Such a surprising number of people saying to never give advice, starting to question my assumed role of mentor a bit. Coming from a professional standpoint, at

Such a surprising number of people saying to never give advice, starting to question my assumed role of mentor a bit. Coming from a professional standpoint, at work, as a software engineer. When you have what you think is relative experience, and think you have a nugget of advice that could help a more junior person out, who you are pretty sure is looking up to you for advice, do you just not give it? I don’t mean in a prescriptive manner, more like “hey I see the road you are on, I have been there, here are some pointers that I think could be of use”. I thought I was careful to always flavor such advice as non-prescriptive— it’s not me saying “do this, otherwise you will fail”, it’s more “here are some interesting ways that I myself have failed in the past”. Maybe I’m wrong? In some cases it’s been months/years working with people in a mentorship role, and I swear I have seen nuggets of my advice turn up later as “yeah I see no issues with this, carry on and good job!!”. The article isn’t about technical advice, but it’s here on the front page of HN so I can’t help but interpret it in that way. I know I’ll be wrong sometimes, because I have been, but I don’t see it as a failure, I am very transparent about how I was wrong, and try to turn into a learning experience for us all.