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Ask HN: How to find mentors?
145 points by trwawy11221122 on Dec 22, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 83 comments
How do you find mentors? I'm a 30 something engineer who has never had great technical mentors mostly because of working in startups with few experienced engineers. I've had many business people mentors over the years but not as many engineering mentors as I'd have liked.

So how does one go about finding mentors when you do not work closely with them? Is there a better strategy than simply reaching out on email/linkedin and hope for the best?




> How do you find mentors?

I go up to them, and I ask them.

And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude. People are usually really happy to talk about things they know a lot about, not just to sound smart, but because they really like to think about it, and you get to think about it when you hear yourself talking... I really enjoy ranting, and listening to rants. I learned a lot of CS by listening to hour-long rants at the cafeteria. Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.

Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.


> Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.

I swear fully half the really useful/interesting things I've learned have started with someone just infodumping on me IRL at some event.


> I go up to them

How do you find them to go up to them though?

Not sarcasm, genuine question. How do you find someone who a) you respect and could teach you things you're interested in, and b) has time for you.

I tried trawling through LinkedIn "to expand my network" but that's useless.

I tried attending meetups, that's only slightly less useless. Lots of cool people, no mentors though.

At work, it seems the people who could be a mentor are more senior and everyone wants them as the mentor.

And people who're on the same level often consider you as competition and it takes a lot of work to establish enough trust for truly candid communication.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Yea, I've gone up to a lot of people at work, outside of work, by cold emailing, etc. Most people are pleasant enough and will exchange a few emails, for example, but for the most part, I have never had extend beyond that. And some basically do not want to converse beyond being polite. The best success I've had is that I have attended courses at local universities why still working full-time, and by just showing up to professors' office hours is basically the only way I've gotten good mentorship.

I'm sort of mid-career now, and I just feel I have missed out on mentors outside of my very first job. I'm worried about it in general because I feel inadequate to mentor others.


> I'm sort of mid-career now, and I just feel I have missed out on mentors outside of my very first job. I'm worried about it in general because I feel inadequate to mentor others.

I've wanted a mentor for at least 7 years now, and I didn't find one.

If you're mid-career, you're probably perfect as a mentor for someone.

The question I have for a mentor is "how do I get to the next step?" -- and a person who is either on that step or recently left it would know. Or someone way more ahead who's introspective and remembers well -- but I'm okay with less.

I was never a better classroom teacher than on my 2nd year of university.

Everything was fresh to me, including why people don't get things the first time, because I'd only recently not got it the first time.


> How do you find them to go up to them though?

I keep them around.

They're like rare pokemons.

Some meetup groups are better than others.

Getting mentorship through work: There are two ways I can think of. 1) Pick a job so that you specifically end up working with/under the person you wish as your mentor. There's simply no way around getting it, because you'll just suck up whatever ideas and opinions they have. 2) If your workplace has a "guild" where the obsessed can meet; this is, in my sample size = 1 experience, most often done half-assed.


Thanks for the advice.

>> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

This is so true. I do want to work mostly on distributed systems but every once in a while I get AI envy seeing all the amazing progress being made in the field.


As a suggestion for finding mentors, maybe just track down some senior software engineers at OpenAI and the like and drop them a cold email explaining that you're curious and would love some time to chat about how <some new tool they're working on> works?

If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat. You lose nothing by asking, and if someone's "offended" or something because they received a cold email... well, that's their problem.

That's the start of a mentoring relationship. The first two probably won't be good AI mentors but you'll have learned something cool, and maybe they're curious about distributed systems. But maybe the second or third or fourth time you repeat this process, you find someone you really click with.


> If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat.

I've been on the receiving end of those emails a small handful of times due to a previous job, and I've been thrilled to receive them every time. While none of them turned into a longer-term relationship, I would have been happy if they had. I think in general, (non-famous) people are less busy than people assume and would love to talk about things they're passionate about. Don't track down the project lead; instead go talk to the anonymous people a step or two down the ladder.


> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

This is truly the most important question and one that only you can answer for yourself, unfortunately.


> And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude.

I strongly believe this is entirely what is necessary for the average person to be a good hacker. Put in effort to understand. The rest often comes naturally.


https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/

It's not mentoring per se, but the list of people I speak with ranges from CS students asking for advice regarding their career to industry veterans. Sometimes we talk only once, but some of these relationships have lasted for more than a year so far. The latter are rare, still fairly casual.

