Mentorship, especially in software engineering, is a bit...

Mentorship, especially in software engineering, is a bit of an overloaded term at this point. I often hear about mentors struggling to find mentees or similarly mentees struggling to find a mentor. I find this difficult to imagine, given mentorship is simply a specific form a relationship can take, which often isn’t unidirectional. " "" "In my eyes, almost all work relationships have some element of mentorship going on. Helping someone else think about a problem, about a situation, or about what to do next in their career? That’s mentorship. While mentorship can happen at any time, career planning often takes a very conscious effort to broach with others." "" "One of the key reasons I’m still at LinkedIn is the mentorship I find every single day. I feel like I have limitless perspectives to learn from in my current position and do my best to expose that same vision to those around me who might not see it that way. Admittedly I’m not shy about reaching out to a senior engineer to pick their brain for 30 minutes, but no one at LinkedIn should be! Our culture makes it such that no one is going to tell you outright: “no” — the worst they’ll give you is: “I’m swamped right now, how about in a few weeks?” As long as you can be patient and are respectful in the way you ask, it’s possible to get time with anyone to learn from them. " "" "Mentorship also doesn’t have to be a super direct relationship with a fixed schedule. It can also be part of a long-term relationship you form over infrequent 1:1s, with async touchpoints via Slack/other online forums. If you are learning from the relationship, there’s a mentorship component there. " "" "My favorite part of mentorship is the learning I get from helping others. It most often solidifies my own knowledge and gives me new ideas of what to try down the road. So my advice to those struggling to find mentorship, stop looking so hard! Focus on learning from your peers, and find things they may want to learn from you, and all of a sudden, you’ll see mentors all around you #bendevtip

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Original post on LinkedIn