I help mentor at my local Python meetup. It usually involves getting people set up, guiding them to resources, and helping with problems they find in their projects. I found my meetup on Meetup.com and just started regularly attending.
Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
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Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#62I wouldn't feel confident to mentor anyone on anything. I'd feel like a total fraud. This can't be uncommon. When I was a developer, I either felt like what I was doing could be done by a smart highschooler (probably better than I was doing it) because it was straight forward, or like I was figuring things out as I went along (because it was hard). Now I do less development and more business analysis / architecture,…
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect As someone else pointed out, this is more commonly referred to as Imposter Syndrome.
> the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein persons of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is
Don't think that is the same as Imposter Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#63I wouldn't feel confident to mentor anyone on anything. I'd feel like a total fraud. This can't be uncommon. When I was a developer, I either felt like what I was doing could be done by a smart highschooler (probably better than I was doing it) because it was straight forward, or like I was figuring things out as I went along (because it was hard). Now I do less development and more business analysis / architecture,…
> All I could advise someone starting out in tech is to remember that no one really knows what they are doing.
That's why we are getting paid. We are all similar brain. Developers simply have familiar pathways that allows them to find solutions faster.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#64In Nashville (and growing elsewhere) we started a community around self-organizing peer-mentorship. Checkout it out http://pennyuniversity.org
It's very rudimentary and grass roots at this point. (I mean.. we're a Slack Team and a Google Forum.) But the idea is that everyone has things they want to learn and thing that they can share. PennyUniversity serves as the community for people that want to make In-Real-Life connections to learn new things. It's self organized, mostly it's individuals asking to learn something and then setting up a coffee chat or a lunch conversation. Occasionally the conversations grow to larger groups (say 10 people). Often the conversations are one-off, but sometimes they form into longer-term mentorship or topical-groups or reading groups. We encourage face-to-face meetings, but occasionally the meetings are online and recorded - like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czy7bgDd7Hc
Check it out. I'd love to hear feedback.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. Maybe we should have a "who's mentoring" thread, haha.
That's a great idea. I just started it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#66I started a meetup to fill a niche in the town I lived in regarding a technology stack I was proficient in (PHP and MySQL in Ann Arbor, MI). Attendance was usually less than 10 per day, but that made it easy to give everyone personal attention. Fast forward a few years and now I regularly mentor at Nodeschools.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#671. 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…
You're doing an important thing. Rather than just working with students, also reach out to experienced people in the industry. Even in a city like Bangalore, I feel the industry is too disconnected from the colleges.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#68Not sure if advice to startups counts.
I think it does. I've sat in on mentorships for small businesses via the local Economic Development dept. at city hall.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#69I do! Not because I feel like I know anything, but because logically I know there's quite some distance between an engineer and someone wanting to be an engineer. I see it every time my team gets a summer intern.
I got started by re-connecting with a group I led at university and being introduced to folks teaching business and practical engineering skills at a local accelerator (which seems to be primarily populated by college students and people without much experience trying to start their own companies). It's been a learning process -- both in terms of learning what people really ought to know before they apply for their first job versus what's normally taught and trying to fill in some of the missing bits, and learning where I myself have skills gaps.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#70I recently started mentoring a small group (3) of homeless people that have demonstrated computer proficiency under the auspices of a local Indianapolis homeless teen charity. We started with 3 and two have largely dropped out. One, however, is still going strong. We are using the Free Code Camp curriculum (goal is a front end engineering job) paired with side lessons from my own experience along with a class project so at the end the students have a public thing on the Internet that they can point to and say "I built that".
The jury is still out if this will succeed or not but I hope that it does and if so it will likely be expanded beyond its pilot stage.
On the encouraging front, I've seen the following progress:
* The student got paying work doing some wordpress stuff on the side so a side gig! * The student got an Ubuntu based development environment up and running all on his own