Why did you decide to become a mentor?
I spent 15 years as a professional software engineer, most of it for Amazon & AWS, up to the Principal/Staff level. Then in 2022, I took an intentional step back from full-time work to spend more time with my family and try to launch a freelance career.
While I had been working at Amazon, I was an interview "Bar Raiser", which was sort of a side job within the company. I participated in over a thousand hiring panels, conducting interviews as well as leading the "debrief" meetings where the hiring decisions were made. I had really enjoyed this aspect of my job, as well as mentoring other engineers in general, and I had vague plans of launching a solo "interview coaching" business once I started freelancing. But I was a bit overwhelmed and unsure of how to get started. I don't have a blog to leverage, I'm terrible at hustling on LinkedIn, etc... Plus I'm busy taking care of two young kids while my wife goes back to work full-time
About six months after I quit working full-time, I was having coffee with a friend from my last department at AWS, Demian Gutierrez. He told me about MentorCruise and I decided to give it a shot. I liked that MentorCruise handles most of the boring "administrative" parts of matchmaking and mentoring and lets me focus on working one-on-one with mentees, which is the part I'm interested in.
How did you get your career start?
My degree is in Computer Engineering (a mix of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering), and while I was in school I thought I would eventually work on the hardware or low-level embedded software side. I had an internship at Intel, and I sort of just assumed I would go down that path. However, I eventually took this upper division course in C++ programming with a really memorable professor, someone who really made it feel exciting and powerful to put these huge complicated bits of code together and see them work perfectly together. I finally got this "spark" I was looking for but didn't realize yet, and I was hooked. He hired me part-time to work at his software startup, as he did with many of his students.
That company was my first introduction to a really strong coding culture that took software craftsmanship seriously, where I felt like I was always learning from the best. It was the kind of place where the "Spolsky Test" (from Joel on Software) was taped up to the wall to keep everyone honest, and we had weekly group "code beautification" meetings where we brainstormed ways to refactor problem areas in our codebase. I eventually veered sharply towards the pure software side in my career, and I owe a lot of that to my early mentors at this startup, many of which I'm still close with.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
There are a few different things that people have reached out to me for help with.
Interview preparation and practice is probably the most common. Software engineers enjoyed a pretty long run of constantly being in-demand in the hiring market and generally having no widespread layoffs, but that changed a lot in late 2022. It's not as bad as a lot of the "doom and gloom" in social media makes it out to be, but things have changed. Sometimes people want help with specific areas ("coding", "system design", etc.), other times people aren't quite sure what they need -- which is all fine, of course.
My approach is generally pretty similar regardless. I focus on specific areas that people want help in, but I also spend a lot of time trying to understand things more holistically -- for example, digging into someone's longer-term goals, or doing a general "culture-fit" style behavioral mock interview, to see how their skills and experience come across in a real conversational interview setting. This is how we used to evaluate technical candidates, when I was on the "hiring" side of the desk. We would drill into specific areas and try to evaluate a candidate's specific strengths and weaknesses, but we would also evaluate them holistically, weighing strengths vs. gaps, and looking at common themes (positive or negative) that emerged across the multiple rounds of interviews.
Another thing many people are looking for is "filling in" their technical gaps. For example, a "front-end" or mobile app software developer looking to move into a "full-stack" role but not feeling confident that they can land a job as one yet. Another similar situation is an early-stage or self-bootstrapped startup founder looking for some initial technical architecture guidance as they take an app from conception to prototype, or prototype to production-quality application. Sometimes the goal is directed or structured learning, bootstrapping some initial concepts before diving into a deeper area, or just plain old technical advice.
Advice and mentoring around their current job or career is the other main area I help with, whether it is working on getting a promotion, shifting into a different role, or maybe they feel they are falling behind in their current role and want to "catch up". In either case, I find that by diving into their goals and exploring their current work situation, the projects they have on their plate, etc., we can usually find some clarity and some actionable things to work on.
My wife jokingly calls me a "software therapist", but I have actually found there to be similarities to the way I work as a mentor. As software engineers, we often use our emotions about code to guide us, even if it's hard to articulate what the specific problem actually is (e.g. "code smells", "spaghetti code", etc.). And we can also often use our emotions about our work (which projects we're excited or apprehensive about, and why) to guide us to a deeper understanding of how to advance in our career, or how to find work that is more fulfilling personally (and ideally both).
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
I'm fairly new to MentorCruise so this story is from when I was at Amazon, training others to become "bar raisers". A Bar Raiser (BR) was a special role within the company that served as an "outside the team" perspective on every interview loop, company-wide. A BR has a lot of responsibility and input into every hire, as they plan the areas each interviewer will cover, lead the hiring panel discussion, and ultimately hold a veto power on the hiring decision. It's a role that some people are naturally good at (type A, extroverts, etc.) but others can find it difficult and intimidating (I fall into that second group).
I was working with a BR trainee who was struggling to maintain control over the hiring discussions. Louder personality types and hiring managers desperate to fill headcount were dominating the discussions, and sometimes my trainee would bring the group to a decision that she wasn't totally comfortable with, or end the meeting with some kind of deferral or postponement. She was an introvert (as am I), and having been only recently promoted into her current level, she lacked confidence. When we'd discuss how things went privately, she always knew exactly what went wrong, but she didn't know what to do differently next time.
I worked with her to develop a more structured and detailed plan for each hiring discussion, for example, which topics to cover in what order, which datapoints to highlight and how to frame them in the discussion. We also worked on developing a "toolbox" of ways to guide and frame the hiring decisions differently. Instead of just going around the room, letting everyone ramble and then opening it up to a free-for-all with a final round of voting, she would ask specific questions to each participant. As we heard conflicting datapoints (two interviewers who disagreed on how strong the candidate was on coding, for instance), she would encourage everyone to try to see both perspectives fairly, without immediately biasing towards one or the other. This was difficult, but ultimately rewarding for both her and me. When she eventually became a Bar Raiser, she was always in demand from recruiters and hiring managers alike, because they knew she'd guide the hiring decision expertly and fairly.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
I didn't think I would enjoy it as much as I have, to be honest. Part of it is just connecting with other people. When I started freelancing, I went 100% remote and very rarely have meetings at all, so it's nice to talk to someone other than my family! But I also really enjoy the feeling of knowing I've helped someone else gain some clarity over their work situation, or made them feel more confident, or helped them frame their accomplishments better, etc. Of course, when I hear later that they actually got the job or the promotion or whatever, then I again feel some warm fuzzies about that too, but it's really about that early moment when we're still talking and I can see some positive shift happening in their mindset.
Mentoring is also really good way for me to continue some kind of productive and engaging work during a time where I'm trying to be a stay-at-home-dad while my wife works full-time. I'm trying to do some freelance development and consulting, but that is difficult to sustain while my schedule is randomized by kid activities, cooking, etc. There's no way I'd be able to hold down a full-time job right now without throwing them into full-time daycare, and they're also at a really important and fun age where I don't want to do that, I want to spend as much time as possible with them for the next few years. However, I'm finding that I can sit down and spend 10-20 minutes here and there writing back and forth with my mentees, planning agendas for our calls, or other similar tasks, and then I can squeeze in our regular calls during the times when I do have childcare.