About Mentoring
I consider having been mentored by two people as one of the most important pillars in the development of my professional career. If you are stuck in the working world, have doubts and don't know what to do, let me share my experience in case it helps you. Also, I want to take this post to publicly thank Pedro G. Revington and Álex Fernández (aka Pinchito) for all their time and selfless help throughout these years.
In this post I will talk about:
- My first job: that inexperience when entering the job market where you have no idea about almost anything.
- Being mentored without looking for it: how chance made me find a mentor I didn't know I needed and with his help I changed the path of my professional life.
- Mentoring on leadership: as I have grown and progressed in my career, new challenges have arisen that are no longer just technical but also consist of leading projects and people. And that requires different skills.
- What characteristics do good mentors share? My opinion about them in case it can help you to identify them or to become one.
- Conclusions
1. My First Job
After graduating, I did my internship in a company in my area, Benidorm, and I stayed working. It was not a technology company, although we sold technological devices -mobiles, tablets, headphones...- and there was a quite young and entertaining environment for a recent college graduate.
The stack was not new but it fulfilled its function: different webs made in Perl on a MySQL and an ERP created within the company with Delphi on SQL Server. With what I brought from home (from the university), I was happy because I had never worked with Perl and I was discovering it. Besides, it is the arrival to the professional world and you learn a lot of things that do not appear in any book.
When I tell about my working life, I always say that at Energy I learned a lot about a company and its departments: finance, marketing, operations, etc. And that is something very valuable. If you are starting out, don't just focus on the technology. Knowing how works the company you work for, its product and its people will help you grow much more than if you just learn the latest version of the latest framework.
2. Being mentored without looking for it
However, after a couple of years I met Pedro at an event that had nothing to do with our profession. Chatting and chatting we discovered that we were in the same profession and that we lived just 5 minutes walking distance from each other. From there and spontaneously we started to meet for a beer or tea, depending on the mood we were in, and talk about technology.
To be completely honest, Pedro talked and I listened. He started talking to me about things that may sound basic to all of you today, and probably were back then too, but I hadn't heard them. For example, the importance of using a version control system like Git, of Node.js, of NoSQL databases like CouchDB, coding best practices, etc.
He offered to come and give a talk at my work to help us implement Git. We prepared a demo simulating a small website with products similar to ours and we did the demo together changing things and showing the different advantages. We were very happy with the demo and especially one of my colleagues, Aarón, I remember how he was very excited about it.
I don't need to tell you that changes are always difficult but Aarón was motivated enough and he also saw the need and usefulness of the change. Little by little he and I started to use it until we managed to convince the whole team. And after that change came many more.
Meanwhile, Pedro was sending me Node.js exercises: starting from a basic roman numeral to decimal converter, to a middleware path simulator (to understand Node.js callbacks) and much more.
With all that, I discovered an event called CodeMotion where there were very cool talks and one of them was about Node.js: "Scalability Lessons: Beyond 70 Krps" by Álex. A bunch of us from the company got to go and it was a very enriching experience but if there was one thing I took away from it was that I wanted to keep learning Node.js and work with Alex someday. Spoiler: I did it by joining mediasmart and we not only exceeded 70 Krps. We got to 1 Mrps along with Guillermo Fernández, someone with a brain like few I've met in person working on this.
A few years later, Alex left looking for new adventures and I continued a couple of years more. Working at mediasmart has been the most enriching work experience I've had in my professional career (so far), both for the technical challenge it entailed and for the people I worked with, including Noelia, the CEO.
3. Mentoring on leadership:
Although we no longer worked together, Alex and I kept in touch, because besides our work, we share a passion for music and we are always discovering new things, even if they may be old. With all that came the pandemic and Alex proposed me to be an assistant professor in the scalability course he organized. It was a real success and we did a second edition, also fantastic.
After the pandemic, Alex became CTO of a French influencer marketing startup called Hivency that was having a lot of scalability issues. He proposed me to lead a purpose-built platform team when I joined.
It was a tough challenge, because I had to lead seniors who had been with the company for many years, including the first engineer of the company, when I had never done anything similar.
Alex taught me all those soft-skills needed to succeed and boy, did we succeed: we improved the performance and stability of the platform and the owners are now millionaires after selling it to a French group called Skeepers.
After that, we went our separate ways and I got to my current position as Head of Technology in a company that although it does not have a software product, had the challenge of creating an IT department (to manage the ERP - Odoo -, the websites, etc.) from scratch. Another challenge he had never faced before. Alex has continued to be at my side, giving me advice every time I have asked him about a dilemma or recommended bibliography -such as “The First 90 Days”-.
I have had to hire, fire, define roadmaps, adapt them, choose technology changes and many other things. It is a difficult road, but with the selfless help of the people you meet along the way it becomes much more bearable.
4. What characteristics do good mentors share?
I think it is interesting to reflect on the main characteristics that I believe good mentors share in order to identify them or even become one of them.
In my opinion, the first characteristic to highlight is their altruism: people who help you and share their knowledge without expecting anything in return, or at most some beer 🍺.
As a counter-example, we have those people who, although they know a lot about the subject, either by personality or by fear, do not share information or knowledge, even among the same colleagues at work. I'm sure it has happened to you! Although this is enough for a separate post.
In addition, they are usually passionate about the subject they deal with, since they do not mind dedicating their time once they have finished their working day to continue dealing with that subject.
They know how to explain themselves clearly about the topic they are dealing with because they have a clear command of it. I believe that knowing how to explain oneself is not a completely necessary attribute because in the end, with will and time, as it is something relaxed, it can be solved.
What other characteristics do you think make someone a good mentor? Tell me about them! 🎓
5. Conclusions
No matter where you are in your career, there will always be something you can learn or improve. I am sure that in many of those occasions you will not know how to do it and someone will be able to guide you. Seek help, the IT community is usually very open and cooperative. Don't be afraid to reach out on LinkedIn in an honest way to someone who you think knows what you want to learn about.
In my next post I will talk about the experience of mentoring others, which although it is something I have experienced less is something very rewarding and a way to continue the “chain of favors”.
I want to take this opportunity to thank all the people I have mentioned in this post and those who do not appear but have also helped me throughout my career, but especially Pedro and Alex. Thank you. ❤️
