Don’t Tell Me, Show Me
The tale of two companies:
This is the tale of two software companies — let’s call them Techware and Softnology. Each is successful in their own right, but they each use a different training strategy geared towards the younger generation of developers. The internship programs at both companies excite and challenge their interns over the course of three months, and both attempt to teach their interns as much about being a developer as they can.
When a young developer is hired for an internship at Techware, Techware employees cheer and clap as the intern (along with their internship “class”) receives a tour of the facilities and learns where they’ll be working and who they’ll be working with over the next three months. At the end of the tour, the guide who has been leading the interns around stops, turns around, and grins. It’s finally time to reveal what groups the interns will latch onto for the remainder of the summer. Three interns get placed into front-end web development; two more get placed into database management. Another group of three interns joins the user interface design team, and four lucky interns join the most sought-after team: the artificial intelligence and data science team.
When a young developer is hired for an internship at Softnology, the developer receives a warm welcome at the door when they arrive at the office. Once inside, the intern scans the room and notices that only one other intern has arrived. After the initial pleasantries are out of the way, the intern comes to find out that Softnology only hired two interns, which makes sense, considering that Softnology’s entire company is comprised of 6 employees. The company is co-owned: one owner works as a full-stack developer, the other works as a designer, and each owner beckons to an intern to join them. Our intern eases into the developer-owner’s office, prepares to sit down across the desk, but stops halfway into the chair. The owner is beckoning the intern to come around the desk and sit with him.
At Techware, once the interns have been sorted, they rush to the desks (or “workspaces”) that have been set out for them in their appropriate departments. Once there, the employees within the department present the interns with a summer internship project for each of them. One intern is tasked with coming up with a possible redesign of the user interface for an internal conference room reservation program, while another is tasked with proposing a plan to speed up Techware’s employee birthday calendar database. Each intern’s project will certainly take the entirety of the internship to complete, so each intern starts as soon as they can, attempting to press onward as quickly as possible.
At Softnology, the intern joins his boss behind the desk. The boss points at his screens, one showing a massive block of code, the other displaying a production website that seems to have gone awry, and asks the intern what they think the problem is. The boss and the intern pour over the code block causing the problem for what seems to be hours until finally, the intern pipes up, saying that the boss had misspelled a variable name, identifying the location of the bug. The boss chuckles, congratulating the intern for finding the bug and reminding the intern that even seasoned programmers can make spelling errors. Once the boss pushes the new bug-fix into the codebase, he, with the intern still beside him, downloads and installs a package for his text-editor to prevent a spelling mistake like that from happening again, recommending all the while that the intern do the same.
Two months into their projects, the interns at Techware continue to make forward progress with their assignments. Aside from their daily stand-up meetings with their respective groups, the interns don’t have much contact with their fellow employees unless they get hopelessly stuck. Even then, the interns generally get redirected to their search engine of choice to learn the answer, because the other employees are busy with their own projects, meetings, and deadlines. Regardless, the interns are learning a lot and are generally self-sufficient within their projects.
Two months into his employment with Softnology, the intern still sits next to the boss every day at work but has finally begun to branch out and do his own work. For the first week, the boss would talk the intern through whatever problems the boss was working on that day, keeping the intern close so that the intern could assist wherever possible. Eventually though, once the intern became familiar with the codebases that Softnology currently works in, the boss gave the intern his own tasks on the same projects that the boss was working on. The boss was open to answering any questions the intern had and was prepared to jump over to the intern’s problem and walk him through it, even though it happened multiple times an hour. Regardless, the intern learned a lot through the process, and by the end of those two months, had become generally self-sufficient with the same projects that the boss was working on.
At the end of the Techware internship program, Techware employees gathered in the conference rooms to watch presentations from the Techware interns about their respective summer projects. All of the interns had some sort of success with their projects, so the employees clapped and cheered for each of the interns as the interns finished their presentations. Food and drink were passed around, and at the end of the day, the Techware interns began their journies home, leaving Techware to go back to business as usual until the next group of interns arrives.
At the end of the Softnology internship, the company took the interns out to a “last-day lunch.” As they ate, the employees reminisced over the work that had been done and the progress that had been made over the past three months. The boss laughed again about how our intern had saved him on the intern’s very first day by catching a typo in the code, and the intern was quick to remind his boss about how many typos the boss would catch of his in a single day. As lunch progressed, the owners began to ask for the interns’ opinions on the internship program as a whole. Did the interns feel like they got anything out of the program? Did they feel like the work they did was fair, and not too easy or too hard? The conversation followed this pattern until the end of the meal, and then the interns went their separate ways, leaving Softnology with new insights, goals, and dreams for the next round of the internship program.
