I am offering mentoring: In which I help you

Copied from here by screye: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31815204

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As a reader, if I had to generalize; Dynomight is a SF-rationalist-substack-adjacent blogger with a good understanding of statistics. The 2 closest popular bloggers I associate him with are SSC and Gwern; both pretty popular on HN.

I particularly loved his blogs on the homelessness[1] and drug[2] crisis in the US. He? digs deep, does the statistical due diligence and usually finds conclusions that richer-academics-media houses have yet to find. I have found his arguments to be in good faith and are generally unencumbered by the political repercussions of said findings.

That's too humble to assume it's a dumb question. If a title includes I, me, we, us, ... I am skipping.

> Who is this

Clicking the domain name next to the story title returns a list of previous HN discussion of the author's articles, with 1000+ comments.

This is a question that is not asked often enough lately. For better or worse, best predictor of human behavior is still what they have done in the past...

Someone else had the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31815204

The author is offering 1.5 hours of meetings, as three 30 minute conversations. It's not nothing, but it's also probably not really the level of mentoring that can be super impactful. But it might make a difference to some people who apply.

I've had one amazing career-related mentor in my life. He probably spent 20+ hours per week for 6 months doing mentoring things for me. He worked VERY hard at this but his work was very impactful on me and I really appreciated it. He had support of his management, which was critical to being able to spend that much time on mentoring.

I've tried to be a mentor for Google Summer of Code before. It was difficult for me and required a LOT more effort and time than I had expected. Mentoring well is not easy.

Would you feel more comfortable about it if you re-framed it as "I'm willing to have three 30 minute calls with people about their life and projects to see if I can provide any useful tips?"

That's what this is, and I don't think it pretends to be anything else. I don't think it's worth getting too hung up on the "mentoring" language used here - especially since I'm certain there is no standard agreed definition of what "mentoring" actually entails. Or have I missed one?

It isn't true at all mentoring takes a lot of effort. It really depends on a lot of factors. My 2 bosses at work are excellent at abstract thinking and mental models. They are usually able to provide significant ways of looking at things differently in just a few minutes of talking with them.

I will say they are hard to find. These aren't your average people.

It also really depends on where the mentee is. If there is a massive gap from where they are and where they want to go, that would be a large undertaking.

However, mentors don't have to expend all that effort. Even just a bit of help from time to time would be preferable to zero mentorship, which is where most people are today.

That was my first impression as well. Unfortunately I grew up with someone who offered "mentoring" when he felt the need to augment his own sense of magnanimity, and the only help that was given was that I needed to agree with his (always bigoted, usually horrifying) opinions about whatever was on his mind at the time. So whenever someone is openly offering mentorship, I immediately nope out.

I don't know anything about the author, but he doesn't seem like a bad person by any means, and this post is probably well intentioned. I just can't help but get an ick from this.

> To be honest, this entire post reeks of that.

I could definitely be out of the loop but I've never heard of the linked blog/newsletter, and there is no explanation of who it is, so the whole thing gives me a feeling of "uhm, why would I do that?"

I’ve always valued the mentor / mentee process and have gone out of my way to help a couple of students from my former university.

The problem is, I’ve struggled to find a mentor that isn’t currently at my company.

Not looking for a job or even network building - I love my job, simply looking for someone to chat with about issues and career development as someone only a few years into their career as a SWE.

Most of the recommendations I receive are sites where the individual has a large list of mentees and cost hundreds of dollars.

Are there better ways to go about this?

Suggestion for @dang, a montlhy "who wants to hang out?" thread.

Although, I can see how it could enshittify quickly with recruiters and whatnot.

At least one exists -- https://adplist.org

That's not mentorship though, that's just the blind leading the blind. Mentorship implies by default one party has asymmetrical knowledge over the other one. That's how the mentee levels up.

I do agree that partnering up with someone is better than going it alone, but if you're both at the same level, progress won't be as substantial as with a true mentor.

Not sure why you are being downvoted when you're absolutely correct. Free resources are usually over taxed and the best way to weed out the uncommitted is to add a cost.