I'm in the same boat as you, but I'm trying to focus a bit more on the product/business side of things. I've been mentoring engineers for 10+ years (and introduced the practice to several orgs). The irony is that I've ben struggling with finding a mentor for myself. The impromptu way seems to work better.

Also I second the comment made my sshine: "I go up to them, and I ask them." I sometimes reach out to people in my area just to learn about their work. We generally meet in person. This has been a bit harder since I left London, where it's hard to avoid interactions that are _not_ networking. But it's still doable even in my current location.


Unrelated, but I'm really enjoying Ensō at the moment. It seems like a great tool, something that I'll keep using years from now. Thank you!


This looks great. Thanks! I should also put up something like this.


Took me 10 years but I found two in my life.

I randomly found one in his only appearance at a ruby meetup, giving a presentation that changed my life, opened me to the community where I met a now dear friend who also became my mentor.

I wish I had a suggestion, it seems like it just happened randomly, even though I was searching for ages.


It wasn't random. You went to conferences and introduced yourself to someone who gave a presentation that impacted you.


I guess, my point in "random" is that I searched for years and then it happened on a conference where I wasn't really looking for one (although the conference was indeed very interesting)


> mostly because of working in startups with few experienced engineers

This is an under-appreciated cost of working at startups. It's fun to be the big fish in the pond, but it means that you have less access to resources for this sort of thing.

You've identified something that you think is high value to you, and should reasonably be supplied by your employer as part of your job -- access to a mentor. This is something to consider when looking at jobs.


It doesn't have to be this way does it ?

Startups don't have to comprise merely junior employees. Sure, the senior employees rarely have a skill-for-skill match to your profile. Startups can't afford that kind of redundancy.

But, any competent startup should have a good balance of senior 'ship steerers & NO men' alongside dynamic starry eyed juniors. For product & work-life mentorship, you don't need a technical peer as your mentor. So any senior leader in your startup will do.

For technical mentorship, I do think it is a bad idea to join a startup as your first company. Kind of leaves you without reference. Some avenues for technical mentorship that have worked for people around me are:

1. Universities sometimes have alumni mentorship programs

2. If you worked in a lab in undergrad, your professor or his ex-PhDs are great references

3. Friend of a friend, friend of family. 2 degrees of separation casts a wide net that often catches 1 person who is a good match.

4. If you can find a good technical mentor who just doesn't have enough time, then getting access to their wikis or favorite blogs also works. Sometimes the hardest part is understanding workflows and curating the right information. If someone has already laid it out for you to read, then it's about separating the wheat from the chaff.


Tbf, it seems this could happen anywhere. Imo, seems it would be more prevalent in bigger, more established businesses where you’re further away from the core of the technology. I’ve done consulting and seen tons of bad practices. This is ofc selection bias though, lol.

I totally get what you’re saying though. It can be a situation of the blind leading the blind.


+1

I work at a bigcorp and have had great mentors, and now that I'm an old fart, I try my best to mentor others. It's a huge plus to have access to a large community of talented engineers


1. Look around for people you respect/admire. 2. Just ask.

A lot of people will gladly help but don't do it because most people in general react badly to unsolicited advice. I have been trying to help people in the past but I wised up and now I am only offering help if they ask for it.


What do you expect from a mentor? For example, if you work with other engineers (preferably, experienced) in the same codebase on the same project, won't code reviews – a routine practice that a team ought to have anyway — count as continuous mentorship? Won't tech talks about ideas relevant for your field from various conferences count as mentorship? Don't books, blogs, or even tweets/toots by people you look up to count as mentorship?


Mentorship and code review is not just about getting the answer for writing better code or reading generic blog or books.

It's about someone with wisdom knowing your particular context and guiding and dialoguing on questions like

- should I learn this tool/lang/framework

- is this general approach feasible for my problem?

- I'm thinking of accepting a job at $corp, am I missing a blindspot based on culture or some other factor


Ideally yes. But I work with other engineers who are much less experienced than I am. The other experienced engineers work on different projects.


