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welcome everyone thanks for coming to my talk quick note I had planned to thread
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a bunch of clothing related puns throughout this talk but darn I don't know if I would have been able to knit
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together okay here and talk about mentorship so instead allow me to introduce myself I work at a company
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called stitch fix my name is Jonathan Wallace at stitch fix we help our clients become their best selves best
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selves we are a personalized styling service and we do some cool stuff we do
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some cool stuff with machine learning and data science and we use some tools that you may be familiar with we use go
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react angular some rails some Ruby actually a lot of rails and a lot of
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Ruby and we're hiring so if you want to learn more about our company or what kind of things we do in the engineering
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department you can get in touch with me or you can come see us by our booth in the exhibit hall so today I'm here to
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share my thoughts about mentorship with you and I appreciate you coming this isn't a real specific talk but we'll be
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talking about techniques and strategies and philosophies that when employed will
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drastically accelerate your career and your skill growth the plan for today is
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to discuss first what exactly mentorship is and then we want to talk about why
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you might be interested in doing it and then we'll go into some details the how of good approaches and actual tactics to
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be effective so let's talk about the what mentorship can be formal you can be
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something that you do on a regular cadence it can be scheduled you can have 30 minute meetings every week or
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bi-weekly but it can also be something that is informal and intermittent it can
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be something that's ad-hoc where your mentee reaches out to you when they have something to talk about something that I
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think is very important for it to be effective is that it should be altruistic now it's possible your
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mentoring as part of your job so you are receiving some money along with that so technically you're getting paid but what
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I think is key here is that you are sincerely invested in the results of your mentee and how they
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do and how they grow so I think of that as being altruistic so it's not about
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the money you're sincerely invested despite what other motivators do are and that's really important if you are
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getting paid outside of a job it's probably not a mentorship relationship
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it's more like a coach or possibly some type of teacher and in when you're
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mentoring you're not focused on a particular oath in a particular skill it's a little bit broader than a little
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bit larger you're looking at the longer-term view so that leads me to
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talk about the minty and what they bring to the table and I think it's really important to realize that they bring the fuel for the relationship and they bring
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the spark but as the mentor your job is to be the accelerant you're accelerating
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their learning in their development and we'll talk about this more later as I think this is probably one of the most important aspects of mentorship and
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that's why it gets two animated gifs you're also taking the longer-term view
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of their career growth or their skill set that they're trying to grow your future focus for your mentee you have to
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have a vision you don't have to have a vision but it's nice to have a vision of where they might go in their career or where how
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they may grow their skill set it may not be the vision that they ultimately aligned with over the long haul but you're helping them develop their vision
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more quickly so let's get into the why why am I you want to do something like
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this one of the key aspects that that I found a lot of value in is it allowed me to practice my leadership skills in a
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very low stakes environment the consequences are low you'll get many opportunities to course-correct along
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the way catastrophic failure is very unlikely and this is a great opportunity
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to practice those leadership skills in the small the stakes are low you may lay
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out a plan of growth for your mentee let's say you're developing somebody who is new to rails and new to programming
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in general they may decide that you may sort of share out with them the specifics of how our industry is laid
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out in terms of career growth you could talk about a back-end developer a front-end developer a UX
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or maybe a UI designer and this person may indicate interest in one or the
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other let's say to decide to be a back-end developer and over time maybe a couple weeks they find that they're gravitating more towards the front-end
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that's okay that's an opportunity for you to reflect and reset your expectations as to what they may need to
