As a sister posts echos, finding a mentor can be a blue moon event. I looked for one my whole career, I've had 2 over the last 10+ years. The first was the le

As a sister posts echos, finding a mentor can be a blue moon event. I looked for one my whole career, I've had 2 over the last 10+ years. The first was the lead sysadmin I was working under at my first datacenter job. We always joked that he's the sort you keep far away from customers, but he also had hands down the broadest and deepest knowledge base of any sysop I've ever worked with, as well as 0 hesitance to dive as deep as needed (patches to ZFS/The kernel? sure.) to fix whatever was going on. My second is a dev lead on my current team. The mentorship is less "official" and more than I've learned more in the last 2 years than in the 4 prior, simply because of the massive amount of experience/best practices he's figured out that I was slowly learning via trial by fire. In both cases, it was largely a factor of WHY I chose to work there, to work with someone who blew me away this much. That's the one type of mentorship I've found to "work for me," and while it's perhaps not what you're looking for/what is often trumpeted, (e.g. we never had a "formal mentor relationship") they've certainly boosted me into a far better all around engineer than I would have ever become on my own.