3 ms·

Frankly: it does sound like your character. I read it once, then more slowly twice, with charity at the forefront of my mind. What struck me each time is how t

Frankly: it does sound like your character. I read it once, then more slowly twice, with charity at the forefront of my mind. What struck me each time is how the things you observe are universally centered around people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. Ex. "They want to show authority even though just beginners" "they are ungrateful and [this makes them a burden to me]" The mind-reading is also a big warning sign ("some people think they know all things"). I would either A) reflect on whether my mentorship had devolved into an authoritarian need to rank people and enforce behaviors, as well as demand fealty or B) give more specific examples. As it stands, the general impression is one of navel-gazing and wanting more credit. To be sure, we are all guilty of that.

NicoJuicy 3y ago
Thanks. I'm willing to check if it's my character though, that's why I asked. > people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. Yeah. This could be related. I observed it more lately, thanks. Perhaps I used some wrong terms with "showing authority". What bothered me then was that he started to give wrong dev advice on multiple occasions to other new people onboarding. If it was correct, I wouldn't have "cared". Note : I'm speaking about only 2 occurrences in the last 6 years. But it's a very frustrating experience. I thought the situation was more coined like the "expert beginner" though ( https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th... ) Have you mentored?
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Yes, to an extent, first had my startup where that was extremely easy (people love to suck up to you when you're in charge). Then Google. Google was a nightmare for sociological reasons not dissimilar to what you describe. Quick anecdote attempting to: - colleague is a server-side engineer, highly sociable and communicative. They transfer to client side work on our team, get about a year experience - new manager comes in but is quiet and absentee due to parental leave, about 6 months of a 9 month launch cycle - manager assumes and communicates I'm de facto lead and should be getting people on the project - colleague sees it more as a competition (residual from new manager coming in and me being de facto lead in between managers). new manager never spelled it out to everyone, so 6 months of hell ensue - got to the point he went to manager's manager to complain regularly, eventually gets cut off and told to stop giving me a hard time because he's describing me helping him - 2 weeks past ship deadline, with 2 weeks of work left, he repeatedly insists in a meeting that our work is in Binary A, but it's in Binary B, I let partner team deal with explaining it to him, I tried to avoid anything approaching conflict - He consistently was a helpful contributor when he sat down and coded, but caused an infernal amount of racket between severe absenteeism and a sense of extreme alarmism when he was present and learning what was going on, because of the gaps like you explain (not knowing what you don't know) - The bitter lesson I took away from all this was more or less that I did the right thing, I got them involved and was polite.and helpful with them, and there was nothing I could do to keep the abusive side of that from happening without causing a situation where it looked like I was uncharitable and failing at my duty to mentor. - Didn't matter or help with my performance review. He kicked up enough noise to indicate smoke, so there must be fire, even if managers manager had enough at that one point. - after launch, i spent the next 6 months carefully building a relationship with the other key team member via everyday things, lunch, cat pictures. That way, my relative formality was obviated, and they began being a good influence (i.e. being blunt with the trouble colleague when they were on another planet, rather than re-enforcing their alarmism)
  - NicoJuicy 3y ago