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focus on you also get a portunities to
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practice your listening skills people rarely say exactly what they mean they tend to use a lot of words and go on and
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on and on when just a few may suffice this is pretty normal this is called casual conversation and it can be
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challenging to understand what somebody is trying to get what point they're trying to get to but this is often how knowledge is constructed for us as
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individuals we will practice as a mentor you will practice active listening
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skills and that will help you be more adept at identifying what someone's intent is and this is incredibly
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valuable no matter what sphere you use it in it's valuable whether you're speaking with executives peers
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co-workers family children all these things are incredibly uh when you can
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understand what somebody's trying to get to before they get there it allows you to be more effective in your
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communication which is key as I mentioned before casual conversations
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may be meandering as someone constructs their understanding of a new idea whether that's the framework an application a programming language
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construct a programming language in general and want to reason one reason for this is that inexperienced folks are
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often lack the vocabulary to know what they want they may know what they want I'm excuse me they may know what they
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want but they don't know exactly how to express it have you ever had a problem like that where you're trying to solve a
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problem and you want us to use a search engine to help you find the solution and you can't a few weeks ago I was
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attempting to automate the installation of a Linux distribution called Debian
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and I knew that this was possible and I found out how to do this for Red Hat rather relatively quickly but I
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struggled to find the exact phrase that would give me the answers I needed for Debian I searched for phrases like
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automated install or keyboard list install or keyboard list installation
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didn't have any luck and it took a couple of days spread out over time before I found that the correct phrase
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was unattended install that led me to something called proceed and Debian it was fantastic this is a problem that
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that all of us have experienced in software development and other fields just not knowing the right the right
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words another challenge is that inexperienced folks may not know what they don't know this is Donald Rumsfeld
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he was a secretary of defense in 2002 and he has a quote that's applicable here I'm not going to read it directly
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but he talked about the unknown unknowns and experience is what allows us to take
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those unknown unknowns and turned them into known unknown stead a good friend of mine
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Pamela Vickers gave an excellent talk about this in great detail called crossing the canyon of cognizance and as
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a mentor you're often assisting mentees and helping them turn those unknown
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unknowns into known unknowns and the way she phrased it was you helping folks get to conscious and competence where
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they're actually aware of what they don't know and that's incredibly important I highly recommend that talk
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by the way so mentoring others also allows you to refine your conceptual knowledge and strengthen your vocabulary
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around a particular domain so a mentee may ask a question where you think you know the answer and then when you go to explain it they become more confused and
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you may realize that your explanation or maybe your understanding is either not as refined as you would like or not as
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clear as you would like or maybe they're coming at it from a different angle and they have a different way of conceiving it and when you bridge that gap of
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Understanding between you two you will find that you've augmented your own understanding maybe you've added a new way to conceive of that particular topic
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additionally it's also possible and that they may use a different words than you expect as well so you're also expanding
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your vocabulary I like to think of this is is knowledge as being with this formless void that sum of all knowledge
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and what we're doing here collaboratively is turning that formless void into a labelled map it's also
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possible that they may ask about something which that you don't know anything about and you'll have to go do some research and it will inspire you to
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acquire some new knowledge and then next they can also inspire us with their
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efforts so they can remind us how how much work it takes to acquire that knowledge and for me as someone who's
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been involved in the community for a while and been a software developer few years I find that that's a good reminder to stay humble to realize how
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far I've come and recognize the effort that it takes to get there and appreciate that in others so let's talk
