
Ask HN: Do you do any mentoring outside of work? - johnpython
Do you do any mentoring outside of work? If so, how did you get started?
======
shubb
I wouldn't feel confident to mentor anyone on anything. I'd feel like a total
fraud.

This can't be uncommon.

When I was a developer, I either felt like what I was doing could be done by a
smart highschooler (probably better than I was doing it) because it was
straight forward, or like I was figuring things out as I went along (because
it was hard).

Now I do less development and more business analysis / architecture, I feel
like I'm talking to a lot of far smarter people, and probably look smarter
than I am because I'm echoing better informed peoples opinions back and forth.

All I could advise someone starting out in tech is to remember that no one
really knows what they are doing.

~~~
numbsafari
The job of a mentor is often simply to listen, and to help the mentee hold
themselves accountable.

If you've been successful in your career, in spite of what you perceive as
personal limitations, I bet you have the humility to be a good listener and an
empathetic motivator.

Honestly, if you look at most professional mentors and coaches, especially in
sports, they aren't "the best" in their field. They are people who know enough
to understand the problems and life experiences people in that field face and
are networked in the field and able to help connect folks with each other.

Take a look at the GROW model for a good approach to working with mentees in
fields you don't consider yourself to be an expert in.

~~~
linker3000
Gah: 'Mentee'.

A Mentor doesn't practise the art of 'menting'! The name comes from the
character of Mentor in Homer's Odyssey.

A mentor has protégées.

(Yeah, I know Wikipedia mentions 'mentee' \- it's still a horrible word in my
book.)

/pet peeve!

~~~
grzm
Thanks for the etymology. Very interesting!

At the same time, language evolves and changes. Expecting it not to is likely
only to lead to frustration. (I'm not immune. "Steep learning curve" to mean
something difficult to learn gets me a bit riled.) The change you observe here
is back formation[0], I believe.

Now, if you'll please excuse me. I think there are some kids on my lawn.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-
formation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation)

~~~
nrs26
Interesting! Why do you get riled at "steep learning curve"?

~~~
grzm
The original formulation is based on a skill acquisition vs experience chart.
On such a chart, a steep learning curve is one where skills are acquired
quickly, as opposed to skills that are difficult to acquire. The common "steep
learning curve" = "difficult" usage is understandable, given that steep hills
are more difficult to climb. It's a knee-jerk reaction for me so it's
transient: you're not going to see steam coming out of my ears :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve)

------
uber1geek
I mentor a developer community which i nurtured from scratch in the conflict
ridden valley of Kashmir. My mantra of life is "grow and let others grow with
you."

If you want to pitch in , just drop me an email.

[http://www.gdgkashmir.com](http://www.gdgkashmir.com)

~~~
neduma
You're awesome. Sir.

------
nasir
I did a few sessions of mentoring for (mainly) Syrian refugees in the
Netherlands. The group is called
[http://www.hackyourfuture.net/](http://www.hackyourfuture.net/) and both
students and organisers are very nice people. I plan to do it again after the
summer and my trips.

To get started I just found the contact details on the website, emailed them
and they told me to come.

~~~
mclemme
Just signed up to help out at the Copenhagen "department" of Hack Your Future,
glad to hear it's working well!

------
erbdex
1\. India has 10K AICTE approved engineering colleges. While some of these are
IITs and NITs that you might've heard of, beyond the top 50-100 colleges,
there is _no support system_ for the students. The curriculum of most state
universities still updates in 5 years with little autonomy given to colleges.
As a result, most students still see Java, C and dotNet as the universe of CS.

2\. India's gender inequality in the workplace picks pace from higher
education. In the college we mentor in, there are ~400 boys and ~50 girls. Out
of which, 30 boys and 5 girls actively code today. Since there is substantial
gender based teasing/harassment, most colleges in India lock women up post
8pm. Collaboration doesn't kick off because of such low density of students.
Especially for girls.

3\. We run this with 200 students over whatsapp. We have groups for fostering
reading, internships & jobs, AMAs, competitive programming and so on. If you
would like to help us scale this community, get in touch and we can talk in
detail.

~~~
fellellor
You're doing an important thing. Rather than just working with students, also
reach out to experienced people in the industry. Even in a city like
Bangalore, I feel the industry is too disconnected from the colleges.

~~~
erbdex
We do. Come do an AMA for us next week. Tomorrow's is by a senior from the
college who cracked GATE, went to IIT-D and is now working with Visa in
Bangalore. EMail me.

------
dotdi
I hope this is not frowned upon, but I'll hijack this thread to say:

I'd love to have a mentor.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Same. Maybe we should have a "who's mentoring" thread, haha.

