Mentors are commonly assigned to junior members of a team, such as new hires straight out of school or student interns. Many organizations use mentors as part of their onboarding process for all new hires. Sometimes the mentor is another junior person on the team, perhaps herself only a year or two into the organization; someone who can still clearly remember the onboarding or internship process herself, and can closely relate to the new person. Other times the mentor is a senior engineer who can act as a technical mentor in addition to helping the new hire get up to speed on the process. In a healthy organization, this onboarding mentorship role is used as an opportunity for both parties. The mentor gets the chance to see what it is like to have responsibility for another person, and the mentee gets an overseer who is focused on him alone, without other reports clamoring for his mentor’s attention.
I remember my first mentor, who guided me through my first serious taste of working as a software engineer. I was an intern at Sun Microsystems, working on a team that wrote JVM tools. This was the first job where I had a real software project to build, and I was lucky enough to have a great mentor, a senior engineer named Kevin. Kevin was a memorable mentor because, despite being a senior technical leader in the area we were working in, he made time for me. Instead of showing me a desk and leaving me to figure out what exactly I needed to do, Kevin took the time to discuss projects with me, to sit with me at the whiteboard, to go through the code together. I knew what I was expected to get done, and when I got stuck, I could ask him for help. That summer was critical for my development as a software engineer, because under his guidance I began to see that I could actually do real-world work and that I was capable of being a productive employee. Working with Kevin was one of my first major career milestones. This experience taught me the value of mentorship.