Find a Mentor
Learn the responsibilities and qualities of a mentor and the difference between a mentor and a manager.
Role of the mentor
This course is a virtual guide, but the most successful programmers will have a real-life guide for the journey too. Such a guide or mentor will provide wisdom and counsel for us on our first programming job.
The mentor’s role is to do the following:
- Help us when we get stuck on the job. They’ve been programming long enough to have great problem-solving and debugging chops, so even when they don’t know all the answers, they can point out the next steps we should take.
- Help us with model behaviors and skills we want to learn. Time spent watching over their shoulder will inspire us to learn new programming tricks and new ways of thinking about our problem domain.
- Keep our career pointed in the right direction. They know how to get ahead in our company and advise us when opportunities to advance come up.
- Warn us of hazards specific to our company, like the programming screw-ups that can irk our manager. Our mentor is usually someone who has been around long enough to know the turf.
This mentor may be one person, or it could be several. For example, we might tag along with a senior programmer on our team but learn the political lay of the land from our manager.