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"The last senior dev who got internally promoted currently has an allowance of 50% of his time for helping more junior devs understand things. Fifty percent! Th
by maxxxxx 8y ago
"The last senior dev who got internally promoted currently has an allowance of 50% of his time for helping more junior devs understand things. Fifty percent! The intention is to get his senior dev knowledge and experience out of his head and into the heads of five other people; growing ourselves five more senior devs."
I am pretty senior and I like mentoring people. But the incentives are generally the other way: If as an IC I transfer my experience to new people I almost get no credit. The manager of the group gets credit for building a good team but I have to justify my salary compared to the people I mentored. So sometimes I wonder if it would be smarter to keep knowledge to myself so I can look better.
- EliRivers 8y agoI certainly sympathise. In a strong culture, when you mentored someone, their achievements and success would reflect on you. The boss would see your cohort doing well, and give you a pay rise for your fantastically valuable contribution to the company. "Thank you, maxxxxx, for making these junior software engineers 50% more effective," the boss would say. "Why, you've had the same effect as hiring two or three more people!" But if your culture involves ranking and paying people only relative to each other, I can understand the need to protect yourself. And everybody loses :( The company loses, you lose, the potential mentees lose :(
- maxxxxx 8y agoAnother factor is that by mentoring my own output goes down a lot. If I get interrupted several times a day to help then I get nothing done on my own stuff. I think on overall it's still a big gain for the team but I look worse.
- dfrage 8y agoThat calls for setting clear boundaries, and proactively checking in/interrupting your mentee when it's a good time for you to take a break. I like metrics based on how much time the other person has and expects to waste not being able to do anything productive, which strongly suggests you should give him at least two things he can be doing, an obvious second one being reading documentation or otherwise researching necessary stuff he doesn't yet know. After a certain number of hours it's worth an interruption. And there's the reverse effect that teaching someone else forces you to better learn the subject, so you should gain some extra productivity from this.
- davemp 8y agoIf the saying "A rising tide lifts all boats" doesn't hold in your company, I'd say that's definitely a dysfunction.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIsn't that pretty common? "A rising tide lifts only the boats of a privileged few"?
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago> almost get no credit Delivered four senior developers in order to accelerate our team's velocity... that's what my resume says.
- dfrage 8y ago> that's what my resume says. Which implies it was only valuable to future companies you worked for. Those that actually believe in mentoring, which seems to be rare based on what others are saying and my own experiences.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoUm, no, it doesn't imply that at all. The current company values it; he also figured out how to explain it to a future company.
- wccrawford 8y agoI never even considered that. Thank you. I'm going to have to remember to add more "soft skills" and accomplishments to my resume.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoAnything you do at work that is not a regular part of your job is on your resume. If you get called out on it being bullshit, then you remove it.