~~~
david927
That's a great idea. I just started it.

~~~
wjossey
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148619)

------
osmyn
I'd encourage you to look for a local chapter of
[https://girlswhocode.com/](https://girlswhocode.com/), see if there are after
school programming clubs in your city (or start one), or sign up with
[https://hackhands.com/](https://hackhands.com/) and get paid to mentor.

~~~
nekochanwork
I was a volunteer instructor through Girls Who Code through the 2016-2017
school year. It was a hugely rewarding experience.

I had a class of middle school girls who had never seen a line of code before.
By the end of the course, they had learned enough of the basics of HTML, CSS,
and Python to build a personal homepage and a simple game.

------
fuzzygroup
I recently started mentoring a small group (3) of homeless people that have
demonstrated computer proficiency under the auspices of a local Indianapolis
homeless teen charity. We started with 3 and two have largely dropped out.
One, however, is still going strong. We are using the Free Code Camp
curriculum (goal is a front end engineering job) paired with side lessons from
my own experience along with a class project so at the end the students have a
public thing on the Internet that they can point to and say "I built that".

The jury is still out if this will succeed or not but I hope that it does and
if so it will likely be expanded beyond its pilot stage.

On the encouraging front, I've seen the following progress:

* The student got paying work doing some wordpress stuff on the side so a side gig! * The student got an Ubuntu based development environment up and running all on his own

------
mclemme
I mentor a young guy who came to Denmark as a refugee a few years ago, we met
through the mentor program at the Danish Refugee Council.

After two years of courses in math, physics, English, biology and Danish he
finally got accepted into university and has his first day today studying
robotics.

Signed up to help out at
[http://www.hackyourfuture.net/](http://www.hackyourfuture.net/) as well,
seems like an amazing project.

~~~
Symbiote
Did you speak English, or Danish?

I signed up to teach some programming to children in England, but then got a
job in Copenhagen before starting. It will be years before my Danish is good
enough to understand children in a classroom.

~~~
mclemme
Both, I'm Danish. The guy I mentor is 22 years old now, he already spoke
English when he arrived and has since learnt Danish.

You can sign up here:

[https://flygtning.dk/frivillig/hvad-vi-
laver/mentorprogramme...](https://flygtning.dk/frivillig/hvad-vi-
laver/mentorprogrammer/bliv-mentor)

There's also Coding Pirates, which is aimed at teaching kids technology,
programming, etc.: [https://codingpirates.dk/](https://codingpirates.dk/)

And Hack Your Future -
[http://www.hackyourfuture.net/](http://www.hackyourfuture.net/)

------
inovica
Yes, I do. I think sometimes people just want someone to bounce ideas off. For
me its primarily helping people to think logically about their problems, but
there's also some help given from the years of experience I have. I'm not
super-successful, but I've done 'ok' and I'm happy. The feedback from those
I've helped has been positive and it feels good to help others. I think best
way to get started is to just speak to people and see what problems they have
and see if your knowledge can be helpful. Use your own network first - plus
there's a fairly big network on here! :)

------
stulevine
I mentor my wife who recently started working professionally as an iOS
Software Engineer. When I lived in the city, I would attend a peer lab for iOS
Developers where you can mentor developers just getting started in the field.
This is where I got started and highly recommend that route.

------
JnBrymn
In Nashville (and growing elsewhere) we started a community around self-
organizing peer-mentorship. Checkout it out
[http://pennyuniversity.org](http://pennyuniversity.org)

It's very rudimentary and grass roots at this point. (I mean.. we're a Slack
Team and a Google Forum.) But the idea is that everyone has things they want
to learn and thing that they can share. PennyUniversity serves as the
community for people that want to make In-Real-Life connections to learn new
things. It's self organized, mostly it's individuals asking to learn something
and then setting up a coffee chat or a lunch conversation. Occasionally the
conversations grow to larger groups (say 10 people). Often the conversations
are one-off, but sometimes they form into longer-term mentorship or topical-
groups or reading groups. We encourage face-to-face meetings, but occasionally
the meetings are online and recorded - like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czy7bgDd7Hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czy7bgDd7Hc)

