
The answer to “Will you mentor me?” is no (2010) - brudgers
http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-will-you-mentor-me-is.html
======
felipemnoa
This is nice but I like this advice much better:

Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish
someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we
have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make
stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but
it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still
killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never
get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting,
creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this
special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are
just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal
and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a
deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going
through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be
as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than
anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile.
You’ve just gotta fight your way through. <

~~~
phaus
> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

On the whole, I agree with his sentiment that hard work will get you success,
but the idea he magically started out with some kind of innate talent for
telling whether or not things are good is the same type of illogical thinking
he's talking about being discouraging to beginners.

~~~
simonh
I think you're interpreting 'good taste' too narrowly. A sense of the value of
things is what motivates people to want to produce them. So if you value nice
things enough to want to make more of them, that's 'good taste'. He's not
saying taste is an immutable attribute that cannot be refined.

He's not writing an essay on the relationship between taste, skill and
creativity and how they feed back into each other. I think he's just saying
stick in there. It's tough for everyone in the beginning, and this is one
reason why.

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devxpy
The most relatable piece of this article, as a college kid in Bangalore, is
this

> For some reason Bangalore is crawling with people who first want to form a
> community and then start learning/working/whatever. These efforts almost
> invariably peter out uselessly. First do the work. Then if you feel like
> "communing" talk to others who are also working hard.

~~~
wsxcde
As someone below noted, there's nothing Bangalore-specific about this. This is
coming from a native Bangalorean who moved away about eight years ago.

It's just human nature to want to sit around and chat rather than actually
spend hours of your time on hard work which may or may not pan out into
something useful.

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wehrkeoruw
It's gatekeeping, isn't it (in a good way)? Demonstrating you give a shit
(rather than saying it) goes a long way.

I went to a meetup around where I live that was meant for developers on my
area. What ended up happening was half the group were practicing developers
who wanted to socialize a bit more, and the other half were people who were
"super passionate" about programming and wanted to talk nonstop about their
ideas. Unfortunately I got stuck with the latter half, due to seating, so I
had to field all kinds of "Do you think this is a good idea?" questions the
whole time. It sucked.

~~~
povertyworld
Sounds like every IRC channel ever. The topic is some open source project or
programming language, but eventually it just becomes a clique of regulars who
stopped caring about the topic a long time ago, and now just tell people who
want to discuss it to go read the manual.

~~~
toast0
I mean, we're mostly all programming because it's interesting. Answering the
same questions over and over isn't interesting, that's why it's in the manual.
Asking an interesting question will usually get an interesting result.

For example, I tried X, the manual said it should do Y, but Z happened
instead, what's going on?

~~~
draugadrotten
> Answering the same questions over and over isn't interesting, that's why
> it's in the manual.

I have mentored people for many years and I recognise what you are saying
here.

This is the part where the person being mentored have to do their homework
first. If you want to have useful mentoring advise, you should read books,
experiment and even google first. Asking stupid questions (lack of insight)
are okey, but asking simple questions (lack of research) is just lazy.

As a mentor, you need to move on to mentor people who you find it interesting
to mentor. You are usually not forced to mentor someone, it is your choice. So
choose wisely. When you find someone who is thirsty for your knowledge, the
mentoring process is very rewarding. It is like being an intellectual parent.
You help someone grow, you watch them excel and you feel pride. You grow
yourself from the experience.

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timoth3y
There has been a significant devaluation of the term "mentor" over the past 15
years or so. The word used to imply a mutual respect and commitment that it no
longer does.

A mentor's counterpart used to their "protege". However, since that word has
not been devalued, we've invented "mentee".

I'm not claiming this is a good or bad development, but it's interesting how
quickly the meanings of even quite important words can change.

~~~
taeric
The double speak in your last paragraph undercut your post. :(

Be bold and make a claim. Nothing wrong with that. Even if you are wrong, you
will be so with skin in the game, so come out knowing. With couched claims,
you can always duck behind being right, but not understood. And never know.

~~~
timoth3y
> The double speak in your last paragraph undercut your post. :(

It's honestly not double-speak. I'm a descriptivist rather than a
prescriptivist. Words are defined by how people use them. I consider it a
waste of time to complain that "everyone is using a word wrong" as long as the
meaning is clear, which it is in this case.

~~~
taeric
The double speak is the claiming of not claiming it is good or bad.

Words can change. True. Calling the change of some words as important is an
opinion. Clearly label in some words imparts a value judgement. To claim
otherwise is to try and shift the claim to the receiver. "I'm not claiming it
is good or bad, but look at the evidence."

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mmaunder
"For some reason Bangalore is crawling with people who first want to form a
community and then start learning/working/whatever."

Seattle is the same. Probably the same everywhere. It's easier to talk and
drink coffee than to challenge yourself way outside your comfort zone for
hours at a time, day after day.

