preface
In the development of engineers, it may be a glorious and challenging job to become a mentor, which is also a stage that many engineers must go through. The author will talk about how to become a reliable mentor based on his own experience.
Mentor’s goals
Solution implementer–>Problem solver
Solution Implementer: a Solution Implementer that focuses on converting the Solution into code. Newcomers to this phase need to be familiar with both the development environment and the tool framework. At this stage, the positive feedback and guidance made him think more about the reasons for the plan decision.
Problem Solver: People at this stage are able to think more about problems and give reasonable answers.
The mentor’s goal is to guide the novice to be competent solution implementer and strive to transform into problem solver, capable of facing problems independently and finding reasonable solutions.
What should a mentor look out for?
Timely feedback
Mentors need to give clear and direct feedback on their expectations and requirements for new recruits. What to do and what not to do.
For the new do good, in formal occasions to give praise, the new do not do enough, privately and promptly pointed out.
Some things are vague in the eyes of the new employee, so it is important to correct them in time and not develop bad habits because of insufficient feedback.
How do you Teach them to Teach themselves?
The cultivation of new people should focus on improving their self-study ability as the goal, teach people to fish. For example, when answering the new person’s question, consciously tell him how you found the idea to solve the problem.
What websites should you go to when you encounter problems? Should you find the documents of the module with problems in the first time, or use Google to search, and how to determine keywords in the process of search, etc.
Self-study ability is the most important thing that needs to be paid attention to and spent time to cultivate.
Consciously cultivate habit awareness and make demands
Habits determine a person’s behavior. Cultivate good habits on purpose.
Deliver on time, deliver clean code, discuss technical solutions before you go live, make sure everyone knows before you go live, and so on.
The plasticity of new students is relatively strong, and there will be feedback immediately after correcting bad habits for several times.
For smart payment business, online quality awareness and careful habits are crucial and need to be consciously cultivated.
The “degree” of authorization
Don’t overestimate a newcomer’s abilities by delegating too much work to him or her.
As mentioned above, most of the new people are Solution implementers, so tasks should be assigned step by step and not to deal with complex problems at the beginning.
On the one hand, a mistake may have an impact on the business, and on the other hand, it will hinder the confidence building of new staff.
Keep away from their keyboard.
For a certain task, just because the novice can’t finish it, he can’t get started and solve it by himself. Although the problem can be solved better in the short term, the novice can’t grow better.
Don’t let yourself be the rookie’s backup. Avoid thinking, “I can’t handle this, my mentor will help me eventually.”
Hold off on answers
When the new person has a question to ask, consider the idea of guiding it, rather than directly giving the answer.
The newcomer’s work experience and technical ability must not be as good as the mentor’s, so the mentor may be able to answer some questions immediately based on experience, but in this case, it is necessary to “postpone the answer”.
The benefits of this are:
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The new person can continue to think about the problem according to the ideas given by the mentor, and in the process of thinking, they can get a deeper understanding of the problem.
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When the same problem is encountered again, the new person can try to use the ideas given before to think, and solve the problem more smoothly.
The key of a mentor is to “guide”, so more guidance and guidance for solving problems.
conclusion
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reference
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/138396/how-to-mentor-a-junior-developer
(Pictures from the network, if there is infringement, contact me.)