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about how and start getting into the details first I want talk about how you might find them in tea this is pretty
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straightforward whether you're into functional programming apprenticeship mentorship or any other topic there's a
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collection of folks on the internet who probably share that same interest so the key is to find those folks on the internet whether it's a slack
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organization a forum IRC channels and go to those places and be helpful in real
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life you can go to meetups and hackathons and find folks who are also getting into software development many
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years ago I attended a Startup Weekend and I remember meeting someone there and because this is my first weekend ever
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trying to write software little did I know that three or four years later I would be working with that person and I
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found it incredibly inspiring that he came to a startup weekend with no experience started teaching himself gave
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talks at local meetups and I was able to help him out along the way specifically on that weekend but later on we were
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working together so when you go to these places whether it's online or in real life you want to talk about your
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whatever you're passionate about maybe you can talk about mentorship and its value to you you can even present and maybe a local
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meetup or whatever your passion may be if it's not mentorship or something it's some other topic you just want to talk
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about that share your expertise share your challenges that's incredibly important to share where you're struggling and you'll find folks that if
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you're available and helpful to others you'll find that other folks will recommend you as a resource to potential
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mentees you want to develop your brand as a caring helpful person whether it's
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about a topic which you were passionate about or not you still want to develop that brand and that may also write how
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folks recommend prospective matiz that comes to you so another Avenue that I
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like to touch on is children volunteering you can go coach at a chess club the local chess club at a local
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school or robotics club or some type of athletics there's all of there's Boys and Girls Clubs there's numerous
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organizations out there that would be happy to have somebody come out and help out and mentoring younger children which
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is something I did when I was in college I coached soccer from kids youth three to
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three-year-olds and four-year-olds all the way up to you 19 and what you find is the challenges of communication across all boundaries and if you can
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communicate with a three-year-old who's still struggling to acquire language in general you can communicate with almost anyone so it's also laced low-stakes there's
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such great learning learn little engines of learning that they will they will
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course correct for you faster than you can for them but it gives you a great opportunity to practice that so one of
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the important things in my mind is that you want to let the mentee drive the relationship if you're driving the relationship that's probably not the
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right way to go about it so your min team may have objectives and goals or they may not and that is
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completely alright they may have a problem to talk through when you meet up but they may not and that's okay as well
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you don't have to be afraid to reach out in schedule there's one exception where I think it's okay you know that it's
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important to reach out in schedule and that's if you feel at the the relationship may be fading a little bit I when I was doing my research for this
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talk I came across this quote I thought it was an apt way to put it if you feel it's fading it's not a bad thing to reach out to hey looks like you may not
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be getting value or you're too busy and that gives them a chance to say hey I've been too busy I would still like to meet
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with you at a future date or maybe they'd say you know what yes I'm other obligations or other priorities have
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become a more overwhelming and I need to cut this short for a while and it gives you a way to provide some closure to
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that experience so when I gave my talk proposal I put some fancy terms in there
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one of those was inquiry based learning so the input the minty idea behind this is that the minty is driving but you're
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trying to keep them on the road and make sure they're not they don't get any accidents or travel down any dead ends and one way to do that is to follow this
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philosophy it's primarily a pedagogical method that was developed during the 60s
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as a response to the traditional forms of instruction where you sit down and you memorize a bunch of information and
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that that's the lift philosophy can be thought of as a constructivist
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philosophy and the idea is that for somebody to learn something you want them to generate information and make meaning of it based on their personal
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experiences to post a rote memorization this this philosophy indicates that the