A few steps

1. Meet people smarter than you, could be through meetups or discord etc. The more people you meet, the higher chance of someone you'd meet someone you'd want as a mentor

2. Being active as a mentee. Most people love mentoring but it's a two way street. If you don't make yourself available to be mentored you waste everyone's time

3. Show initiative as a mentee. Ask good questions and problems your solving related to your mentors expertise

Having had a lot of great amazing mentors in my life, and mentored just as many.

In my experience if you don't put yourself out there to be mentored you won't get anywhere. Most of my mentors have been through city slack channels, work, and meetup. Alot of my original mentors actually ask me advice having seen my career progression over time

I've had people ask me to mentor them but they expected me to magically transfer all my knowledge to them, suffice to say I didn't waste any time with them . When I found an amazing mentee I went out of my way to help them, and I got to see their progress and growth overtime. That was super rewarding


Is a "city slack" something like a Slack instance operated by your city hall, or something unofficial that is used by the residents of your city?


I live in Portland and there's a "PDX Startups" Slack community here that grew out of a similarly-named #pdxtech channel on IRC. I assume other midsized cities would be similar.


Once you identify what you need - you must also identify what the mentor will get out of the relationship. Primarily the mentor gets to feel high-value and appreciated. They may also be interested in hiring you or people you know. They may want to leverage your ideas or time - particularly on things that are not worth their time but are worth exploring. The relationship should not be exploitative, but should be mutually beneficial. You can indicate your value to them by doing some homework. Cold email is great, but have a specific question - "I'm interested in AI but having a hard time finding the right role to transition into the field - do you see good areas for me to apply my loosely related skill-set and get a toe-hold?".


Nearly 10 years ago my manager suggested we get a mentor so I chose a great Java developer in our team (I didn't have much OO experience) and wanted to learn about dependency injection and TDD and all that stuff. A couple of weeks later this great dev was pushed out / fired over some argument with a manager, so that ended pretty quickly! I had a great mentor when I started my last job although he left pretty quickly it was probably him that gave me the confidence to move from developer to tech arch. I hope it wasn't me that made them leave :-)


Mentors usually transcend a single role at a single company. If your mentorship ended when they left the company, it wasn't mentorship, it was training.


I think that bar is too high and you can still call this mentorship. It would be exceedingly rare to find someone who is going to mentor someone for free across multiple companies. When I mentor vs. train, I care a bit more, follow up more, the scope is broader, more personal, etc., but I'm not adopting you for life.


I was in a similar position for years. Paying for weekly session with someone can start you off, but its difficult.

Filtering for people who are: - good engineers - enjoy helping people - are good at helping people - have the time to help people - are mature enough to appreciate the self development value of mentoring someone else (its a great way to discover ones own weaknesses)

Leaves you with a very small pool of people. My advice is to consider people in areas that might not fit your mental image of what a mentor looks like, so someone younger than you for example.


>> so someone younger than you for example

That has been my approach so far but it feels like that we've sort of taught each other most of what our individual strengths were.


I have benefitted a great deal from alternating between startups and larger, more established companies in the course of my career. Highly recommend seeking out a position with a company that is working on something you find compelling, where they have staff who have more depth of experience than you do.


Not a direct answer to your question but related.

In your career there are periods of reaping and sowing, in various ways. In terms of mentorship, you are reaping when you are surrounded by people more senior than you, and you are sowing when you are the most senior one.

My experience has mainly been in top companies where there were always more senior people to learn from. Then I did a 2 year startup stint and had nobody to learn from (but had plenty to teach)

I think you are seeing this dynamic. Your best opportunity for mentorship is at work and you are recognizing that startup life doesn't give you that. If you are craving growth / mentorship, it may be a signal to look for a situation (big company) that can readily give you that to reap. After a few years, you can go back to sowing in startups at a higher level.


Unfortunately I've had the opposite experience, so I worry my help won't be particularly helpful.

Almost every great mentor I've found was through work. Teammates that I would gravitate towards, usually because I was stumped on something.

Eventually they'd have something for me; then we have this sort of paired-mentoring thing going

A suitable stand-in would be open source projects for things you're interested in. For me, it's been Ansible -- particularly roles (reusable tasks) for it.

Get your hands dirty with something. The important part in finding a good mentor is being teachable

Tell 'them' (rather often a vague audience) what you're trying to do, how you're going about it, and how it's different from what you expect.

If things are presented well I've found people are usually eager to help


I'm a bit younger, working as a Software Engineer for a startup. I'm building my own projects to move towards them in the future as a real startup when it starts making money.