    Thanks! Many great points. There is a reason behind my original question, since it's related to reflecting over the mentor role in the current situation. And I'm trying to find out if if there, with the current situation, are similarities with past annoyances because of my character. So the following hit right to home, because that's what I'm reflecting about: > What struck me each time is how the things you observe are universally centered around people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. I'd appreciate your thoughts about the mentor role on the following situation. The person I'm mentoring now is a senior with past roles in Amazon, IBM, ... We are working together for 2 months now, but December is traditionally a low activity month because of holidays and a week off by the company. I've had a feature that I was originally going to do solo ( my priority was the deadline and now I'm mentally switching to onboarding the senior the right way). This also means that the user stories were less documented. We have a 7 hour difference in time zone ( he in Canada and I'm from Belgium). I've almost daily asked if there were any issues/unclarities. He also started early sometimes, probably to have more overlap and more help from me. He also worked a Saturday ( for a relatively simple problem that he couldn't fix in 3 days, we did pair programming and I had 2 solutions in 30 minutes). He couldn't solo implement a feature flag, where the "enabled" route took the new endpoint ( swagger generated) and the old route took the old one. I literally had to take the screen over and did it in 5 minutes. Personally, this looked like an easy task. Any advise from the mentor viewpoint? My urge was that this ( and other things) looked like a red flag. I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account. I'm now trying to compare past experiences to reflect on that feedback. But I have a hard time getting over it that someone with 18 years of experience couldn't do that solo. I was always worried that he would be without work. It's possible that this was viewed as "pushing", while I just tuned in to see if everything was clear and if he had questions. My current guess is that perhaps because of my handling, he tried to adjust his coding to my way of doing/development and it impaired him ? ( that's the only possible explanation I can find). This guess is related to what was mentioned after feedback internally. My actual guess is more in the lines of "beginner expert". And my worry is that our team in theory has an additional senior, while that's not the case. Note: I requested for an additional senior ( full stack) for a while since we can use it. But it seems that the position that was open is not similar to what was fulfilled ( I would say there's even such a big difference that's it's red flag. And i believe it's also my job to signal that). Any advice / reflections would be greatly appreciated.
zero-sharp 3y ago
I've definitely been in workplace situations where one person's language creates an impression of egotism (to me). For example coworkers making extravagant comparisons in aptitude (in relation to senior coworkers). I can definitely relate to that aspect of the OP and I would want more examples.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  That's fair and true: I wrote a long comment on a sibling with a similar conflict that might rhyme On further reflection prompted by your comment, I guess what I'd say is it happens, but nothing useful comes from trying to actively address from a mentor role due to sociological reasons: i.e. unless you're emperor, it looks like a mentor rolling in the mud with a mentee. It actually costs you more than them because theyre supposed to be naive and new, whereas with the mentor, it looks like they're too immature to take on the more advanced role. This was shaped by 7 years at Google, a very strange place where unsustainably surreal and smiling was preferred over functional and forthright --- I'm being unfair with that, but it's good to share because it's a concrete warning my bias is towards avoiding conflict and sitting and waiting.
  - NicoJuicy 3y ago
    > It actually costs you more than them because theyre supposed to be naive and new, whereas with the mentor, it looks like they're too immature to take on the more advanced role without. That's a good observation and correct, thanks!
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Eg: - trying to explain things to others, without knowing simpler things related to it - when given a feature on his own, I practically did all the more difficult time-consuming things ( eg. Doing the logic of product variants to the db, when the Post is done) - when they get a feature, instead of discussing how it's going to be done before he starts and if it's a good approach. Finding out when they are halfway in and his pr's are getting blocked because of "wtf" - Starting to spread asking things to people less aware of certain behavior, so it wouldn't be obvious how much time he spend getting something out ( this is a guess behind of the why fyi) - only claiming that they gave doubts about certain variable names, while an implementation is 4 levels deep of "if/else" ( or similar bad code - sometimes, I took the entire afternoon to explain things. The day after, it was just like nothing was discussed and the same mistakes that were talked about to avoid, were in the PR. Tried to talk about it again, but started to ignore it more from then on, since it was time consuming