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learner is actually participating in the process they're not just a a receptacle
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of information so it's very important to remember that inquiry-based learn as experiencial they should be
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experiencing things along the way and I find that experience is most often sticky and stays with somebody and has
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value when there's some effort that is expended to go along with it another
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thing you want to do is an inquiry-based is ask questions you can think about this as the Socratic method so let's say
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your mentee comes to you with a question about routes in rails so my first questions would be focused on
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determining exactly what their concern is is this an aesthetic concern about the using restful routing is it
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something specific that can we be solved with a visit to the guide the rails guides and the route section you want to
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determine exactly what their challenges and the goal is there by asking these questions is you're hoping to facilitate
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autonomy for your mentee and we want to get them to a place where they can take
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those unknowns unknowns and turn them into known unknowns on their own we want them to be autodidactic which is another
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way of saying that we want to do to be self teaching and neat it's less and less over time so let's talk about the
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four attributes of inquiry based learning the first is a new being art your field or in an endeavor your
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ability to distinguish signal from noise is often very challenging it hasn't yet been developed so because of this it is
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easy to be led astray and be confused so it's important that the information that they're learning is not deceptive
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another good friend of mine Kiley sadly gave an excellent talk about this called Amelia Bedelia learns to code and she
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talked about beginner confusions that are very common I remember when I first started learning rails this is something that I experienced and I struggled a
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distinguish between the executable Rake's command and the rails and the rails executable command and what those
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things did and I think now since then in more recent versions of rails we've
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tried to address this to some degree but that's one of the important things is that an inquiry-based for somebody to be
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driving that process forward that information be structured and as a mentor that's part of what we're doing
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we are provided we're guiding them through that structure and there was a
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great blog post in December of 2013 on the code fellows blog and this is a diagram you're not supposed to read it
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so don't stress out it but this is a diagram of everything that they indicated that you need to know to
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an effective full stack rails developer and I really want to reiterate this was in 2013 and that's change stinks has
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changed that's been four years since that's happened so they talk about why learning rails is hard and we can see
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why there's some value in some internship to help folks navigate this so how much time should someone spend
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when they're learning the command line this is the type of question that we as a mentor you will help in my opinion you
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want to make that very small you want to give them the basics if they're new to software development you may show them that the terminal just a couple of
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commands using like CD things of that nature and the reason the other third
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point is that you want to make sure that the knowledge that they have is transferable so if they're learning how to develop software they can use that in
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other languages if they're learning how to use the command line that still lasts forever so the fourth point is that in the real
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is that um you want that structured knowledge out to also be easily retrievable one of the values that I
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really appreciate about our community is that we do place a relatively high value on documentation it's not a hundred
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percent across-the-board but we have you have the fancy Rails guides which is something that I still use today so I
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wanted to get into specifics for doing inquiry based learning with your minty and walk through what that process might
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look like we want them to devise their own questions so again let's say we're
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mentoring someone in rails and they want to apply a discount to something that's a product and maybe they want to change
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the sales price and they come to to you asking for help modeling that I think
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you might want to talk about the different approaches with them you could talk about the value in having logic in
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the controller you can talk about the value and benefits of having the logic in the model maybe worth being called
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from the controller you could talk about the value of using callbacks or you could talk about the value using service objects the idea is by asking them
