I'm a recent grad and have been working on small startup teams. With the pandemic, it's been kind of a ping pong because funding has fallen through a few times. I work with subject matter experts but they aren't the technical mentors I've had in prior roles (someone who can review my code, provide meaningful guidance on systems design, etc). I am lucky to have a group of mentors I've cultivated over the years. But it's harder to find technical mentorship - not necessarily day to day but on a rather frequent basis. How do you all find technical mentorship? Open to answers from anyone/everyone who would like to share.
I've had mentors and I mentor quite often. Mentors want to bounce their ideas off someone. You have to be curious enough to add more to their ideas and skilled enough to criticize it.<p>Criticism is where the sweet spot falls IMO. You have to criticize a mentor to a point they learn from it, but not where they think you have much to learn. Some mentors and students also tend to be stubborn and don't accept any criticism.<p>Technical mentors are hard for this reason. Technically superior people tend to be so good at something that it's muscle memory. Recent grads tend to not only struggle, but they stay in groups that reinforces bad habits. There are some unusual habits - like how Paul Graham uses lines of codes as a metric for work done, which doesn't click well with newbies. This creates a knee jerk contempt in the student, and the mentor as well.<p>So normally, you want to look for a mentor who's just a few years ahead of you. You don't necessarily want to meet the best programmer, but more a big sister figure who's worked in a company for 5 years maybe.