~~~
soneca
I don't think the foundation of this phenomenon is laziness or lack of
diligence. I believe people are craving to be part of a community. Humans have
always had. But these days your family and your neighbors are not that
community anymore (edit: not _necessarily_ , not so much at least), so we look
elsewhere. The internet allowed us to look everywhere actually. Then you find
a community that, from the outside, you feel attracted to. Often these
communities are built around a certain topic or skill. Then you want to be
part of the community and say to yourself that you will learn that skill.

I agree with the author though that this path rarely works. A better way is to
first you dive into something that interest you and then you go find other
people with the same interest.

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mgamache
I am being pedantic, but I _hate_ the word mentee. I am not sure if it was
made up, but it sounds like it. The proper word IMHO is protege.

~~~
koolba
It’s not the same thing. A protege is _one_ person done your are grooming to
be your replacement. A mentee is one of _many_ people your are guiding down
their own path.

~~~
Sean1708
This was always my understanding of the word too, but I've just looked it up
and apparently a protégé is just "one who is protected or trained or whose
career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence" so in
a mentor-student relationship the student could definitely be referred to as a
protégé.

------
hartator
I might be a minority but never extracted huge value from mentors. Read books,
reach out directly to whoever you want to reach out, and trust your guts’
feeling have worked better for me.

------
jseliger
Developing the ability to be an attractive, as opposed to hapless, mentee is
also a skill: [https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-
pr...](https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-
professors%E2%80%99-attention-or-how-to-get-the-coaching-and-mentorship-you-
need/) and it's one that's sadly not taught.

~~~
alltakendamned
Insightful article on how mentors might perceive your actions

------
clvx
This sounds exactly the same as when you are looking for help in a public
mailing list. I usually list everything I’ve done right or wrong to pick
anyone’s interest to give me some clues to continue my work.

~~~
chillwaves
This demonstrates effort, which in turns demonstrates capability. Why waste
time on someone who will not try?