Check it out. I'd love to hear feedback.

~~~
cosmie
That's really neat! I'm in Nashville and haven't ever heard of this. Have you
guys reached out to groups like the NTC[1] to potentially advertise in their
newsletter? It seems like a lot of their audience would be interested in just
this sort of thing.

[1] [https://technologycouncil.com/](https://technologycouncil.com/)

------
a_lieb
I do programming tutoring at LightHouse Holyoke[1], a learning center for
homeschooled and unschooled kids here in Western Massachusetts. Legally the
students are homeschooled, but the center has a full schedule of classes and
also connects the kids with tutoring and other one-on-one activities. Most
kids go 3-5 days a week and get most or all of their education through
LightHouse.

It's a blast. There are about 15 centers like this across the country that
operate under the banner of the Liberated Learners network[2]. It's mostly
volunteer but there are some paid opportunities, especially for group classes.

[1] [http://lighthouseholyoke.org/](http://lighthouseholyoke.org/)

[2] [http://liberatedlearners.net/](http://liberatedlearners.net/)

------
markkhazanov
I've mentored more than 100 students over the past decade. It's something
incredibly important to my life and wellbeing.

I suggest going to your alma mater or graduate school and asking them if they
have a mentorship program. They almost always do and it's an easy way to get
started.

There's a lot of different opportunities for mentorship as you can see from
the comments. Find a specific demographic that you're passionate about
helping. Maybe it's someone less fortunate, maybe it's a carbon copy of you.
After you have that set it will be significantly easier to identify
opportunities and organizations through which you can mentor.

------
allenc
Yea, I chat with ex-colleagues about their work and how they're faring since
we've worked together.

I'm a director of eng. as well, so there'll be times when I reconnect with
former managers and reports and provide/get mentorship that way as well. The
key is to actually keep in contact and in touch beyond any singular job; if
you were able to mentor them while you shared an office, that relationship is
still valuable afterwards. Of course, this means that you have to develop the
skill & reputation to be a good mentor to others around your job.

------
troysandal
I actively do, at least 1 person (I don't know) each year who's in my career
track as well as the people who work for me. The way I get people to mentor is
by telling colleagues that if they know anyone who might benefit from talking
to me send them over and we'll see if we hit it off. That gets me about 1-2
people a year, some whom still seek me out years later.

I didn't start mentoring anyone until 15 plus years into my career, or so I
had thought. After I was first asked to mentor I read up on what it is and
realized I'd mentored many people in software since the moment I'd left
college. Not all mentoring looks the same but the thing it always has in
common is listening, asking questions, listening more then hopefully getting
the mentee to listen to themselves. The best book I ever read on mentoring was
"Inner Game of Tennis" despite it being intended to teach coaching. I highly
recommend it.

I think you can mentor people outside your discipline if you know what
questions to ask. It's not always about having a superior technical insight,
if it is then it's probably coaching. FWIW I see mentoring as advising someone
through personal growth area and coaching as directly training someone on
skills improvement or change, the former initiated by the mentee, the later
the mentor.

Everyone here is smart and has something to offer. Seek out mentors yourself
and in turn mentor others when the chance arises, you'll grow tremendously.

Great question, thanks for asking.

------
cosmie
Professionally, I do some mentoring outside of work. But it's mainly informal,
and consists of former employees and interns reaching out to me. For these,
the mentoring is less advice-giving and more playing devil's advocate to help
them think through decisions and be confident that they've explored all the
angles.

Personally, I do mentoring for children through programs like Big Brother[1]
and Youth Villages[2]. These programs are constantly in need of male
mentors/role models. Even more so for ones that work in white collar areas
that these kids may not have ever had exposure to otherwise. As a former
mentee in one of these when I was little, I can't stress how impactful these
types of programs are. I encourage anyone here that can spare a few hours a
month to volunteer at least once for one of these.

[1]
[http://www.mentorakid.org/site/c.flKYIcOSIiJ6H/b.9192427/k.5...](http://www.mentorakid.org/site/c.flKYIcOSIiJ6H/b.9192427/k.554B/Be_a_Big_Brother8212give_a_Little_something_back.htm)
[2] [http://www.youthvillages.org/what-we-
do/mentoring](http://www.youthvillages.org/what-we-do/mentoring)

------
brightball
I've done a lot of speaking at programmer groups in my area, try to be active
in answering questions on a Slack group that's also setup for programmers in
my area and taught a Rails and Postgres class a little while back. Would love
to teach more but it's hard to find the time.

The Slack group is the most efficient way. If people find that they are able
to get help by coming there, they tend to keep coming there.

------
emcarey
Yes - I have an hour every Saturday I put aside for a weekly mentoring
meeting. I have a lot of people reach out to me for advice, but as a founder I
don't have time to meet every request. Instead, I have my Saturday afternoon
hold each week for a call or coffee with people who reach out for guidance on
hiring engineers, fundraising, starting a startup so there is a controlled
time slot for mentoring meetings. Being a founder is really hard, we're a
startup that is post revenue, post seed venture, post product market fit - but
everything just seems more complex as we get bigger and there are more
failures all the time with bigger consequences. These mentor meetings with
founders just starting out give me a healthy pause to realize how far we've
come and I feel better knowing I can help other new founders not feel so alone
in the early stage process.

------
thinbeige
LinkedIn is about to launch Tinder-like mentor matching. There are also two
more startups in this field.

Do you want to start something in this space?

