Is mentoring engineers under-hyped or under-valued? If you spend enough time working in engineering circles, you might hear about mentorship or onboarding experiences that were particularly amazing, or a miserable failure. If we step away from all the talk about perks on the first days at work, it’s easy to see how these pains have a long lasting effect on any dev team and business. Amplified by Covid-19, onboarding easily becomes an agonizing experience for remote devs.
Onboarding manifest – sincerely, all new hires
But onboarding and mentorship developer pains are real and they are trending. Some would even go as far off to debate whether to onboard junior developers or not, without the band-with for proper mentorship. On some level, you can kind of see where this is coming from. But would you really run a team without junior developers?
To do or not to do – hiring junior developers
Anyone in tech has felt the creeping imposter syndrome multiple times. Laurence Moroney, AI Lead at Google shared a post this week saying that it’s a mechanism we should embrace, it keeps us learning (and grounded).
But it does slow us down. Fighting imposter syndrome with a mentor can be a game changer, that someone who will help reflect reality back at you when you are doing the face-palm motion (or face-desk movement).
How to fight imposter syndrome
How do you fight impostor syndrome?
My ways are :
1. Know that the feeling is normal.
2. Remind yourself of all that you’ve accomplished.
3. Seek out a mentor.
4. Remember it’s OK not to know what you’re doing.
5. Expect initial failure.#100DaysOfCode #CodeNewbie— Ankur💚JavaScript (@TheAnkurTyagi) August 5, 2020
Onboarding curve balls
We’ve all had our shares of epic fails that have been painfully etched in our memory during our onboarding days. Admittedly – those are some ungraceful moments. Especially when we feel we’re apt to deal with our first tasks all by our self, eager to show some value, and then, a curve ball…
Breaking the app then crawling out of misery to ask for support
Google? Quora? Reddit? Stack overflow? It’s an overwhelming moment in time, what’s your go to place when diving into learning something from scratch? I work with a lot of developers and there is a huge variance. Starting with Google tends to be a common ground.
Your go-to help when learning something new?
The costs and barriers to good and even remote onboarding and mentoring have significantly shrunk, so why is it still under-valued, and such a painful process? A surprising connection between “Whiplash” and code from this week might hold an answer, and will make you want to mentor better.
One by us, because – well, why not?
Trending pains
So every company should want to level up their onboarding? A good onboarding process starts before you set foot in an office. If you recall a good experience, it means someone helped you find value super quickly in what you’re learning, planned your first few days and even weeks meticulously, and put in the effort to set you up for success. If not, you probably know this pain way too well.
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