------
stackzero
Don't ask "will you mentor me?" just ask a specific question and you've got a
mentor

~~~
wccrawford
I think that advice is buried in the stories the article tells, and I wish the
writer had made it more clear.

I spent quite a lot of time trying to help people who were asking for general
advice, and my take is that very, very few of them actually did anything with
it.

Soon, I realized that answering these question privately is a complete waste
of time, and switched to answering them publicly. At least then if the person
ignores it, it's still there for someone else to benefit from.

Eventually, I realized that all these questions have been answered hundreds or
thousands of times in the same general ways, and that anyone who cared would
just use Google and find all of them. The people who are now asking the
question either lack the basic awareness to use Google, or think their
situation is somehow special and only very pointed advice can help them.
They're wrong, of course, which means you can't really help them.

Now, I only answer questions that I feel are actually unique somehow, or that
I haven't answered in a while and just want to do a little good and maybe
inspire some people.

In no circumstance do I react negatively to them. I just ignore questions that
bother me, rather than tell them to "Just Google It" or whatever. If they
haven't figured that out, my negativity won't actually help them or anyone
else.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994998)

------
dunkelheit
This is good advice because talk is very very cheap and by actually doing
something you stand out of the crowd. But doing something in a field that is
new to you can be daunting and learning on your own is still very inefficient.
That is why those Stanford PhDs are still worth something even if all relevant
information is online - they had good mentors.

Here are some tricks that I find make learning process less inefficient (as
applied to programming of course):

\- Formulate specific questions. This is kind of silly but many times you will
have a feeling of being vaguely stuck and will just zone out instead of making
progress. Instead try to precisely and succinctly formulate the problem. You
can then search the Internet, ask a question on stackoverflow (or ask a mentor
:) or you can look through some good open source code and see how the problem
is solved there. Formulating the question focuses you. It is important to
condense the question as much as you can because this way people will have to
do less work to understand it and the probability that you will get an answer
goes up.

\- Find a way to test your stuff. I don't mean specifically unit tests, it can
be "testing in production" with the real users (it is standard startup wisdom
to get user feedback as quickly as possible) or at least solving toy problems
with your code, or creating a benchmarking harness and seeing where the
performance bottlenecks are. First, seeing that your stuff is actually working
is incredibly motivating. Second, your taste (what the Ira Glass quote in the
sibling comment talks about) is subjective and can mislead you (especially if
you are a beginner) and making your code confront reality is much more
objective and is going to uncover problems with your work that you weren't
aware of and maybe show that some problem that you thought very important is
actually not a problem at all.

\- Watch programming streams. This thing is getting more popular these days.
Much of mentoring consists of you observing how your mentor actually does
stuff - how they approach problems and what are those little tricks that help
them do the work - and then copying it. Watching people programming sounds
silly but it is the way to observe those tricks if you are not lucky to have
easy access to someone competent.

------
m0zg
A lot of people out there just go through the motions. They aren't
particularly interested in their field, and seek "mentors" just because this
is something you're supposed to do. This is a waste of time for both the
mentor and the mentee. In 20+ years in the industry I only had one mentee (out
of half a dozen), who was not a waste of time. She's a senior manager at
Facebook now. Super smart, and very strongly intrinsically motivated. She'd
succeed without any mentorship just fine, but hopefully I helped her get there
faster.

------
DangitBobby
Sure, but you don't get to complain about the next generation of programmers
re-discovering every wheel that's been invented in the past 60 years (or worse
variations of them).

------
PeterStuer
It comes down to trust and expectation. Everyone can _say_ they are
passionate, interested, want to do the hard work to make the mentor's
investment in them eventually worth it. Those are very weak signals. On the
other hand, actually having demonstrably put in a very significant amount of
effort already is a strong proof you are being serious.

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radcon
> So in the next email (sent a minute after I received his reply) I sent him a
> zipped file of code with an explanation that "this is what I've done so far
> which is about 70% of what you want" and he immediately replied saying "Whoa
> you are serious. That is refreshing .. '

> So a few days later, I sent along a detailed algorithm that expanded his
> idea, with a formal proof of correctness and a code implementation and he
> suddenly switched to a more expansive mode, sending friendly emails with
> long and detailed corrections and ideas for me to explore.

And then the whole internet stood up and clapped.

------
noncoml
Despite the assholish title, the blog post actually makes a very good point
and it’s a pretty good advice. Before you ask somebody to spend them time on
you, make sure you put the time yourself.

------
codeisawesome
The StackOverflow advice to writing answer worthy questions generalises quite
well into all professional interactions where help is exchanged.

------
lmilcin
The only time you can really provide mentoring is if the person wants it and
asks for it. It is not yet enough because the person may say they want it but
have wrong impression of what it entails (like having expectation of some kind
of magical step change in their life), but it is prerequisite IMO.

So, obviously, this answer is wrong beacuse that would mean that there cannot
be any mentoring.

Another observation of mine is what is mentoring for. A person that isn't
interested in learning something will not learn it no matter if the do or
don't have a mentor. A person that wants to learn something will also learn it
regardless of whether they have mentor.

The role of mentor is to expedite the process, help avoid dead ends or bad
habits and generally make the end result better and faster than without
mentor.

I can learn to be Enterprise Architect or play flute on my own, but having a
mentor makes it easier for me.

I pay for a flautist to teach me but really I don't want him to teach me. I
teach flute myself and the flautist is to point out errors, tips that help me
learn it faster, his experience of how he learned it, all to let me reach
goals that I set with less effort.

The problem people have is the moment they get a "teacher" they assume some
kind of shared responsibility or even expectation that the student will
somehow offload part of the effort onto the "teacher". That is simply wrong.

------
duxup
It is an understandable policy.

The person being asked has no idea where the asking person is at or even if
they should be doing that thing at all.

If there is nothing to show.... you have no clue.

------
sodosopa
Anyone who is better than you at a skill or task is a mentor. All it takes is
to work around them, ask relevant questions, watch, do and shut up.

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wolco
Offering money or something can go a long way.

~~~
michaelt
IDK about the money angle.

I mean, how's a student going to pay the hourly rate of an average mid-career
FAANG employee - to say nothing of a CEO, VC or famous coder?

~~~
esmi
Mid-career FAANG employee, I guess it might be ~$100/hr for a one time code
review. (Incidentally, About the same rate as getting a chess GM to review
your game [1]) Someone might do that if the project wasn’t too large.
(Although their employment contract might not allow it.) Not cheap but maybe
not totally out of reach either. Pretty questionable how useful it would be,
IMHO.

[1].
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/3hgoip/typical_coach...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/3hgoip/typical_coaching_rates/)

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simaracode
Never read it before, priceless and true.

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sdan
Nice article. Well written!

