Why Should a Programmer be a Mentor?

Currently, mentoring is just beginning to develop. The idea of mentoring is to provide gratuitous assistance to the mentee, therefore, on the one hand, few highly qualified specialists are ready for this.

Why would anyone even need to look for a mentor?

They say that the right conversation clarifies the situation better than ten hours of searching the Internet. This applies to any topic, not just Tech. The task of a mentor is to help a person solve a certain problem and share not so much knowledge as experience.

Problems can be of a different nature:

• A mentor, as a person with extensive experience in a certain area, helps another to solve the problem in the least painful way in a reasonable time.
• Not all people come to Tech from a university, there are a great many self-taught people. It is difficult for such a person to start, he has no information about where to start, what to devote more time to, and where to get information. An hour of time is enough for a mentor to draw up a development plan for the mentee. It is important that the mentor already has exactly the experience that the mentee needs, he passes on his formula for success, which helps to master knowledge in the shortest possible time.

I have been a programmer for more than eight years and I have mentoring experience. I am ready to share my experience of mentoring and tell what it gave me:

• In one of the IT groups on the Telegram network, I saw an announcement: people who have lost their jobs outside of IT have a desire to retrain in IT. This service was looking for both mentors and students. Everything is free. I was offered 3 students, of which one student disappeared after the second conversation. Two really went according to the plan I proposed, and of them, only one found a job as a junior programmer.
• I had teaching experience in one of the online programming schools. And there I voluntarily accepted the role of a mentor. The students usually asked me simple questions between lessons.

What did it give me if everything was free of charge?

• Awareness of the fact that not everything in life needs to be paid for. You grow up to a high professional level and now you can afford a little charity.
• I want to do something good in life to make this world a little better. Mentoring is a good way to do this if you really have something to share.
• To look for the job you really want, you need to be able to express yourself. Mentoring is a great way to add a few lines to your resume. This will tell about your high communication and interpersonal skills, which will impress HR.
• At my current job, they know about my mentoring and, I see, that it has a positive effect on my work. A good employer likes when the staff has versatile personalities and holds on to such employees more strongly, which positively affects the salary level.
• Mentoring expands the network of acquaintances, and the more good connections, the more chances to achieve something more.
• Mentors' questions are usually simple, but they make you remember something forgotten once again. It helps to keep you professional.

Conclusions

You see, mentoring does not give money directly. But at the same time, it gives a lot of other things, for example, the feeling that you are making the world a little better.

Thanks for reading! If it helps to get a new mentor, I will be very happy.

Photo by Kenny Eliason, https://unsplash.com/photos/y_6rqStQBYQ