Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?

I work on my own startup with a co-founder so I can't mentor at work. Over this past summer, I mentored a college junior as part of the Code2040 (http://www.code2040.org/) program.

I have been mentoring a friend over a 1.5 year span. We were both from the Market Research Data Processing domain. I managed the make the switch to software and helping him get proficient enough in web software development to land a junior position. So far I've just told him what courses to do on Udemy and Code school and helped him if he's got stuck. He's doing this for himself so the motivation is there. I just make a phone-call twice a day asking him his progress. Even if he's not made any it's fine - as he's managing this with his current work. He works from home and has 2 clients who pay him for MR DP work - so he makes time on weekends and early in the morning. This has already yielded him some really great benefits because he can now program web surveys and customise them for client requirements. Over time he's become really good at jQuery and CSS and has now done a RoR course and currently doing a node.js course on Udemy. If he continues to be open to mentoring I plan on putting him on an Erlang or Prolog or Haskell or Elm tutorial next.

I also mentored another relative. He was a fresher and just passed out of college - but with a "wrong" degree. He did commerce (that's what we call it in India, his dad is an accountant) - but wanted to be a programmer. I followed the same pattern with him. He also did a 1 year full time course in Software. He just recently landed a job as a Junior Dev. It's a start because the institute that he did the course with said that because of his background degree, he'll find it difficult to get a break with A-companies and should concentrate on B-class companies. I tried to convince him to now start solving problems on Hacker Rank and Project Euler and take about 3-6 months before applying for a job, but he was too anxious and went for a job that pays - I kid you not - INR 8000/- per month. They have said they will pay INR 16,000/- after 6 months if he does well.

One of the things I've found is it's hard to boost people's self esteem. The first guy i'm mentoring is too afraid to go for an interview because he doesn't want to fail. But anyway it's slow and steady progress up the ladder.

They're downvoting because a very large number of people don't do it, and it should be obvious that OP is interested in those primarily those who do -- or at least, those with reasons either way.

Just saying "No" presumes we care that this specific guy doesnt do some specific thing. It's quite arrogant.

1. India has 10K AICTE approved engineering colleges. While some of these are IITs and NITs that you might've heard of, beyond the top 50-100 colleges, there is _no support system_ for the students. The curriculum of most state universities still updates in 5 years with little autonomy given to colleges. As a result, most students still see Java, C and dotNet as the universe of CS.

2. India's gender inequality in the workplace picks pace from higher education. In the college we mentor in, there are ~400 boys and ~50 girls. Out of which, 30 boys and 5 girls actively code today. Since there is substantial gender based teasing/harassment, most colleges in India lock women up post 8pm. Collaboration doesn't kick off because of such low density of students. Especially for girls.

3. We run this with 200 students over whatsapp. We have groups for fostering reading, internships & jobs, AMAs, competitive programming and so on. If you would like to help us scale this community, get in touch and we can talk in detail.

PM me and let me know how I can help. We can set up an initial set of emails.

1. What you currently do 2. What you would like to be doing/learning 3. Where you want to go From there, we can discuss how we can both work on your development. Thank you,