Mentor junior people

Florian Haas recently posted something on Twitter that is a good reminder for all of us in tech:

Hire. Junior. People.

— Florian Haas 🇪🇺 (@xahteiwi) May 19, 2020

His thread is all about a positive experience he had hiring a new junior developer. In addition to what he said, I’d like to emphasize that senior engineers have a duty to mentor junior engineers. This is further emphasized by Alice Goldfuss:

Mentoring junior engineers is part of a senior engineer's job. Making mistakes is part of everyone's.

— bletchley punk is a fullmetal engineer (@alicegoldfuss) December 22, 2017

My story

By pure chance, a manager reached out to me, asking me to help mentor an intern turned new-hire on her team. I immediately accepted and spoke with the developer soon after.

He had mentioned he was nervous about meeting me, he had never met an STSM before. He didn’t think he had much to talk about, we spoke for 80 minutes. He was feeling a bit stagnant in his career and didn’t know where to turn. I gave him multiple resources and steps to go forward.

Here’s what he emailed to me a few days after:

It was a great honor for me to talk with you last Friday. What a fantastic and mind-changing conversation! I would like to thank you again for your guidance and mentoring. I will keep working hard on direction as discussed and embrace new changes and challenges.

So, yeah, mentor junior people, too. It’ll make your day, like it made mine.

Image credit: https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2019/08/01/ask-the-trainer-what-is-the-best-way-to-identify-effective-mentors/