<story><title>Developers mentoring other developers: practices I&apos;ve seen work well</title><url>https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/developers-mentoring-other-developers/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aethr</author><text>A big mistake I made when I started mentoring other developers was making the answers to their questions too easy.&lt;p&gt;I spent a lot of my early career crawling around on linux servers trying to fix weird bugs in pretty typical web stacks. Later on, when other developers needed help diagnosing an issue on a server I would say something like &amp;quot;sounds like X problem, look at the log file in Y&amp;quot;. After several years of this, the same devs were still asking the same questions. I was helping them solve immediate problems quickly and easily, but I was &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; mentoring them.&lt;p&gt;Developers don&amp;#x27;t grow by being given the answers. They grow by trying things and experimenting and solving problems themselves. These are the skills and the lessons that will serve them well as they level up their career. Not giving them the answers but giving them the tools to find the answers.&lt;p&gt;These days, if there&amp;#x27;s no urgency, I would say something like &amp;quot;where are the places in the stack where a problem like that might occur, and what  can we do to narrow down the set of likely issues?&amp;quot; I might give them some ideas, but let them do most of the legwork.</text></comment>
<story><title>Developers mentoring other developers: practices I&apos;ve seen work well</title><url>https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/developers-mentoring-other-developers/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>roberta_welch</author><text>Imagine a mentor who belittles you, exaggerates your flaws, and brings up false accusations only in private, during one-on-one meetings, and only picks on you in secret. But outside they are very friendly.&lt;p&gt;I have had two such mentors.&lt;p&gt;I am extremely suspicious of any such one-on-one arrangements when there are no written records and opportunities for challenging unfair assessments formally. There has to be second opinions from disinterested parties.&lt;p&gt;Now imagine an office politician who relays to you bad things other people said about you, and relays to others bad things you said about them, and encourages retaliation between staff. I have worked with one such person. Again here, under the guise of mentorship of one-on-one feedback there is a lot of gossip being generated.&lt;p&gt;I can already predict that there will be more people who think they can mentor than people who think they can improve.</text></comment>