who is he and how can he help. My personal experience
Why is mentoring popular in IT today? Yes, it's simple. With a mentor, or tutor, you can achieve your goal much faster and with fewer losses. After all, he has already gone this way, made mistakes and now knows exactly how to do it better.
A mentor will help if you:
you are entering IT from another field and don’t know where to start;
have already established themselves as professionals, but are stuck in one place and don’t understand how to develop further;
need advice from an experienced specialist;
want to communicate with like-minded people.
I have been mentoring for many years now and it is thanks to this that I was able to create a strong team of developers that now works at PRAI. That is why I want to share how I work with mentees. I conditionally divide my mentees into three groups.
Without experience in IT: high school students, students
If we talk about children, then usually parents contact me. But I always ask the child to write to me independently. It seems like a small thing, but in fact it is a very important indicator. If a person who wants to learn cannot write to me independently, it immediately shows his lack of interest in the process, so I will never waste his and my time on lessons.
Personally, I entered IT on my own initiative, it was my hobby. I searched for information myself, read articles and documentation, watched training videos. I found it interesting. And it was this interest that helped me achieve certain results.
When I see that the mentee is interested, I give a difficult task. I will say right away that I am against smooth immersion. It creates the illusion that coding is simple and exciting, but this is not entirely true. In any project, at any stage, difficulties may arise, faced with which an unprepared person will give up. If a novice specialist understands at the start that programming is an eternal battle, then he will either immediately decide not to enter the profession, or will be ready for reality.
While the specialist is doing the test task, naturally I watch his work, answer any questions that arise. But at this level, to a greater extent I show how to independently search for information, how to read and apply it correctly, what to pay attention to.
If after the first difficult test task the person's ardor does not fade, we start working with such a specialist with pleasure and they automatically move on to the next level. This level implies a small base of knowledge and skills in a person.
There is some experience in the IT field: high school students, students, junior level specialists
These people have already studied programming, but do not yet have experience in product development. Usually, this stage is passed not only by those guys who have moved from the previous stage, but also by those who contact me themselves.
Since PRAI has established development standards, I ask everyone to take our internal conditional courses and demonstrate that the person has the required technology stack. At the same time, this is a test period when anyone can see the work on the project from the inside.
By joining a project that our current employees are working on, mentees learn the basics, languages, and learn to work in a team while completing small tasks. Let's say that at this stage we accept them into the family, support them, and help them in everything.
With sufficient experience in the IT field: middle and senior level specialists
If you think that a mentor is needed only to learn how to write code, you are mistaken. Programmers are creative people who are prone to constant learning. Usually, at the middle level, a specialist can already independently search for information that is interesting to him and solve non-standard problems. But here lies the problem, there are many materials on the Internet like “for beginners”, but it is almost impossible to find training in the nuances of solving complex problems. Sometimes, in order to understand the issue, you need to reread a lot of technical documentation.
In these cases, it would be a good idea for middles and seniors to get a mentor themselves. After all, he can suggest a shortcut to solving a problem, or give an idea of how to find this path. And this is saved useful time, which everyone lacks.
Interaction between specialists of this level is very useful both within the team and with outside specialists. After all, each of them simultaneously becomes both a mentor and a mentee.
In summary, I would like to note that mentoring is a cool and effective tool, but only for those who are ready to learn and work on themselves. A mentor is not a school teacher who forcibly puts knowledge into a person’s head and then checks it during tests. A mentor guides, shows the shortest path, but a person must go through it on their own.