~~~
dotdi
Any links about about the LinkedIn feature or the startups?

~~~
LolWolf
Yeah, I'd also like to know more!

~~~
vram22
Me too.

------
viiralvx
I'd like to plug an article written about "mentorship" and looking into
"friendtorship". [https://iheanyi.com/journal/2017/08/18/on-
friendtorship/](https://iheanyi.com/journal/2017/08/18/on-friendtorship/)

------
Balgair
For anyone looking to get into mentoring:

[https://www.bgca.org/](https://www.bgca.org/)

[https://www.girlscouts.org/en/adults/volunteer.html](https://www.girlscouts.org/en/adults/volunteer.html)

[http://www.scouting.org/Volunteer.aspx](http://www.scouting.org/Volunteer.aspx)

For more volunteer-y opportunities:

[http://www.workingmother.com/family/5-easy-ways-volunteer-
yo...](http://www.workingmother.com/family/5-easy-ways-volunteer-your-childs-
school)

[http://money.howstuffworks.com/economics/volunteer/opportuni...](http://money.howstuffworks.com/economics/volunteer/opportunities/volunteer-
at-hospital.htm)

------
defined
I used to offer mentoring in a certain programming language via email. It soon
became too time-intensive to continue with it, mostly because the people
appeared unwilling or unable to do the necessary groundwork and just wanted
answers without much effort on their part. They wanted, basically,
supervision.

I recall reading a very short book years ago, I think it was "The One-Minute
Manager", and the biggest takeaway I got from that is that you have to adopt
different styles according to people's motivation and skill (a 2x2 grid
similar to [1]).

It appears "mentoring" (coaching) is appropriate for people who have skill but
lack motivation or confidence. This definitely correlates with my experiences.

