The answer to “Will you mentor me?” is no (2010)

> The double speak in your last paragraph undercut your post. :(

It's honestly not double-speak. I'm a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. Words are defined by how people use them. I consider it a waste of time to complain that "everyone is using a word wrong" as long as the meaning is clear, which it is in this case.

This is good advice because talk is very very cheap and by actually doing something you stand out of the crowd. But doing something in a field that is new to you can be daunting and learning on your own is still very inefficient. That is why those Stanford PhDs are still worth something even if all relevant information is online - they had good mentors.

Here are some tricks that I find make learning process less inefficient (as applied to programming of course):

- Formulate specific questions. This is kind of silly but many times you will have a feeling of being vaguely stuck and will just zone out instead of making progress. Instead try to precisely and succinctly formulate the problem. You can then search the Internet, ask a question on stackoverflow (or ask a mentor :) or you can look through some good open source code and see how the problem is solved there. Formulating the question focuses you. It is important to condense the question as much as you can because this way people will have to do less work to understand it and the probability that you will get an answer goes up.

- Find a way to test your stuff. I don't mean specifically unit tests, it can be "testing in production" with the real users (it is standard startup wisdom to get user feedback as quickly as possible) or at least solving toy problems with your code, or creating a benchmarking harness and seeing where the performance bottlenecks are. First, seeing that your stuff is actually working is incredibly motivating. Second, your taste (what the Ira Glass quote in the sibling comment talks about) is subjective and can mislead you (especially if you are a beginner) and making your code confront reality is much more objective and is going to uncover problems with your work that you weren't aware of and maybe show that some problem that you thought very important is actually not a problem at all.

- Watch programming streams. This thing is getting more popular these days. Much of mentoring consists of you observing how your mentor actually does stuff - how they approach problems and what are those little tricks that help them do the work - and then copying it. Watching people programming sounds silly but it is the way to observe those tricks if you are not lucky to have easy access to someone competent.

Insightful article on how mentors might perceive your actions

The only time you can really provide mentoring is if the person wants it and asks for it. It is not yet enough because the person may say they want it but have wrong impression of what it entails (like having expectation of some kind of magical step change in their life), but it is prerequisite IMO.

So, obviously, this answer is wrong beacuse that would mean that there cannot be any mentoring.

Another observation of mine is what is mentoring for. A person that isn't interested in learning something will not learn it no matter if the do or don't have a mentor. A person that wants to learn something will also learn it regardless of whether they have mentor.

The role of mentor is to expedite the process, help avoid dead ends or bad habits and generally make the end result better and faster than without mentor.

I can learn to be Enterprise Architect or play flute on my own, but having a mentor makes it easier for me.

I pay for a flautist to teach me but really I don't want him to teach me. I teach flute myself and the flautist is to point out errors, tips that help me learn it faster, his experience of how he learned it, all to let me reach goals that I set with less effort.

The problem people have is the moment they get a "teacher" they assume some kind of shared responsibility or even expectation that the student will somehow offload part of the effort onto the "teacher". That is simply wrong.

I think that advice is buried in the stories the article tells, and I wish the writer had made it more clear.

I spent quite a lot of time trying to help people who were asking for general advice, and my take is that very, very few of them actually did anything with it.

Soon, I realized that answering these question privately is a complete waste of time, and switched to answering them publicly. At least then if the person ignores it, it's still there for someone else to benefit from.

Eventually, I realized that all these questions have been answered hundreds or thousands of times in the same general ways, and that anyone who cared would just use Google and find all of them. The people who are now asking the question either lack the basic awareness to use Google, or think their situation is somehow special and only very pointed advice can help them. They're wrong, of course, which means you can't really help them.

Now, I only answer questions that I feel are actually unique somehow, or that I haven't answered in a while and just want to do a little good and maybe inspire some people.

In no circumstance do I react negatively to them. I just ignore questions that bother me, rather than tell them to "Just Google It" or whatever. If they haven't figured that out, my negativity won't actually help them or anyone else.