How would you mentor new entrants into tech in general and programming in particular?
So on a different platform, I came across heated conversations about more experienced tech workers being unwilling to mentor new entrants. While I thought that was an unfair accusation, I thought to ask a wider audience their views and thoughts on mentoring upcommers. Do you mentor anyone? Were you mentored? How much impact does mentoring have on career growth?
I think mentoring is incredibly important-it's how the field.stays vital. I've done it in my career through code reviews, architecture discussions, pair programming, and for hobby stuff even just writing blog posts about how I got stuff to work.
I think giving them a small project tight out of the gate might be the best.
While not a tech mentor, I am a tech teacher and my students will rise to my expectations.
So I come from a 3rd world country where many people lack the basics. Covid-19 and remote work opened a lot of opportunities for local tech folks such that $15/hr immediately made you very comfortable here. This was after years of earning about $2k/yr from local employers. A lot of young locals are now rushing into tech with the aim of earning such "mouth watering" pay. However many are not willing to put in the work. They literally want you to plan a learning path for them, teach them, get a job for them and in some cases work that job for them
In our company mentoring was done by selecting easy bugs and letting the new hires solve them. And doing pair programming if they got stuck on something. Also one dev is given the responsability and time to mentor them for the first few months.