Now that I’m entering the 5th decade of my career with technology companies – and with Covid19 providing an assist in freeing up my calendar somewhat – lately it’s been a time of reflection.

I’ve never considered myself to be a standout engineer. I’ve done okay in my career, no complaints, but have never worked anywhere that I was the BMOC technology-wise.  Each place has had some real shining stars and it’s been both a privilege and humbling to get to know them.

But there are different ways to add value to your particular engineering organization. I was reminded of this yesterday as I was mentoring a new start on the deployment process for some frontend code. This is a process I only learned myself a couple of months ago, but now I’m mentoring others on it. That’s often how it works. Not long after you learn something, others in the company start referring to you as the defacto SME.

I made a list of some former senior co-workers who have taken the time to mentor me so that I could try to find common traits that made them good mentors. For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with. If you’re junior on the scale of things, maybe seek people with some of these traits out. If you’re senior, just know that people with these particular traits have made a real difference in my career.

True SME

First and foremost the person needs to be a true subject matter expert (SME) on whatever it is I’m asking about. They either know the answer or know where to find it. At the end of the day, they’ve been helpful in advancing whatever problem I’ve been tasked with resolving.

The little things

Knowlege and skils are great but it makes a huge difference if they are also personable. This is not always the case with those who are considered top of the heap on the tech stack scale. We have all run into the legendary recluse who has marginal social skills but is yet invaluable to the company because they just know so much. It can be frustrating when people with the most knowledge aren’t equipped to help, but that’s just how it is in tech. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

What is most helpful is the very basics, like getting calls/emails returned. Everyone is busy, but the good mentor will at least respond and communicate that while maybe they are busy right now, they will set expectations on when they can meet with you at a later time in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you’re stressing them out with your questions.

Meet me at my level

No, I don’t mean showing up at my desk. I mean asking ME questions to find out what I already know or don’t know so they know where to start. Some people make assumptions that I already know several things I have yet to learn and start talking over my head from the first sentence. Then we have to back up.  The good mentor wants to know where to start and then bring my understanding along at whatever pace is possible.

A real-world example

I once left a fairly stable career in Aerospace in Everett, WA. in order to move the family back to the city where I grew up, Portland, Oregon. I was still writing software, but it was for a small printer company. The underlying technologies of the companies had nothing in common with each other (Flight Controls v. Printers). This change was harder than I had expected it would be.

When I arrived our team of 10 was tasked with reverse-engineering the Adobe PostScript Level II interpreter so that the parent company (Oce’, Netherlands) could avoid paying royalties to Adobe when they shipped their printers with PostScript capability.

I was new so they had divided up the teams in the backroom and then let me know my assignment. I was very fortunate to get paired with not only an extremely brilliant engineer but also a fantastic mentor.

There were only two of us tasked with writing the rendering engine for the printer. The renderer is really where the rubber meets the road in printing. It’s the lowest level. It’s where all of those high-level commands get turned into dots on a page… but not before the boundaries of the image or text are set, and the image is broken up into hundreds if not thousands of trapezoids to fill with dots.

The very notion of that design was fascinating from the start.  Ah, so that’s how they do it.  Wow, I have no idea where to start. My mentor did though. He was a math major and no stranger to figuring this type of thing out. But best of all he was a FANTASTIC teacher. We may have benefited some from small team dynamics, but he set aside about 3 separate 1-hour whiteboard sessions to explain in detail, the design he had in mind. And he stopped to let me ask questions. He figured out where I was starting from (ground zero) and we went from there. His ability to put the right thoughts and images in my head was off the charts helpful. When I talked he listened.  It was… fabulous.  And I learned it.  And if memory servers I performed pretty well after that and held my own.

The pace of change at work has gotten even more frenetic since the 1990’s when I transitioned to printing.  I just hope people can be made aware of how valuable this level of mentoring can be.