Spoon-feeding to Failure: A Mentorship Conundrum
Experienced engineers want to be left alone to their solitude and productiveness. Leaders have a lot on their plate and need clueless new hires like another hole in their head. Who remains to lead the blind?
A couple of junior engineers started today in our remote-first team, fresh out of college. As a routine welcome we organized a 1hr orientation call where we primarily talk about our origins and our values.
We went over each individual value with specific real-life examples. Each example explained is also an expectation set. As we managed to hire people who are a good values-fit we are only seeing smiling and nodding.
We don't waste time on this call to talk about day to day stuff, immediate tasks, technology. This is a pure values / expectations talk, a constitution we have everyone agree upon on their first day on the job.
"Today you can think of yourselves as rookies. As of tomorrow, you are all full-fledged members of our team and will be working side-by-side with everyone else. The only difference is the size of the potato bag you will be carrying, increasing in size as you grow."
Whenever we have an opportunity we will give low priority production assignments to our new team members, regardless of their (in)experience, and we will manage our own expectations accordingly. Good thing we are not surgeons putting scalpels in the hands of college grads. 😉
What next, who will provide oversight if all experienced people are busy?
Through a lot of trial and error we can say with a lot of confidence that the engineers learn increasingly more when they:
- Read / listen
- Do
- Teach - herein lies the solution
A few months back we had another group of a few fresh-out-of-college-values-fit engineers onboarded. They already had an opportunity to do an open heart surgery in production and look upon the face of death customers.
They've learned a lot but aren't yet sure in everything they do. They have battle scars and know where all the landmines are along the first mile.
"Congrats! You are now proud mentors of the new colleagues who just started today. Don't mess them up!" 😉
At first this approach sounds counterintuitive, however what we create here is a mentorship hierarchy which makes everyone feel the responsibility early on.
Instead of spoon-feeding and building blind followers we are placing the buck in front of everyone and building leaders.
At the same time, by having the ability to teach others we have an opportunity to solidify everything we've learned so far and to figure out the answers to questions we hear for the first time, together.
Does this mean that the mentorship system works flawlessly? Yes, if we consider the system is a hierarchical propagation of leadership values and working patterns. Anti-patterns included, free of charge.
We found this out the hard way when an experienced QA engineer didn't receive the latest product build to conduct acceptance testing. Everyone being a leader, the QA decided to ask a junior software engineer to send him the entire product source code in order to build the code locally. The code was sent, a local build was made, product was tested, issues were reported. The entire DevOps pipeline was skipped, security scans were ignored, version hierarchy was dismissed, company IP was flung around in an unencrypted archive file. 😕