So why the crazy story?
Obviously, this story is a bit polarized and inflated (especially on the Techware side), but it brings up a solid point. I personally have been in both of these situations: one internship working for an organization who gave me a project that didn’t really have any external merit, and multiple internships with a company who gave me projects that had real-life applications. Both companies that I worked for wanted to educate me, but it was only the latter where I was really taken under someone’s wing and mentored, and that’s what this story is about.
Mentorship is something that is often forgotten about in this day and age, especially by companies who value the profit and the output more than their employees and their future. When a young employee, especially a young developer, can have the opportunity to be mentored, entirely new worlds can be opened up that they had never even known about before. I am a product of that idea; when I took an internship with a company like Softnology, I had just begun programming because my attempt at becoming an engineer just hadn’t worked out. I knew I liked computers, but I didn’t know anything more than that. I lucked out when I landed this internship, and by the time I had finished the summer, I was a changed developer. Instead of being unconfident in my own work, to the point where I was literally terrified to push my code live, I was confident in my abilities. Instead of having no idea where the boundaries of my knowledge were, I left with a deeper understanding of what I knew, but more importantly, of what I didn’t know.
I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I am the software engineer that I am today because I was mentored. I am in a field that I love more than anything because I was mentored. My standards for employment and work, in general, are now higher than ever because I was mentored. And, most importantly, I am better personally, as an employee, and as a mentor because I was mentored. And now, being on the other side of the coin working for a company who uses this mentorship model with our own interns, I can guarantee that having a mentorship culture in the office brings countless benefits to the company as a whole. Mentees bring a feeling of new life to the company, bringing with them new ideas and experiences and points of view that can only be absorbed by spending time getting to know them and work with them, just like in the mentorship model.
Here are my two pieces of advice when it comes to mentoring:
- Employers, consider having mentors for your interns and new hires. Train your mentors to care about their mentees, and pay them for their efforts because mentorship is a lot harder than it seems. Bosses, owners, C-level executives, don’t think that you are too high up the chain to be able to mentor the new people. The fact that I was mentored by the owner of a company shaped me into a confident developer, but also gave me a deep-seeded love for the company that I worked for.
- Employees, interns, young developers, don’t settle for a company that doesn’t give you the care and attention you deserve. You might learn a lot about programming from having an individual project and having to learn through your problems yourself, but you can learn a lot more from having a mentor. Having a mentor teaches you about your field, for sure, but it also gives you insight into other parts of your life that you probably don’t even know need to be mentored. Even if interning for “that company” will look amazing on your resumé or will earn you a lot of money, I say that interning for a company where you get to work on projects that matter, working right with a seasoned employee will give you exponentially more benefits in the long run. And if you’re lucky enough to find a company that will look amazing on your resumé, earn you a lot of money, AND will mentor you through the whole internship, latch on and don’t let go!
So what can I do?
If you’re interested in becoming a mentor, or are searching for a mentor to call your own, there are a few options that you can look into!
- There are lots of organizations geared specifically at matching up mentees with mentors across a wide variety of fields. Generally, they have fairly simple sign-up processes, so long as you pass their background checks. One example of an organization like this can be found here: https://www.mentoring.org/get-involved/become-a-mentor/
- Check with your local state or city government to see if they have any programs available. Where I live, we have something called the “Mayor’s Mentorship Program” that does exactly what it says on the box.
- In the coding world, the idea of “meetups” is huge. If you’re not familiar with the lingo or are outside the world of tech, a meetup is basically a large meeting of like-minded people. They can consist of anything from just meeting up to network and mingle, to having a talk about a specific topic, to getting together to work on similar projects. They can also be incredible places to find people willing to mentor you or to find people to mentor. If you’re into programming, FreeCodeCamp has tons of meetups (they call them “study groups”) around the world. Follow this link to see if you have one near you: https://study-group-directory.freecodecamp.org.
- Finally, try checking with your local schools and universites, sometimes they can have mentorship programs that you can be a part of, either as a mentor or a mentee.
Regardless of how you participate in the mentorship culture, whether it be as a mentor, a mentee, or just a supporter of the cause, it will be one of the best choices you ever make because the impact you will have will be remembered for decades to come.