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questions you want to expose them to a bunch of ideas and then facilitate them going and doing some research on their own and when I say doing research it may
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be that they are going out and looking up blog post or maybe they're spiking out an approach and trying it out to see
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what it looks like and then after they've done that you want to come back to you and sort of explain what's going
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on and share that experience with you and you're hoping to find that they're able to
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their reasoning and their thought process through the research they've done this is a great opportunity to facilitate their growth with respect to
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how to find things on the internet because that may be challenging as well and then finally you want them to
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develop an opinion about it this is incredibly important because this is where they're really constructing their knowledge and finding a way to to
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imprint it in their brain and retain it and alone over there longer threshold of time you want them to make an argument
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that makes sense so this isn't prescriptive it's just a general guideline and there you can there can be
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loops in this where you cycle through the first couple of steps a couple of times that's normal so the next thing I
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want to talk about was differentiated learning and this is a fancy term for teachers that they use to talk about the
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fact that children learn in different ways which we can generalize into the fact that people learn in different ways
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people have different learning styles we all have different strengths and different weaknesses specifically we all
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have different zones of proximal development and this is another fancy term that was developed by a Russian
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named Lev Vygotsky and it is the difference between what a learner can do and what a what a learner can do without
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help so here's a great image that it shows that visually if you're a visual
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learner I wanted to make sure to share that on the outer ring we have what the learner may not be able to do yet maybe they can't develop facebook on their own
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and in the middle there's a set of tasks and challenges where a mentor a mentee
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may tackle those and they may need some help along the way and then in that inner circle you have where a learner
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can do complet ask on their own and our job is to fill our mentee with tasks and
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challenges and make sure they're focused on the right tasks and the right challenges that are in that middle tier
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we want to make sure these tasks are not too difficult we want to make sure they're not too easy we want them to be
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just right to facilitate their growth another thing to ask yourself about your
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mentee is whether they're an exploratory learner or they're somebody who likes to go through tutorials how much freedom do
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they need in their process that will change over time so this isn't a question that un's asked once and then
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it stays answered are they comfortable pairing would they prefer to work alone they like to think out loud these are
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all important questions to ask yourself when you're thinking about how you can most effectively help them and then I
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mentioned this earlier but I think it's the key thing this goes back to the key thing as the accelerant we're going to talk about morale maintenance I want to
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reinforce how important it is to know the signs of stress and to recognize when someone's ready to throw in the towel and give up and maybe need a
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reprieve or take a break I can't over stress the importance of this when knowing when you're mint you
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may need a boost a compliment or a sympathetic ear knowing when they're ready for a bigger challenge or when they're ready for constructive feedback
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is incredibly important so again you're the accelerant another way to think about this is that you may be the bellas
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to their fire remember they're this they are the fuel in the spark and we are providing air to help accelerate their
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growth if we give too much air if we give to challenges that are too large we can blow out that spark and burn them out right or if we don't give enough air
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we can starve them of the oxygen they need to be effective so you want to provide the right amount at the right time and that's sort of the thesis of
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this talk so I had some general mentored by someone in the cover as well I talked
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in the beginning about it being altruistic and you being sincerely invested in their in their goals and their efforts
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but I also think the relationship does need to be reciprocal and the reason why is that you're learning from them as
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well and if you're going to be consistently working with them over time there has to be some value that you're getting back out of that again you're
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giving without an expectation of receiving anything but if the relationship is going to last over the long haul you'll find that you're
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helping each other grow and it becomes a positive feedback loop one of the cool things about working with someone who is