[1]: [https://goo.gl/images/EvBi7x](https://goo.gl/images/EvBi7x)

~~~
skylark
I used to love teaching people things, but as I've gotten older I've gotten
more jaded. We all want to work with people in the bottom right square - those
with potential and tenacity seeking to accelerate their progress. But the
reality is that the vast majority of people (I'm guessing 95%+) are on the
left side - they just want to be sold a dream.

At least for me, it's too soul crushing to work with people who completely
lack motivation.

------
zschuessler
Youth Startup Weekend is a nice event to get your feet wet. The kids that show
up are fun and pretty darn smart, some great ideas come out of these.

[http://startupweekend.org/interests/Youth](http://startupweekend.org/interests/Youth)

It's a whole weekend of volunteer work, functions just like an adult startup
weekend. Kids learn to pitch, come up with ideas, and pivot more times than an
adult does (ha!).

I've done a few in different states. Only one wasn't run well (techstars
appoints faciliators & organizers, it's up to them on how well the event
runs). The others I learned just as much interacting with the kids than they
learned from me.

Give it a shot! They don't have many events on that page now, but they have
events in quite a few states throughout the year.

------
nfriedly
Yea, people just email me out of the blue asking for help sometimes.

I used to freelance full-time, and I wrote a number of articles to help market
my services. Between that and my open source work, I'm pretty easy to find. I
think at one point, my site was ranked 6th on google for "JavaScript Expert".

I lived in SF for a while and then moved back to Ohio and started a local JS
meetup. I did a lot of presentations there, although I'm not sure if it would
count as mentoring. I had a son about a year after starting it, so I handed
off the reigns to a local agency with a bit more free time then what I
suddenly had.

I've also helped some of my friends' children get started on Khan Academy
(programing and other things), and I'm looking forward to when my son will be
ready (he just turned 3 ;)

------
sporkenfang
I do! Not because I feel like I know anything, but because logically I know
there's quite some distance between an engineer and someone wanting to be an
engineer. I see it every time my team gets a summer intern.

I got started by re-connecting with a group I led at university and being
introduced to folks teaching business and practical engineering skills at a
local accelerator (which seems to be primarily populated by college students
and people without much experience trying to start their own companies). It's
been a learning process -- both in terms of learning what people really ought
to know before they apply for their first job versus what's normally taught
and trying to fill in some of the missing bits, and learning where I myself
have skills gaps.

------
vram22
I did some mentoring on Ruby for beginners as one of the mentors at
RubyMentors some years ago, when I was working on Ruby (and Rails) projects.
Currently not doing any such mentoring as I am busy with many things. Might
start it again after some time, likely this time for the following areas:

\- software career guidance for beginners;

\- Python, SQL and database design, and Linux/Unix user-level and shell
scripting (the mentoring can be done for each of those subjects
independently);

\- maybe C too a bit later.

I have multiple years of real life experience in all of those.

I also do online mentoring as part of my work, at Codementor. Here is my
Codementor profile:

[https://www.codementor.io/vasudevram](https://www.codementor.io/vasudevram)

------
fdchn2016
I have been mentoring a friend over a 1.5 year span. We were both from the
Market Research Data Processing domain. I managed the make the switch to
software and helping him get proficient enough in web software development to
land a junior position. So far I've just told him what courses to do on Udemy
and Code school and helped him if he's got stuck. He's doing this for himself
so the motivation is there. I just make a phone-call twice a day asking him
his progress. Even if he's not made any it's fine - as he's managing this with
his current work. He works from home and has 2 clients who pay him for MR DP
work - so he makes time on weekends and early in the morning. This has already
yielded him some really great benefits because he can now program web surveys
and customise them for client requirements. Over time he's become really good
at jQuery and CSS and has now done a RoR course and currently doing a node.js
course on Udemy. If he continues to be open to mentoring I plan on putting him
on an Erlang or Prolog or Haskell or Elm tutorial next.

I also mentored another relative. He was a fresher and just passed out of
college - but with a "wrong" degree. He did commerce (that's what we call it
in India, his dad is an accountant) - but wanted to be a programmer. I
followed the same pattern with him. He also did a 1 year full time course in
Software. He just recently landed a job as a Junior Dev. It's a start because
the institute that he did the course with said that because of his background
degree, he'll find it difficult to get a break with A-companies and should
concentrate on B-class companies. I tried to convince him to now start solving
problems on Hacker Rank and Project Euler and take about 3-6 months before
applying for a job, but he was too anxious and went for a job that pays - I
kid you not - INR 8000/\- per month. They have said they will pay INR
16,000/\- after 6 months if he does well.

One of the things I've found is it's hard to boost people's self esteem. The
first guy i'm mentoring is too afraid to go for an interview because he
doesn't want to fail. But anyway it's slow and steady progress up the ladder.

------
PoachedSausage
I have, through my local Hackerspace. Mostly basic electronics and a bit of
microcontroller programming.

I am also a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, a UK
professional engineering organisation. I hope to be involved with some
mentoring through that.

------
kdbg
I kinda do. Not is a professional sense but with teens/preteens mostly. Some
years ago I was linled to a chat described as filled with skiddies (I do vuln
research and dev). What i found was some lids who had taught themselves Visual
Basic in order to male cheats and trainers for flash games.

I stuck around helped them learn more about programming, reverse engineering,
and eventually exploit development.

Over the years the group has changed but I established myself as one willing
to take questions and help people learn. It took sometime to establish myself
especially among that age group but I just stuck it out because I saw people
willing and tryimg to learn.

------
nteunckens
I do some coaching in a local CoderDojo
([https://coderdojo.com/](https://coderdojo.com/)) ... Great to see how kids
engage and appreciate the help that you can provide. In doing this, I got some
valid lifelessons on how to interact with people (regardless of age or
skillset). It's really fun to 'teach' logical thinking to kids and - frankly -
I sometimes gather a new perspective on things when problemsolving with these
kids.

In fact, we're all ready to go for another season of coding and mentoring as
of tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing familiar and new faces ...

------
hugozap
I'm mentoring a deaf student who wants to learn web development.

It's been challenging and slow but we are progressing. Most videos/tutorials
do not work well because deaf people do not have the same reading
comprehension non-deaf people have.

~~~
hslzr
I made an account just to reply to this. I think is amazing what you're doing;
I learn sign language about two years ago and I've been working with local
organizations in order to help/teach deaf people and their families to
communicate. Keep it up!

------
JamesUtah07
I mentored a guy in Lithuania for a year. It was very rewarding for me to help
him out and he's been working for some time now. When we started he was
finishing up college and we continued while he was starting to look for jobs.

------
BlackjackCF
Hmm, not any mentoring... but someone asked me to give a talk about Golang at
a small meetup recently. I felt like a fraud. I'm not qualified to give a talk
on Go!

