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> I think for the vast majority of people, it's hard to become a senior or even intermediate developer without some [on the job] mentorship along the way. Doe

by jt2190 10y ago

> I think for the vast majority of people, it's hard to become a senior or even intermediate developer without some [on the job] mentorship along the way. Doesn't this assume that the only mentorship (edit: We're really talking about "job training") is peer mentorship? What about classes, self-training, etc? Why should the onus be placed 100% on the senior employee? Why no onus on the junior employee?

grardb 10y ago
As I wrote in my comment: >I believe this is especially true for aspects outside of writing code. This probably isn't true at every company, but from where I've worked, a big part of being a senior engineer is understanding how to tie in business goals to development. That's not really easy to learn in a tutorial online or by contributing to open source. I went through four years of computer science education, had multiple jobs/internships in college, and even took over 10 MOOCs across Udacity, edX, and Coursera. None of those things prepared me to be the developer I am today (I won't deny that they helped, though). They certainly put me in a great position upon graduating college and got me a great job, but nothing increased my skills more than simply working with more experienced developers in a full-time role.
- jt2190 10y ago
  > [Formal education in software development] certainly put me in a great position upon graduating college and got me a great job, but nothing increased my skills more than simply working with more experienced developers in a full-time role. That's, fine, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about management placing an (implicit, unrecognized and uncompensated) expectation on one developer on a team who happens to have a lot more experience than their peers. In other words, management is happy treating him as equal to his peers when providing compensation, yet expects significantly more output for the same pay.
chillacy 10y ago
At the few places I've worked I've found a large part of the training was company-specific or team-specific tribal knowledge (here's how you restart our service, here's how our data pipeline works) that was either not actually documented, or documented somewhere in a wiki and despairingly out of date or unfindable. That's arguably the fault of the team, but one of the companies (can't mention names) flat out said that it was one of their strengths to be a "storytelling" company.
jt2190 10y ago
Downvoters: Consider the context of this thread... Imagine you're asked to train your peers for no extra compensation or credit, and you're still expected to produce 100% of the typical work output. At the same time, your peers are compensated at the same rate, are considered equally for raises and promotions, but are not expected to train anyone. I understand that senior devs might mentor juniors, or that experienced devs might train up newbies, but to expect one dev to "step up" to mentor teammates without some kind of recognition or compensation is not reasonable. (edit: Especially if those teammates are a long way from being qualified to do the work.)
- icebraining 10y ago
  The issue of having too much work for your time is valid, but it hadn't been raised, as far as I can see, and it's mostly irrelevant whether it's mentoring or any other kind of work.

by jt2190 10y ago

grardb 10y ago

As I wrote in my comment: >I believe this is especially true for aspects outside of writing code. This probably isn't true at every company, but from where I've worked, a big part of being a senior engineer is understanding how to tie in business goals to development. That's not really easy to learn in a tutorial online or by contributing to open source. I went through four years of computer science education, had multiple jobs/internships in college, and even took over 10 MOOCs across Udacity, edX, and Coursera. None of those things prepared me to be the developer I am today (I won't deny that they helped, though). They certainly put me in a great position upon graduating college and got me a great job, but nothing increased my skills more than simply working with more experienced developers in a full-time role.

jt2190 10y ago
> [Formal education in software development] certainly put me in a great position upon graduating college and got me a great job, but nothing increased my skills more than simply working with more experienced developers in a full-time role. That's, fine, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about management placing an (implicit, unrecognized and uncompensated) expectation on one developer on a team who happens to have a lot more experience than their peers. In other words, management is happy treating him as equal to his peers when providing compensation, yet expects significantly more output for the same pay.

chillacy 10y ago

At the few places I've worked I've found a large part of the training was company-specific or team-specific tribal knowledge (here's how you restart our service, here's how our data pipeline works) that was either not actually documented, or documented somewhere in a wiki and despairingly out of date or unfindable. That's arguably the fault of the team, but one of the companies (can't mention names) flat out said that it was one of their strengths to be a "storytelling" company.

jt2190 10y ago

Downvoters: Consider the context of this thread... Imagine you're asked to train your peers for no extra compensation or credit, and you're still expected to produce 100% of the typical work output. At the same time, your peers are compensated at the same rate, are considered equally for raises and promotions, but are not expected to train anyone. I understand that senior devs might mentor juniors, or that experienced devs might train up newbies, but to expect one dev to "step up" to mentor teammates without some kind of recognition or compensation is not reasonable. (edit: Especially if those teammates are a long way from being qualified to do the work.)

icebraining 10y ago
The issue of having too much work for your time is valid, but it hadn't been raised, as far as I can see, and it's mostly irrelevant whether it's mentoring or any other kind of work.