I don't have a mentor. I was thinking about it, but for me being active on websites connected with my lifestyle and following their valuable people in my topics: startups, technology, and building a successful business became a great way to improve every day.

For me these sites are Twitter, IndieHackers, HackerNews, ProductHunt, BetaList. I find there is so much precious content, better than reading some old blog posts or forums.

I can live day by day, following their ups and downs. I can actively comment on their work and ask questions. That's a hidden mentoring for me.


> mostly because of working in startups with few experienced engineers

Search one with experienced engineers then (?).

If you don't contemplate a change of workplace then I guess you shouldn't depend on people. Read books extensively, try to apply, see what works and what doesn't.


>>Search one with experienced engineers then (?).

That is the plan but that's a much slower process because of vesting, intertia etc.


I've usually found my mentors at work in the past, but you mentioned that your opportunities are limited in your startup. I've mentored many people myself and since I left my job at Amazon, I've been mentoring on mentorcruise.com. There are a few other platforms that do it as well. Yes, it costs money but it's an easy way to test-drive multiple mentors.

Regardless of how you find the mentor, the key is to make sure the relationship is a good match. It's easy to get caught up trying to work with the "smartest" person. But, you want a mentor you can feel at ease with.


Everytime I find myself trying to break down what I want from a mentor, I discover it's just a gaping hole in my heart from effectively being my own father and teaching myself how to exist, and then I get sad

I'm being serious though is the non-obvious part, I'm not making a quip. A mentor to me is someone who isn't teaching me "how" or even teaching me "why", they are teaching me "hmm"

I'm in my mid 40s and I try to remain receptive that a me from 20 years ago is looking for me now, and try to pay backwards what I couldn't steal forwards


You might want to find a platform for discovering mentors, something like MentorCruise.

You can find and discover mentors, and vet them via their profile or their LinkedIn (if linked). Normally you get a free session as well to get to know them.

I've mentored on there quite a bit and I think its a great platform.

Website: https://mentorcruise.com

My mentoring link: https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/jackgardner/


Your states' Professional Engineering Licensing agency should have continuing education requirements[1]. You can meet other professional engineers in those courses. I'm surprised you didn't make friends with other engineers during your studies.

For example, here is the information for my home state of Indiana:

[1] https://www.in.gov/pla/professions/engineering-home/engineer...


If you’ve been working in startups 10+ years, the inexperienced developers you worked with at the start of your career may now be very knowledgable, and mutual mentorship may be possible.


Find someone who is really good at what they do and work for them for cheap. Or help them out in any way you can.

Relationships are a trade. Mentorship is a trade of guidance for volunteership.


- Reach out and ask external and internal.

- Go to other teams and build relationships and ask for mentorship.

- It's your team's more senior members explicit responsibility to mentor you.

- Ask your company what they offer for training and mentoring.

- I _think_ some people charge $0 on mentorcruise.com.

Not having technical mentors really hold me back from getting the staff/principal level so as a manager now (one reason I switched but not the main one) I push hard for to enable mentoring for my teams and the org. Push hard to find one.


Thanks for the advice. Being stuck in roughly my current skill level is why I want to make more connections with people more experienced / senior to me. I have poor management skills and that doesn't look like a path I'd do well on.


Happy to chat if you're looking for any support or advice.


I found mine by fixing his computer for free. He has a small business selling to the agriculture industry. When he asked for payment, I was more interested in the story of his business and how he made success. I never took payment and we ended up doing some large CCTV installations while he just wore the "business man" hat, I did all the tech and learned business vocab.

Have something to offer, be genuinely interested and it will happen. Don't be afraid to ask.


You would not. Experts will not spend time mentoring random people for free. In the past, mentorship or apprenticeships were provided in exchange for work. You might find someone willing to give you pointers if you start contributing to open source, but otherwise you need to learn yourself. You might pay a professional coach/therapist to help you on a personal/career level, but I would not expect anything from strangers for free.


I've written about how to ask for help: https://play.teod.eu/interaction-value-differential/

I'm going to assume you don't have people on your team / in your organization you can learn from.

In short, I'd:

1. Make something that reflects the things that I'm curious to learn

2. Then ask specific people for specific advice about the thing I've made.


OP I'm in the exact boat. I'm in my 30s, been in startups for the entire time. Although I'm a go getter and very resourceful individual, I feel like I've made every single mistake that may have been avoided if I talked to someone that was in my shoes before.