But I went. It went really well, and I got a lot of people interested.

~~~
vram22
Cool. See impostor syndrome mentioned elsewhere in this thread. No need to
feel like a fraud. Even if you know just somewhat more than some others, there
can be value in what you can talk about to those others (not everyone) - this
applies to any subject. The obvious caveat is that one should try to do a good
job of the talk by preparing, trying to make it interesting (some), giving
good examples, etc.

------
thestephen
Some countries have youth entrepreneurship programmes – in Sweden, at
secondary school (15-18), some programmes have a youth entrepreneurship course
where students get to run a business over the course of a year. These
microcompanies generally have an "advisor", who generally have experience
running a company. I have been an advisor for two groups of students over my
course of time – and I must say that it has been a learning experience that
feels as big for me as it was for them.

Further, one should not underestimate all micro-mentoring that occurs when
helping young talents in ones field.

------
mbrain
I'm a developer for 10 years and I've started to mentoring by HackHands on
Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I realized its so much fun and improves my knowledge.

I believe knowledge should be free and I've done lots of volunteered mentoring
like instructing RoR 101 more than 200 hours, created a free online RoR101
course.

I find mentoring, helping and instructing people about something you know is
fun and exciting, also it makes you better at it.

I also do mentoring at
[https://www.codementor.io/beydogan](https://www.codementor.io/beydogan)

------
jkingsbery
I recently joined a large tech company, and so most of my mentoring has been
within the company (including other departments though). One thing that I did
more of previously was sign up for different events at the university I went
to grad school (which happens to be in the same city I work). It's pretty low
risk, in that you can commit to an event one evening without needing to commit
to anything specific for the long term. They also usually have different
formats for events so you can pick something you feel you can help more with.

------
ruskimalooski
Constantly. I was the chair of an student development team that runs AI
Tournaments ([http://siggame.io/](http://siggame.io/)). We get a constant
stream of freshmen and most of them are very new with programming. I don't
think our organization would survive if we didn't mentor new people. Since
graduating I still mentor people in programming, resume building and other
things.

I do have my work cut out for me though since they are usually still students.

------
reboog711
Outside of work? Not anything formal.

I offer mentoring as a consulting service. It's often a followup of some
longer training. It's lots of fun when it happens. We usually talk once or
twice a week and discuss "the problem of the moment". Contracts like this
usually last 3-6 months, and I probably do one every couple of years.

There isn't a huge demand for this sort of 'one-on-one' training since most
programmers with moderate experience can "Google until it works"

------
linker3000
I do ad-hoc mentoring (electronics and computing) to primary and secondary
school children in the UK as a STEM Ambassador (www.stem.org.uk) - I help with
code clubs, attend STEM days and career days. This is a voluntary role and my
company allows 3 days of paid leave for 'community day' work.

The engagements with people are not long-standing, but it is rewarding to see
someone expand their knowledge, work out a technical challenge or find and fix
a bug in their code.

------
vyrotek
I'm the programming mentor for a high school FIRST robotics team. I was one of
the team's founding students over 15 years ago. (Team 498!)

~~~
danielrw7
I do this as well (Team 4534)! I was also a founding student though we only
started 5 years ago.

------
yamalight
I've created a video series on advanced javascript (i.e. how to go from basics
to product), people wanted more help, so I'd set up a Discord server where I
help viewers with their js questions. It's a pretty cool experience since I
quite frequently get question that make me go: "hmm, I have no idea how / why
/ where", so I have to learn more myself.

------
arupchak
There are a couple of CS programs, especially community colleges, where they
actively ask for folks with industry experience to mentor students.

There are also boot camp programs that do the same. In particular, I have
mentored at Hackbright Academy, and I only have great things to say about the
experience. I am pretty sure that I get more out of the experience of
mentoring the students than they do :)

------
aryehof
I do some paid mentoring. I don't need the money, but I insist people pay to
confirm their commitment, and ensure I am not wasting my time. It's a policy I
recommend.

How did I get started? I was asked if I would agree to it. As a former CTO and
engineering manager with 40 years experience on very large projects in
commerce and industry, I offer a different perspective and level of
experience.

------
pruthvishetty
You would be surprised to see how many people in your professional circle
would be ready to mentor you. All you have to do is ask.

------
cwbrandsma
Yes.

Here is my list:

* I run a developer user group in town that meets once a month to talk about various topics.

* I help run a code camp here in town (not affiliated with Microsoft) that meets once a year and attracts 800 people, about 200 are school age.

* I attend panel discussions at some of the code schools.