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less experienced is that there's something called the beginner's mind and Richard schneemann
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recently recently wrote a blog post I think a week or so ago about a typo that has existed for four years I think he
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said it underwent over nineteen revisions and this wasn't some documentation he had written it had been
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seen by multiple editors and it was not caught it wasn't caught until someone new to software development was reading
00:22:00.629
this post and caught it in this blog post he goes in the details around it and it's a small typo but it really
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highlights the fact that the beginners are struggling to distinguish between signal noise and there have to focus
00:22:13.649
that focus that they bring to it is much higher level than we do typically as an experienced person we are taking
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shortcuts this is normal but it's something to remind us of the value of that focus that is important to think
00:22:26.159
about and I get value out of that and I find that to be reciprocal you also want
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to think about their work ethic that's very inspiring to me they're working through that signal noise again that's it's it's a monumental when you first
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get started if you haven't had the opportunity to mentor someone and you start doing it they will ask a lot of questions and you'll be like why are you
00:22:44.609
asking that question and then when you think about yeah of course that makes sense but a lot here's here's the interpretation that you might want to
00:22:50.039
take so they're constructing that knowledge regularly with your help and their efforts to do so are very
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inspiring they're struggling with the challenges of the magic phrase and the silly typos that when I first started do
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developing software and I did not have someone who's more experienced that you have to fight through on your own so as a mentor you can really greatly
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accelerate their growth so be inspired by the efforts and tenacity recognize their greatness for what it is let it
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motivate your efforts to be better and to do better also the cool another cool thing is that your mentees are going to explore more
00:23:21.989
technology then collectively than you can do on your own and you want to take advantage of that effort you wanted to
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allow it to inform your opinions and grow your respect for their efforts
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your guidance on dimensions to consider when they're exploring new technologies can help them out a great deal but
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they're going to come back and report back and say hey I went and investigated this new tool called jQuery and it's a lot better than script Acula to
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prototype or whatever the other the other javascript library was at the time when that first came out so one of my
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friends a person that I had mentored through his career transitioned the technology tells me all the time about
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the new stuff he's working with and his his career is now diverged that's a perfect example of facilitated his
00:24:03.719
growth into rails and Ruby and now he's regularly doing closure and functional programming and he comes
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back and shares a lot of that information with me and it additionally is he's also it's my professional
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network that's growing as well so that's another value that you can get out of that I think it's important to touch on
00:24:20.969
this you have to mentor the whole person we talked about you're not just focused on a particular skill is usually in the context of a larger picture and if
00:24:28.259
someone is stressed learning is impacted when you're meeting with your mentee you want to avoid
00:24:34.260
transactional relationships you want to avoid saying okay what's your current
00:24:39.420
problem when we solve that let's move on you have to think about the bigger picture maybe your mentee mentioned about some
00:24:45.120
problems that they were having with a significant other or maybe they had a problem with a pet or maybe they were
00:24:50.490
trying to sell their house all of these things will impact their ability to effectively grow because they can't
00:24:57.060
retain information when they're stressed out this is normal this is a picture of a zebrafish and there was a study that
00:25:04.440
some scientists did where they trained the zebrafish enough in a maze for 14 days with a food reward and then they
00:25:11.250
introduced some stress and then put them through their tests and they found that it graphically impaired their ability
00:25:16.890
their spatial and cued memory if you you're meant to use acquiring knowledge and then all sudden their stress you're
00:25:22.320
going to see their level backtrack a little bit and fall off where you may have expected to be in the past and that's normal so it's important to
00:25:28.830
realize that when you lend a sympathetic ear at those types of moments it can be drastically impactful in terms of their
00:25:34.440
ability to retain information and maybe the current session that you're working in which brings us to how do you do that
00:25:43.620
how do you make sure you're addressing those concerns we this is something that I've heard about in numerous different
00:25:48.780
avenues in my life where there was software development or coaching the concept of active listening and it's
00:25:54.090
important enough to reiterate if you have heard about it before we're going to go through those steps and the first thing is you want to pay attention and
00:26:00.480
this is something that I constantly remind myself when I'm having conversations with anyone whether it's my children or my wife or co-workers at
00:26:07.350
work that I want to make sure I'm looking at the speaker directly I'm framing myself to hear exactly what
00:26:13.350
they're saying and I'm trying to put aside my distracting thoughts so just like our mentees may be less effective
00:26:18.540
if they're stressed out the same thing applies to myself so I want to make sure I'm balanced before I go into a meeting
00:26:23.970
