The benefits of mentoring

I mentor the web team at work and recently I have also started mentoring a couple of students from the local university. I know its a cliché but when you have to show someone how to do something you have to know what you’re talking about and so being a mentor can be a great way of learning; either learning something new or learning something you thought you knew all about.

I try to not have all the answers, if I just give them away then I feel learning isn’t taking place – memorising is what’s happening. The goal is not to have all the answers because then you stop thinking, but to learn how to solve the problems. Mentoring means giving someone a place to try something while being supported and guided along the way.

Focussing my attentions on just a few things, for example how to avoid using magic strings or just focussing on 1 person at a time means they get more out of it. Of course the flip side to that is that you need to be careful not to seem to be showing favouritism. Nevertheless there are times when it is essential that you do focus on just one person, pair-programming is one way to achieve this and recently, at work, we have been having some success with informal pair-programming.

A few days ago (before the trouble with my hosting provider) I spent some time pair-programming with one of the developers, it can be quite hard to remain hands-off as I know what I want to do but that’s not the point, the point is to help the developer grow and that means experimenting, finding what works and what doesn’t. I will show them where to find answers, or places that I think are going to help but I will not simply dictate code as I feel there is no value in doing that. At the end of the session the developer had written some pretty slick code and our team had grown a bit stronger because he now knows how to deal with that type of code. It is also good for me to remember the problems I had when learning to do things. The first time I used version control I had to work it out for myself but doing so has given me a good understanding of the process, writing my first unit test was a big hurdle and took me months to do, there was no one there to help, but with a helping hand to show you past the tricky bits you can get up to speed on something really quickly.

Personally I would encourage people to find a mentor, someone who can help show them the ropes, and I would also suggest looking for ways to mentor others because it really helps, it helps them and it helps you – plus you get a warm feeling from knowing that you’re giving something back!