So first things first, I think it’s important to get some definitions across. When I say that I’m “mentoring” someone, I don’t mean that I have some protégé following me around with a clipboard, finding wisdom in everything that I do.

That’d make for a pretty inefficient arrangement, considering how frequently I do something colossally stupid.

Instead, I mean that I dedicate a few hours each week to sync up with someone new to the field in order to offer support. This can manifest in a lot of different ways: sometimes I’m looking through their code reviews, sometimes I’m just giving advice, and sometimes they just want to ask a question or two. I make sure to warn them when I’m not confident about my answers, but the deal is that I am always willing to give an answer if they ask.

I believe that this part of the exchange is important. I am not infallible [citation needed], and I try to make that clear whenever I’m in a position of authority. I’m well into the Dunning-Kruger effect on a lot of topics, and I make an effort to avoid giving out definitive answers when I have no idea what I’m talking about.

However, if my mentees ask me to answer based on my experience, make an educated guess, or just take a random shot in the dark on something, they know that they will receive an answer. It may not be the right one (a lot of the time I’m not even close), but they always have access to my best attempt.

There are a few things that I’m trying to accomplish with this policy. And since we’re working in Markdown right now, we’ve got ourselves the following bulleted list:

• To make sure that I keep myself open to conversation about any topic they might want to discuss.
• To keep my mentees from ever feeling like they’re asking too many questions.
• To keep myself accustomed to admitting when I don’t know anything about a subject.

There’s more to mentoring than just being open for feedback, because of course there friggin’ is. This just scratches the surface of it. Hell, I barely know the surface of it (what else would you expect from an armchair psychologist on the internet?), and I’ve been making a legitimate effort to learn about it for a few years now. There are some other fun lessons like:

• How do I show my mentee how to solve a problem without just telling them the answer?
• What should I do if I think my mentee is doing something wrong?
• When is it okay to ask my mentee for feedback on how I’m doing? (Okay, that’s enough bulleted lists for now)

Figure it out

That’s right. Mentoring is hard, and I don’t know the answers. In fact, I’m willing to bet that nobody’s answer works perfectly. It’s going to be a long time before I feel confident in my ability to navigate situations like that without constantly feeling like I’m just improvising, and probably longer still before I know how to teach that to someone else. But if you really want to what half-baked opinions some amateur can cook up about stuff like this…

Then I’ll give it my best shot.