with someone if their environmental factors that are going to distract you
00:26:29.160
want to try to lessen those if you're a person who gets distracted by side conversations maybe not meet with them in a coffee shop you want to make sure
00:26:35.940
that you're able to focus on their body language and you want to show that you're listening so I find that focusing
00:26:42.060
on these notes as working working with folks and even though I've been doing this for four or five years or six years I still think
00:26:49.600
about go back to these notes to help me remind myself to do these things as I'm talking to them and I'm trying to use my
00:26:54.610
own body language to make sure I'm conveying to them that I'm paying attention I will not occasionally I'll make sure I
00:27:00.670
smile and I want to make sure my body posture is open to them I've worked in
00:27:07.480
some cramped rooms with folks at times what I've been mentoring them and I'll make sure that I'm able to scoop my
00:27:12.580
chair so that I'm facing them directly and I my shoulders are relaxed and I don't have my arms crossed even if it's
00:27:18.040
cold those little cues I think about the things that add up you know they add up over time and they make a big difference
00:27:23.830
you also want to encourage them to speak with vocal cues saying yes uh-huh indicates that you're listening and that
00:27:30.370
you're following along to what they're saying next you want to provide feedback
00:27:35.700
it's a good idea to reflect back to them what they're saying and summarize what I'm hearing is you're saying that you're
00:27:42.400
struggling with restful routes and you think you want to do this one off ad hoc route and let's talk about that or it
00:27:47.980
sounds like you're saying that you don't like model specs because of x y&z taking that opportunity to reflect back what
00:27:53.890
they're saying is helping them know what how they're communicating and it's giving them an opportunity to course-correct in the conversation and
00:28:01.150
you want to ask questions along the way to you know what do you mean when you say that is this exactly what you mean
00:28:08.080
when you're talking about the route problem that we're having if you summarize their their comments periodically it's a great idea note
00:28:14.770
you're not interrupting them though you're deferring judgment you're just you're just clarifying and trying to to
00:28:20.950
finesse what they're saying to their and their intent interrupting is a terrible idea and I think that in our career it's
00:28:28.210
very if there's a forcing function and that computers are very pedantic so we tend as software developers to
00:28:34.330
become more pedantic over time this is my personal hypothesis and so it's important to remember that when you're mentoring someone this is not the time
00:28:40.660
for patent for pedantic ISM you actually want to defer your judgment make sure you understand exactly what they're
00:28:46.630
saying if you're interrupting to say well at well actually it's not quite that you're you're limiting the full
00:28:53.920
understanding of their message and you're probably frustrating them along the so you want to make sure they finish saying what they need to say and that
00:29:00.610
that that before you're asking harder questions and you definitely don't to interrupt with counter-arguments so when
00:29:08.170
you do get the opportunity to provide feedback you want to be open candid and honest telling someone false
00:29:14.410
superlatives or false compliments is not as helpful as giving them the harder truth but you also want to make sure
00:29:21.070
you're when somebody is starting out they may make a lot of small mistakes they may confuse rails and rakes commands but there may be a bigger
00:29:28.360
foundational issue that's more important it's a good idea to address those in small amounts and and to balance out the
00:29:34.740
constructive criticism with compliments so you want to make sure too that you
00:29:40.150
assert your opinions respectfully while you're doing that there's the concept of the golden rule where you treat others
00:29:45.460
how you would like to be treated that works most the time but I like a rule of next level above that which is treat
00:29:51.610
them how they would like to be treated remember each person is individual we all have our different strengths and weaknesses the best way to know what
00:29:57.910
that is is to ask would you like some feedback on a scale of one to ten how constructive would you like me to be or
00:30:04.000
how candid would you like me to be and sometimes you can ask do you need me to help you solve this problem or would you
00:30:09.280
like me just to listen to and be sympathetic it's never hurts to be explicit about that type of stuff so
00:30:16.410
only the bonus round that's the that comes a lot of my stuff from the mentor perspective but I wanted to talk a little bit about being a mint tea to
00:30:24.520
fill it out so how do you find a mentor if you're looking for one the key thing here is to know what your own Streaks
00:30:30.160
strengths and weaknesses are it's the same side of the coin as a mentor how do
00:30:35.320
you find out what those are the key one key thing that you can do is you can ask right you can go and ask your friends
00:30:42.070
your family members your co-workers your peers hey how am i how am i doing as a manager how am i doing as a co-worker
00:30:47.710
what do you find most valuable about my work efforts and collect their feedback I did this recently and I reached out to
00:30:55.540
a bunch of folks and I was very impressed with the breadth of the feedback that I got but what was very
00:31:01.870
interesting to me is that there was consensus from all these folks who were not necessarily knew each other about
00:31:08.710
certain challenges they saw and certain drinks that they saw it was great to hear about the strengths it was also
00:31:14.289
humbling to hear about the the challenges and one of the things they said is hey you might spread yourself too thin sometimes I feel that I don't
00:31:20.320
get enough value or attention from you and so that's something I've got an
00:31:25.570
opportunity to work on so once you know yourself and you know where you want to work on whether you're trying to augment
00:31:30.940
your strengths or mitigate your weaknesses you want to make sure that you think of someone you respect as this
00:31:36.129
person a highly technical CTO or are you looking up to someone who is an individual contributor who's very
00:31:41.590
effective at what they do they're humble they're always knowledgeable they always have time for folks but then yet they somehow produce a great amount of work
00:31:47.830
at the same time are they a gregarious co-worker who can speak anybody and they
00:31:52.899
get to they grow they're their professional network with ease or they a project manager who ask excellent questions that keeps the work flowing