* I help high school kids in science competitions with coding projects.

* Code reviews in exchange for beer.

------
renownedmedia
I started a meetup to fill a niche in the town I lived in regarding a
technology stack I was proficient in (PHP and MySQL in Ann Arbor, MI).
Attendance was usually less than 10 per day, but that made it easy to give
everyone personal attention. Fast forward a few years and now I regularly
mentor at Nodeschools.

------
dopeboy
I work on my own startup with a co-founder so I can't mentor at work. Over
this past summer, I mentored a college junior as part of the Code2040
([http://www.code2040.org/](http://www.code2040.org/)) program.

------
throwmeaway32
I offer to meet random people for coffee several times a week, sometimes it
turns out to e networking, sometimes it turns out to be ad-hoc
advice/mentoring, I just try to put myself out there for people to use as
they'd like and see what happens.

~~~
bleischt
Just curious, how do you find random people to meet for coffee? From online
communities like HN?

~~~
throwmeaway32
I created some specific 'coffee' time slots in my calender and use
[https://calendly.com/](https://calendly.com/) to organise the time slots (and
put location details etc in as well) and then I just occasionally post to
LinkedIn with the link saying I'm open to chats. I tend to get 1 or 2 every
time I post.

It's definitely not 100% effective but works for what I want at the moment.

------
INTPenis
A bit at local hackerspaces. Mostly basic IT security for laypeople.

I know others who do a lot more admirable work with coder dojo and mentoring
kids. They're always looking for more mentors but I have a hard time balancing
my personal life schedule already.

------
fuball63
I help mentor at my local Python meetup. It usually involves getting people
set up, guiding them to resources, and helping with problems they find in
their projects. I found my meetup on Meetup.com and just started regularly
attending.

------
bitL
I do some deep learning/self-driving car talks and mentoring; thinking about
mentoring at Udacity and making a few courses on Udemy on interesting applied
deep/reinforcement learning topics when I have time.

------
aloukissas
Yes, as a volunteer mentor at Defy Ventures [defyventures.org].

They help formerly-incarcerated people with their entrepreneurial goals.
Highly recommend volunteering there if they have presence in your area.

------
quickthrower2
Worth checking out
[http://www.whosmentoring.com](http://www.whosmentoring.com)

------
kentt
I would love to and have looked briefly for opportunities. I'd like to do
video/screensharing mentoring for Rails pro bono. If anyone has suggestions,
I'm interested.

------
En_gr_Student
The sad question is more if I do mentoring inside of work.

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edoceo
Yes, through a weekly Meetup I started attending hosted by investors to meet
entrepreneurs. After a few years I (the mentee) became a mentor.

------
IMTDb
Twice a week I manage a group of disabled children for a few hours.

I am a world of warcraft raid leader. Started as a WoW raider 10+ years ago.

------
vsviridov
I mentor at a bootcamp, over codementor.com and directly to my past students,
hoping to expand that in the future.

------
known
I do [https://quora.com](https://quora.com)

------
moron4hire
Do you mean mentor, or tutor?

I've had a number of teaching-type jobs over the years. First, as a martial
arts instructor in early college. Then as a math, physics, and programming
tutor. I kept up math tutoring after college for a few years, mostly for
friends and family still going through university. Also, I've been the
technical lead on a number of my work projects, which requires a level of
mentorship when juniors are on the team.

But I hadn't done anything in a few years and so a few months ago I tried to
heed the call that "the world needs more mentors". I spent a solid month with
about a dozen people whom said they wanted a mentor, in the topics
specifically covered by my FOSS project. I spent tons of time on writing
beginner's documentation, creating a whole series of github issues to gently
walk people through getting into the project, started personal conversations
with each person to discover their goals and how they wanted to contribute.

They ate up all the "for first timers" tickets where I provided explicit
directions on single-line changes to make to the code. They never went on to
any of the easy tasks, not ever asked me for any help past the first intro.

Since the advent of "code bootcamps", I've noticed a trend that when people
say they need a mentor--especially just after having read some semifamous
techie on Twitter say a mentor is essential--they really mean they want a
tutor. They want a lesson plan. They want tutorials (notice the root word
there?) with step by step instructions. They want someone to give them the
answers after trying an exercise or two.

That's not mentorship. That's teaching and it's a difficult, full-time job
that should be paid. Mentorship is learning your own path, with an oracle you
can bounce ideas off when you get truly stuck. A mentor shouldn't even really
have to prepare anything, just be able to point you in the right direction
when you have a tough question. Other programmers who know me in person tend
to learn I'm productive and will ask me questions from time to time. That is
mentorship.