That being said I don't regret anything at all.

If you're looking for someone to trade notes I'd happy to hop on a call and see where it goes.


thank you! I'll reach out.


I really enjoy using Mentorcuise.com, both as a mentor and as mentee. It's great to have mentors outside your own organization.


Think you have a typo there https://mentorcruise.com


When working as a junior dev in title I had a designated "mentor" to work with/direct questions towards. I'm more a believer in the stance of "everyone has something to teach" and just try to learn things from whoever, whenever possible - but also understand this is somewhat a cop out for the original question


Best way to do this for startups who want to reach product market fit ASAP is Sparrow (https://sparrowstartup.com/).

Many YC founders have used them before. It works because all of their mentors/coaches have built 7-8 figure businesses themselves.


ADPList is one of platform for learning from mentor easily

feel free to use my referral links to signup https://adplist.org/invite/111309

reaching out to targeted people (eg. engineer working in your domain interest) in HN community also works :)


Cool. Was just going to say that something like that should be made if doesn't exist.


tbh I believe that people seek mentors to partake in some kind of social circle jerking rather than to do deep thought and the actual work. don't look up to them too much, the best insights I got was reading widely and doing deep work.


There's the Emacs Buddy initiative for students and explorers of Emacs.

https://github.com/ag91/emacs-buddy


Previous discussions - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mentor

Not all results match


well this is embarrassing.

For others reading, this is a Ask HN on the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400288


> well this is embarrassing

No worries. I tried to only add more content :-)


https://old.reddit.com/r/mentors/


https://mentoring-club.com/


Check out https://www.mentordial.com


there's important professional mentoring which addresses people/org/mgmt problems, I suspect there might be other good resources on higher-level software eng skills (architecture, refactoring, code organization) - appreciate if someone wants to share some!


Find some source code you like and reach out to the authors/get involved in the projects.


You don't find good mentors, good mentors find you.

I have had multiple good mentors in my career (both student and work) and I have been an attentive mentor to three people in my life.

Your mentors choose you, and it is wrong to think of mentors as ideas/advice machine. Mentors mingle with you depending on your personality, taste, potential, current level, etc.

Be yourself. Put yourself in situations and locations where you are more likely to cross paths with potential mentors. Communicate with people more. If you are eyeing someone specific, let them know of your existence, interests. And ask them advice on something specific. Keep the connection if the other party is willing.

Mentorship relations that form and evolve naturally are the best ones.

And mentorship relations are not one-size fits all. Some mentors are more attentive and more engaging than others. Some relations last for life, some for months. No kind is inherently better than the other.

tl;dr: be in places together with interesting people (fully online forums count, too). Ask for advice. Keep the connection. Let a relation form automatically.


I’ve been trying to meet people outside of my company, i’d be down for a chat.


Is there any money involved? Would the protege pick up stuff for the mentor?


no. actually engaging with someone who wants to learn is a huge reward in and of itself. and it makes you feel like the last 40 years wasn't necessarily just a waste of time treading water.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zk32-jUpXs


you can find mentors on MentorColor https://mentorcolor.org


You insult by calling us boomers, but yet you want to find mentors. Please watch and consider. https://youtu.be/VC923Z4x8YQ


https://vektor.ai/ is an excellent platform for that!


Just curious, does anyone know why majority of the mentors signed up seem to be of Russian descent on this site? (at least going by the full names)


From LinkedIn it looks like both cofounders and half of the employees are Russian or at least Eastern European, so I imagine their network of mentors is seeded with friends-of-friends, or maybe they have ties to university programs or alumni networks in Eastern Europe.


Cultural maybe? With the relative VC disparity US tech is biased toward shipping fast in framework of the week for capital... perhaps Eastern Euro developers are more craft-oriented?


You might be interested in https://www.codementor.io/ but it costs money.


You should try SharpestMinds - https://www.sharpestminds.com

Our mentors are mostly in the data science world, but many are senior software engineers.

Most of our mentees are 1st time job seekers (who appreciate our ISA model), but we did just launch more flexible payment options (e.g. pay by the hour) for folks like you!

Though you do have to pay, mentorships on SM often result in long-term relationships

Disclaimer: I run the company




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