NicoJuicy 3y ago

Thanks. I'm willing to check if it's my character though, that's why I asked. > people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. Yeah. This could be related. I observed it more lately, thanks. Perhaps I used some wrong terms with "showing authority". What bothered me then was that he started to give wrong dev advice on multiple occasions to other new people onboarding. If it was correct, I wouldn't have "cared". Note : I'm speaking about only 2 occurrences in the last 6 years. But it's a very frustrating experience. I thought the situation was more coined like the "expert beginner" though ( https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th... ) Have you mentored?

refulgentis 3y ago
Yes, to an extent, first had my startup where that was extremely easy (people love to suck up to you when you're in charge). Then Google. Google was a nightmare for sociological reasons not dissimilar to what you describe. Quick anecdote attempting to: - colleague is a server-side engineer, highly sociable and communicative. They transfer to client side work on our team, get about a year experience - new manager comes in but is quiet and absentee due to parental leave, about 6 months of a 9 month launch cycle - manager assumes and communicates I'm de facto lead and should be getting people on the project - colleague sees it more as a competition (residual from new manager coming in and me being de facto lead in between managers). new manager never spelled it out to everyone, so 6 months of hell ensue - got to the point he went to manager's manager to complain regularly, eventually gets cut off and told to stop giving me a hard time because he's describing me helping him - 2 weeks past ship deadline, with 2 weeks of work left, he repeatedly insists in a meeting that our work is in Binary A, but it's in Binary B, I let partner team deal with explaining it to him, I tried to avoid anything approaching conflict - He consistently was a helpful contributor when he sat down and coded, but caused an infernal amount of racket between severe absenteeism and a sense of extreme alarmism when he was present and learning what was going on, because of the gaps like you explain (not knowing what you don't know) - The bitter lesson I took away from all this was more or less that I did the right thing, I got them involved and was polite.and helpful with them, and there was nothing I could do to keep the abusive side of that from happening without causing a situation where it looked like I was uncharitable and failing at my duty to mentor. - Didn't matter or help with my performance review. He kicked up enough noise to indicate smoke, so there must be fire, even if managers manager had enough at that one point. - after launch, i spent the next 6 months carefully building a relationship with the other key team member via everyday things, lunch, cat pictures. That way, my relative formality was obviated, and they began being a good influence (i.e. being blunt with the trouble colleague when they were on another planet, rather than re-enforcing their alarmism)
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Thanks! Many great points. There is a reason behind my original question, since it's related to reflecting over the mentor role in the current situation. And I'm trying to find out if if there, with the current situation, are similarities with past annoyances because of my character. So the following hit right to home, because that's what I'm reflecting about: > What struck me each time is how the things you observe are universally centered around people not behaving the way youd want someone to behave given your estimation of their talent and/or experience. I'd appreciate your thoughts about the mentor role on the following situation. The person I'm mentoring now is a senior with past roles in Amazon, IBM, ... We are working together for 2 months now, but December is traditionally a low activity month because of holidays and a week off by the company. I've had a feature that I was originally going to do solo ( my priority was the deadline and now I'm mentally switching to onboarding the senior the right way). This also means that the user stories were less documented. We have a 7 hour difference in time zone ( he in Canada and I'm from Belgium). I've almost daily asked if there were any issues/unclarities. He also started early sometimes, probably to have more overlap and more help from me. He also worked a Saturday ( for a relatively simple problem that he couldn't fix in 3 days, we did pair programming and I had 2 solutions in 30 minutes). He couldn't solo implement a feature flag, where the "enabled" route took the new endpoint ( swagger generated) and the old route took the old one. I literally had to take the screen over and did it in 5 minutes. Personally, this looked like an easy task. Any advise from the mentor viewpoint? My urge was that this ( and other things) looked like a red flag. I requested feedback internally and it was mentioned to take character/culture differences into account. I'm now trying to compare past experiences to reflect on that feedback. But I have a hard time getting over it that someone with 18 years of experience couldn't do that solo. I was always worried that he would be without work. It's possible that this was viewed as "pushing", while I just tuned in to see if everything was clear and if he had questions. My current guess is that perhaps because of my handling, he tried to adjust his coding to my way of doing/development and it impaired him ? ( that's the only possible explanation I can find). This guess is related to what was mentioned after feedback internally. My actual guess is more in the lines of "beginner expert". And my worry is that our team in theory has an additional senior, while that's not the case. Note: I requested for an additional senior ( full stack) for a while since we can use it. But it seems that the position that was open is not similar to what was fulfilled ( I would say there's even such a big difference that's it's red flag. And i believe it's also my job to signal that). Any advice / reflections would be greatly appreciated.

zero-sharp 3y ago

I've definitely been in workplace situations where one person's language creates an impression of egotism (to me). For example coworkers making extravagant comparisons in aptitude (in relation to senior coworkers). I can definitely relate to that aspect of the OP and I would want more examples.

refulgentis 3y ago
That's fair and true: I wrote a long comment on a sibling with a similar conflict that might rhyme On further reflection prompted by your comment, I guess what I'd say is it happens, but nothing useful comes from trying to actively address from a mentor role due to sociological reasons: i.e. unless you're emperor, it looks like a mentor rolling in the mud with a mentee. It actually costs you more than them because theyre supposed to be naive and new, whereas with the mentor, it looks like they're too immature to take on the more advanced role. This was shaped by 7 years at Google, a very strange place where unsustainably surreal and smiling was preferred over functional and forthright --- I'm being unfair with that, but it's good to share because it's a concrete warning my bias is towards avoiding conflict and sitting and waiting.
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  > It actually costs you more than them because theyre supposed to be naive and new, whereas with the mentor, it looks like they're too immature to take on the more advanced role without. That's a good observation and correct, thanks!
NicoJuicy 3y ago
Eg: - trying to explain things to others, without knowing simpler things related to it - when given a feature on his own, I practically did all the more difficult time-consuming things ( eg. Doing the logic of product variants to the db, when the Post is done) - when they get a feature, instead of discussing how it's going to be done before he starts and if it's a good approach. Finding out when they are halfway in and his pr's are getting blocked because of "wtf" - Starting to spread asking things to people less aware of certain behavior, so it wouldn't be obvious how much time he spend getting something out ( this is a guess behind of the why fyi) - only claiming that they gave doubts about certain variable names, while an implementation is 4 levels deep of "if/else" ( or similar bad code - sometimes, I took the entire afternoon to explain things. The day after, it was just like nothing was discussed and the same mistakes that were talked about to avoid, were in the PR. Tried to talk about it again, but started to ignore it more from then on, since it was time consuming