Mentoring: My Gateway Drug to Leadership
When I joined Yelp, I was 1 of 3 Android Engineers. I was called “senior” though I only had 1.5 years of Android experience. At the time, that was hard to come by as Android was not that old of a platform.
So a month in, I was still figuring out how things worked, I asked my manager how I could be a mentor. I was thinking long term, but he said “actually we have an Android intern joining, are you interested?”
I said yes.
About a month later, we hired another full time Android engineer, and I said yes to mentoring them as well.
So me, this pretty inexperienced engineer (in my opinion at the time) had 2 mentees. I met with them weekly, helped them navigate a company I was learning to navigate, and helped them gain new perspective in different areas of software engineering and Android development.
My relationship with my intern was more involved because I had to help them find projects, and guide them a lot more, but both were great relationships that taught me a lot. I actually ended up becoming lifelong friends with the full time engineer, and attended his wedding years later.
I would go on to mentor dozens of software engineers in my career.
Each time I felt I was able to make a huge difference and help them see things in a few 1:1s that took me years and years to learn. It felt like giving people the shortcuts I wish I had learned! It was pretty intoxicating, and I learned to really love helping others level up.
I had one mentee who let me know early on in our relationship that they were planning to quit. We talked about this a lot, and they revealed a lot of issues they were having that ultimately could be solved if they had open and honest conversations with their manager. They would go on to stay for a few more years, getting a promotion, and being a lot happier with their job. They expressed looking forward to coming to work now, instead of dreading it and counting down the days until they would leave.
I consistently signed up for the mentorship program and every time I was matched with someone it felt like a new opportunity to make a big difference and learn a lot.
I’ve talked about why I became a manager before, but I actually forgot about the mentorship angle as a strong motivation. It was how I validated that being a manager was something I felt like I could be good at.
It’s not the only aspect of being a manager, and coaching+mentoring can be quite a bit different when its your team, but it was a good signal.
As a manager you are responsible for the success of the team, and by that nature your incentives are different. Being a truly great coach and mentor as a manager requires you to separate yourself from that fact, so that you can focus on what’s best for the individual, even if it hurts the overall teams success. Ideally you can align what’s best for them and the team, but sometimes there is a choice.
Most people have had a manager who would easily throw you under the bus for the team/business. Not only do I find this reprehensible in most situations, it’s just bad business. The best choice is to focus on the individual and what’s best for them, which will collectively be good for everyone. This is not a rule that always works, but it has been a very successful policy for me as a leader.
Everything I wrote in the previous article is true, I wanted to be a manager after reading High Output Management, and permanent remote led to me pulling the trigger on talking to my manager about becoming a manager, it was my mentorship experience that made me go “yes, I really think this is a good idea”.
If you’re considering engineering leadership, whether that’s as a manager or a tech lead, lean into mentoring opportunities more. Create opportunities to help others. How does that make you feel? If you feel like it’s a waste of time, then the individual contributor track may be a bitter fit for you.
If you find fulfillment in helping guide others, than it’s a strong signal that leadership may be something you enjoy.