Yes, as a volunteer mentor at Defy Ventures [defyventures.org].
They help formerly-incarcerated people with their entrepreneurial goals. Highly recommend volunteering there if they have presence in your area.
Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#82I mentor a young guy who came to Denmark as a refugee a few years ago, we met through the mentor program at the Danish Refugee Council. After two years of courses in math, physics, English, biology and Danish he finally got accepted into university and has his first day today studying robotics. Signed up to help out at http://www.hackyourfuture.net/ as well, seems like an amazing project.
Did you speak English, or Danish?
I signed up to teach some programming to children in England, but then got a job in Copenhagen before starting. It will be years before my Danish is good enough to understand children in a classroom.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#83Some countries have youth entrepreneurship programmes – in Sweden, at secondary school (15-18), some programmes have a youth entrepreneurship course where students get to run a business over the course of a year. These microcompanies generally have an "advisor", who generally have experience running a company. I have been an advisor for two groups of students over my course of time – and I must say that it has been a learning experience that feels as big for me as it was for them.
Further, one should not underestimate all micro-mentoring that occurs when helping young talents in ones field.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#84No, but I'd like to.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#85Constantly. I was the chair of an student development team that runs AI Tournaments (http://siggame.io/). We get a constant stream of freshmen and most of them are very new with programming. I don't think our organization would survive if we didn't mentor new people. Since graduating I still mentor people in programming, resume building and other things.
I do have my work cut out for me though since they are usually still students.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#86I do some paid mentoring. I don't need the money, but I insist people pay to confirm their commitment, and ensure I am not wasting my time. It's a policy I recommend.
How did I get started? I was asked if I would agree to it. As a former CTO and engineering manager with 40 years experience on very large projects in commerce and industry, I offer a different perspective and level of experience.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#87No, but I'd like to.
Me too. Maybe this is a good opportunity for somebody to plug their tutoring-as-a-service platform?
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#88About 3 years ago now (in 2014, time flies) I had two past students who had graduated from our community college and then gone on to get their Bachelors in Computer Science who hadn't been able to find jobs after graduating and that had been maybe in 2010/2011 or so. I worked with one in the Spring and then the other during the Fall semester.
They each were very much at a beginner level so I essentially started providing them with books out of my library and having them work through those and me providing lots of feedback to them and guiding them up in their skills (starting with HTML, CSS and working up to JavaScript and modern PHP programming, with things like Composer/Packagist and new frameworks like Laravel coming into the conversations and also trying to introduce them to other needed developer skills like Git/Github that would help make them employable).
In each case they were volunteering for that semester with my small Online Services department of one (me), so my main goal was building up their skills so they could be marketable next time they started applying for positions and I wasn't trying to use them for just building things I needed to build (if anything, I spent quite a bit of one on one time with them and took them out to lunch most of the days they spent with me a few times each week).
My work at the time was a bit all over the place so I wasn't doing a ton of development myself but I had been adding in a lot of these skills too so it was good to review with them and share what I had learned which in also helped reinforce my own knowledge too.
Kind of in the middle of the semester and then toward the end I gave them a realistic mini-project or two that they could work through for the college that way they can have something to point to that they had done (one of the things I remember sharing with each of them is that in an interview it's really nice to be able to point out specific stories/scenarios/projects that you've worked on to share).
Locally those jobs are pretty rare, but luckily the first guy was able to apply for a job that had come up just a month or so after the Spring semester and get one of the good local jobs in web development. For the second guy it took a little longer, but he ended up being able to get a position in San Diego and he and his wife moved up there (his wife needed to transfer to another school for her work, but I think it at all panned out for them).
I rarely get to talk with anyone else locally about what I do, so in that way it's pretty lonely so when I do have someone locally that's interested in programming/development it's always nice to share and help them out.
It's hard to keep up on an ongoing basis since it is pretty energy intensive, but it's definitely nice/rewarding when you do have good people to mentor.
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#89I 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.
I think "no one really knows what they are doing" is repeated too often and has more or less become meaningless. After are, there are people out there who know what they're doing.
A better way to phrase it is "no one really has all the answers" or "everyone is making their way".
Re: Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work?
#90I would love to and have looked briefly for opportunities. I'd like to do video/screensharing mentoring for Rails pro bono. If anyone has suggestions, I'm interested.