00:31:59.499
across multiple different teams and ensuring that everybody always has something important and relevant to do
00:32:04.809
once you think of that type of person it's very straightforward oh you have to do with ask you may ask for a formal
00:32:11.049
relationship you may ask you may want to start small and ask for help with a particular problem to sort of test the waters out you may ask for regular
00:32:18.159
meetings or you may be asked for ideas it's not a bad idea to start off with a compliment hey I really like how you do
00:32:23.320
XY and Z and I would like to learn more from you I'm having this problem you have some feedback for me on that that
00:32:29.470
can be an effective way to go next I
00:32:34.509
want to make sure to touch on remote mentoring because we work in the industry where we can do that and it's
00:32:40.840
very similar to what we a lot of things are very similar to already talked about but a couple of things are specific one
00:32:46.509
is that whenever you can prefer the higher fidelity communication medium if you can do video if you can meet in
00:32:51.729
person that's great if you can't try to do it over video chat if there's a lag in the audio and the video then you want
00:33:00.309
to just go to audio if you're working on code together you want to do some type of screen sharing that makes the
00:33:06.690
meetings a lot more effective and when you're talking especially if you're just talking over voice make sure to smile it
00:33:13.299
helps you enunciate and it comes across in the communication and then it's also one of those things where your physical
00:33:19.239
response will affect your mood so maybe if you weren't quite as excited about the process
00:33:24.440
four hands smiling will get you there over the course of the conversation the
00:33:29.750
next thing I want to point out is to make sure to maximize whatever program you're using to communicate with if you're communicating with them if you're
00:33:35.720
communicating over the phone get away from your computer so you can't be distracted I call this cheating on folks if I am working with somebody remotely
00:33:42.440
and I start typing or something like that I'm no longer giving them my full attention and I'm really not giving
00:33:47.900
doing justice to that communication that moment I'm not giving I'm not doing justice to them as a person so if you
00:33:54.680
are using a tool like Skype or Google Hangouts if you maximize that and maybe shut down notification that's a great
00:34:00.980
idea to stay more focused so early in the talk I left out one important reason
00:34:06.800
why you should mentor and I wanted to cover that before we wrapped up and this is your call to action so you're at a
00:34:15.260
rails conference and whether this is your first conference or your first rail conference or your tenth conference whether you have ten minutes of
00:34:22.220
experience or ten years of experience the growth of this particular community it was a great debt and immeasurable
00:34:27.920
debt to the open source software community there's many folks who put in many years of effort and you may not be
00:34:34.190
a person who's interested in doing contributing back to the community via software development or documentation
00:34:39.380
and that's okay one of things you can do is reach out and help out a ruby friend and you don't have to be an expert to do this you
00:34:46.130
don't have to be perfect at mentoring mentorship is a skill just like any other and it takes time to become more
00:34:51.590
adept at it so you can just be one step further beyond then the person that
00:34:57.200
you're mentoring and that works out okay as well so that's sort of wraps up my
00:35:02.810
talk I want to make sure to cover some credits and thanks real quick before I go I want to thank the for Athens coffee Club and Athens women in tech
00:35:08.750
organizations for allowing me to give earlier versions of this talk I want to thank stitch fix for allowing me to give
00:35:14.120
this talk as well and give me the time to work on it and friends and family who I cajoled and coerced into listening to me also give earlier versions of these
00:35:20.690
talks I've got a bunch of links here to folks the talks that I referenced the
00:35:26.780
blog posts that I referenced and some other resources that are referenced for material throughout does anybody have
00:35:32.270
any questions that's a great question so the question was what do I look for when I'm
00:35:37.620
looking at a company to see if they're supportive of mentorship is that a great way to say it okay yeah that's a great
00:35:42.780
question so I started at stitch fix last October and this is a sound that's going
00:35:49.050
to sound like I'm shilling a little bit but I got aligned with it I got super excited about it I look at their I look
00:35:54.750
at their their job descriptions and I don't just look at my particular job description the job that I'm interested
00:36:00.270
in at the time I look across all of them and read them and say okay what are they asking about were they talking about in
00:36:06.360
terms of their values are they valuing people first that's that's incredibly important to me and so that's how I
00:36:12.720
would choose a job I also do a little bit of stalking so if there's folks who
00:36:19.350
are on the careers page you can go check out their social profiles and determine
00:36:24.570
whether what kind of folks those folks are to see if it's going to line well and it doesn't mean that you have to
00:36:30.470
that necessarily you have to find the perfect fit you're in my opinion you're looking for openness and you're looking
00:36:35.940
for alignment just fine if it's the right job for you I heard of a company and Aflac organization that I'm a part
00:36:42.810
of where they were advertising for folks that you could come on board and you could be a they would train up junior
00:36:48.870
developers but it comes along with a contract and if you leave before the end of few years they want you to pay back a
00:36:56.070
certain amount of money and so in my mind this may be a perfectly acceptable Avenue for a junior developer if they
00:37:02.760
find that that needs that fits their context I don't know if they need it how hard how you know how dire their need is
00:37:08.490
for a position but in my mind the fact that they're saying hey there's a transactional aspect of this
00:37:13.680
relationship is a red flag and if I were in that position where I really needed a job and I needed to go into it I would at least go into it with eyes wide open
00:37:20.190
so those are the types of things I would look for that's a great question thank you did I answer your question okay cool a
00:37:26.160
question cool thanks again for coming I
00:37:31.320
really appreciate it again if you need reach out to me find me or find a cell over in the exhibit hall