You sound like my boss ;) Here's my beef against him: Lack of trust. If he says to me: "Do X", then expect me to do it. If hours have passed and I still haven

You sound like my boss ;) Here's my beef against him: Lack of trust. If he says to me: "Do X", then expect me to do it. If hours have passed and I still haven't done, and I didn't ask for help, then something is wrong with me. I have a task and I am not completing it. But you got to give me the chance to actually do it. For example, he asked me to test a new mod_rewrite configuration on a server, and that I should use curl for it. I was going to do it anyway, so I kind let his comment go from on ear through the other. But then he said, hey, you must send an specific header because of the way our network is configured. That was actually useful, because I didn't know about this configuration. So I typed "man curl" on the command line to know how to send a header. He said to me: - No need to look on man, I will tell you what you need to send the header. Type -H... I interrupted him and said: - Wow, let me discover how to do this myself. Let me have a chance to learn. So, here's the thing. There are struggles and there are struggles ;) If I am really struggling on something that is simple, give me guidelines, tips, and if I am still failing, then the problem is with me, not you. You need to learn this about who you're mentoring. When they're struggling because they can't learn, and when they're struggling because they need to learn something. In practice, it's way more complex than this. Looking on "man curl" about how to send headers takes one minute, so to me it looked like an offense when he was telling me how to do. Now if he asked me something harder, that would require me hours of studying, than perhaps he telling me what do would be better, since the problem will be resolved faster. As a mentor, that's whay you need to learn. You need to balance all these factors to decide if you need to step in or not. But first of all, like I said in the beginning, trust is the first step. Believe that your student can accomplish something that you thrown at them, and only interfere when the deadline approaches, and the problem needs to be resolved right now. And then later, review what happened. Will this person ever learn this? Is this really that hard that learning about it takes 5 hours instead of 1 hour? Does that mean perhaps he's not the best person for the task? Does this mean that he will never be the right person for the task or will he grok it sometime later? Questions, questions everywhere ;)