involves different technologies, and as you said most of the work is figuring out how to do X in the new language or framework. One key thing which I have taken from everyone, is that learning never stops. The mode of learning keeps changing through out our life, from rote learning in early school to formal learning in high school and college and then to informal learning afterwards.
It's so vague as to essentially add zero value to the discussion.
You're criticizing the wrong people.