So people who say they need a mentor, or those who say they don't feel
qualified to be a mentor, you probably don't know what you're talking about.
Mentorship is just using someone else's experience to take shortcuts. If you
have any level of experience, you can mentor anyone with less. Hell, it's
often not even about that, even. Often it's just being a quiet ear who can ask
probing questions.

If it sounds like mentorship isn't that valuable, that's because it isn't. You
_shouldn 't_ strictly _need_ it, because your entire career will rest on your
ability to read and figure things out on your own, so you might as well start
now. And you are probably already capable of mentoring, even if you feel like
you only just started. Find a good chatroom on your topic and you probably
have all the mentorship you need--and have probably already been mentoring
other people, if you're active.

~~~
defined
> That's teaching and it's a difficult, full-time job that should be paid.

As someone who taught quite a few C and other programming courses at an adult
education college, I absolutely agree with this statement. If anything, it's a
slight understatement.

------
cvaidya1986
Not sure if advice to startups counts.

~~~
pvilchez
I think it does. I've sat in on mentorships for small businesses via the local
Economic Development dept. at city hall.

~~~
cvaidya1986
Very cool. I think advising others helps clarify one's own thinking.

------
Tharkun
No, but I'd like to.

~~~
pitaj
Me too. Maybe this is a good opportunity for somebody to plug their tutoring-
as-a-service platform?

------
gameshot911
No, I don't.

~~~
quuquuquu
While this answer is a bit short on detail, it does answer the question
presented by OP.

Are people therefore downvoting for the poster's lack of explanation, or
because the poster doesn't mentor someone?

~~~
mjburgess
They're downvoting because a very large number of people don't do it, and it
should be obvious that OP is interested in those primarily those who do -- or
at least, those with reasons either way.

Just saying "No" presumes we care that this specific guy doesnt do some
specific thing. It's quite arrogant.

~~~
quuquuquu
Hmm yes, I mostly agree, in this case the answer is very short AND we can
assume that OP only wants responses from the small percentage of people who do
do this

I originally was imagining this thread to be a poll, and then the crowd was
upvoting affirmative answers and downvoting answers that were the opposite

------
orware
About 3 years ago now (in 2014, time flies) I had two past students who had
graduated from our community college and then gone on to get their Bachelors
in Computer Science who hadn't been able to find jobs after graduating and
that had been maybe in 2010/2011 or so. I worked with one in the Spring and
then the other during the Fall semester.

They each were very much at a beginner level so I essentially started
providing them with books out of my library and having them work through those
and me providing lots of feedback to them and guiding them up in their skills
(starting with HTML, CSS and working up to JavaScript and modern PHP
programming, with things like Composer/Packagist and new frameworks like
Laravel coming into the conversations and also trying to introduce them to
other needed developer skills like Git/Github that would help make them
employable).

In each case they were volunteering for that semester with my small Online
Services department of one (me), so my main goal was building up their skills
so they could be marketable next time they started applying for positions and
I wasn't trying to use them for just building things I needed to build (if
anything, I spent quite a bit of one on one time with them and took them out
to lunch most of the days they spent with me a few times each week).

My work at the time was a bit all over the place so I wasn't doing a ton of
development myself but I had been adding in a lot of these skills too so it
was good to review with them and share what I had learned which in also helped
reinforce my own knowledge too.

Kind of in the middle of the semester and then toward the end I gave them a
realistic mini-project or two that they could work through for the college
that way they can have something to point to that they had done (one of the
things I remember sharing with each of them is that in an interview it's
really nice to be able to point out specific stories/scenarios/projects that
you've worked on to share).

Locally those jobs are pretty rare, but luckily the first guy was able to
apply for a job that had come up just a month or so after the Spring semester
and get one of the good local jobs in web development. For the second guy it
took a little longer, but he ended up being able to get a position in San
Diego and he and his wife moved up there (his wife needed to transfer to
another school for her work, but I think it at all panned out for them).

I rarely get to talk with anyone else locally about what I do, so in that way
it's pretty lonely so when I do have someone locally that's interested in
programming/development it's always nice to share and help them out.

It's hard to keep up on an ongoing basis since it is pretty energy intensive,
but it's definitely nice/rewarding when you do have good people to mentor.

------
michael_j_ward
My local python meetup in Chicago (ChiPy)runs an outstanding mentorship
program that I have mentored for twice. The program lead does a great job of
matching mentees with mentors- so all skill levels can apply.

If you're interested in mentoring in Chicago, I'd recommend coming to a meetup
and saying hello!

