Career & Leadership › Technical Leadership
Mentoring
Helping less experienced engineers grow.
Also known as: mentorship, being a mentor, mentoring junior engineers, coaching engineers, growing others
Mentoring is helping a less experienced person grow, by sharing experience, perspective and feedback, and by creating opportunities for them to learn. It’s one of the most valuable things a senior engineer can do. It multiplies a team’s capability far more than your own individual output, and it’s an expected part of growing in scope (scope of work, impact). It also teaches you, since explaining forces clarity.
Related roles
| Role | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mentor | A more experienced person sharing guidance, context and perspective, often over a longer relationship |
| Coach | Helps someone find their own answers through questions |
| Sponsor | Uses their influence to create opportunities for someone (a stretch assignment, a recommendation) |
| Buddy | A peer who helps a newcomer settle in (first weeks) |
What good mentoring looks like
- Start with their goals. What do they want to learn or become? A short conversation about goals and current strengths shapes everything. Revisit it occasionally.
- Meet regularly, even briefly (weekly or fortnightly), so the relationship doesn’t depend on crises (one-on-ones).
- Give context, not just instructions. Explain why decisions are made, what trade-offs you weighed, how the system evolved. Context is what juniors lack.
- Let them struggle productively, then help. Don’t solve it for them in the first minute. Ask “what have you tried?” and “what do you think is happening?”, and give hints before answers (productive struggle, when to ask for help).
- Delegate real work with support. Stretch tasks slightly beyond comfort, with a safety net: check-ins, a design review, and your availability. People grow by doing.
- Review their work to teach, not just to correct. Explain the reasoning behind comments (giving code review).
- Give specific, timely, kind feedback, including praise for what’s going well (giving feedback).
- Pair on hard problems and let them observe how you think: how you debug, how you read an unfamiliar codebase (pairing).
- Share your mistakes and uncertainty. It normalizes learning and makes it safe to ask (psychological safety).
- Point to resources and people, not only to yourself. Introduce them around.
- Advocate for them: make their work visible to others, and recommend them for opportunities.
Pitfalls
- Doing it for them. Taking over because it’s faster. It helps today and hurts their growth.
- Mentoring in your own image. Support their path and style, not a copy of yours.
- Only criticizing, or only reassuring.
- Unclear expectations about time and topics. Agree on them upfront.
- Neglecting it under pressure. It’s real work. Make time for it, and make it visible to your manager.
- Overstepping: you advise, they decide. Respect confidentiality too.
- Assuming one approach fits everyone. People learn differently.
If you’re the junior
You can ask for mentoring, and make it easier: prepare topics, bring specific questions, act on advice and report back, and respect their time (finding a mentor).
The best signs that mentoring works: the person needs you less over time, takes on bigger problems and starts helping others.