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It's so easy to be in a situation where you may not have anybody and you're just getting started programming -- this is not people who have been doing it for a long time... For me personally, I started out programming because my family business needed a website, and I was writing shotgun, building material deliveries, ... |
So I had to spend a lot of this time figuring things out on my own. Twitter was still kind of like finding its feet, and there wasn't an opportunity to find people in communities that you'd -- there was no Go community when I first started programming, and even then, there really wasn't a big group of people that were ... |
I think we're in a time now where -- I work with one of my friends who just graduated from Nashville Software School; we try to get together every two weeks... He was there for JavaScript, so we work on some JavaScript stuff, but you know, just having that opportunity for him to learn from someone who's seen things go ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[28:18\] There's a quote that always comes to mind when I talk about mentorship, and I sent it in a tweet the other day... It's actually about the actor Kevin Spacey; he says "I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling to send the elevator back down and give other... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Absolutely. I love that quote too, by the way. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So how would you define mentorship? What do you think makes a good mentor versus an acquaintance that you occasionally ask advice of? |
**Chase Adams:** I do think a big part of it is intentionality, and... You kind of answered it for me, what I think the differences are - if it's just an acquaintance that you're asking questions of, it's kind of like going to Stack Overflow when you had a question about jQuery, and you copy pasta and you move on with ... |
I have a few people that I try to get together with every week, that I consider mentors in different realms of like -- I think that's one thing a lot of people are afraid of... It's like "I don't wanna ask so-and-so to be my mentor." I don't think you have to do that; I think there are people who are where you wanna be... |
Being able to find those people is a lot more trivial today than it used to be, especially if you join GopherSlack. If you wanna learn Go and you've never done anything with it, I think everyone encourages people, after you've looked at the tour of Go and you've looked through the spec and the source Go, go to GopherSl... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Well, I think there's also a degree of -- so that's hitting kind of on like the technical mentorship side, where you're trying to evolve somebody, but I think there's also value in the career and personal growth... Because we've all kind of tread the path before people coming onto the scene now. So... |
\[32:09\] And even personal... A common thing -- I talk to people who have been in the industry for just a couple years and they struggle with the burnout that almost all of us have gone through at one time or another. I think there's a degree of being around to discuss those things too, and to remind people that are j... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I never get a burnout. |
**Erik St. Martin:** \[laughs\] Of course not. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[laughs\] At least not on days that end in Q. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And for all of the proof that he's lying, I will show some Slack messages in our show notes... \[laughter\] |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Don't do it, because I have Slack messages, too. That boat goes in two directions. |
**Erik St. Martin:** We've got dirt. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** We have dirt... No, I get burnout constantly. And it's my own fault, because I push so hard on something that I'm so passionate about, and then I realize that I've completely buried myself, and then I have to stop, and that's really hard; taking a break, backing down is not easy. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Is that because you have too much empathy? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I don't know if it's all empathy... Sometimes it is, especially when it's product-related and I wanna fix things... But my tech passions burn hot and they burn quick. I get really excited about doing a thing, and then I work too hard on it and I realize that I've let everything else go, so then I ha... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that there's a degree of it though that -- you know, I'm similar in the respect that I often put more pressure on myself than my team or employer does, because I wanna get stuff done and I wanna meet deadlines; even if they're artificial deadlines, I feel kind of this need to hit them. But ... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** And then you have empathy for your users, and you wanna do a good job... You don't wanna just deliver anything, sloppy work. I think, I don't know; I don't wanna speak for you. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** No, it's the same. I agree. There's just lots of stresses, lots of things that push us to work too hard. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So is anybody here actively mentoring people? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I am not actively mentoring anybody, but people do ask me for advice on how to get a job, how I got started working with Go (every once in a while), and I do take the time to open a quick video call and give advice. I have opened myself up to take on a woman of color, somebody who wants to learn ... |
So I'm being selective; I don't have a lot of time, but I will make extra time for that. I'll make an extra effort, I guess. Otherwise, I think we have been sort of successful at being attractive to women in general; we have the [Women Who Go](https://www.womenwhogo.org/) group, and men definitely - we see people joini... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** \[36:18\] I'm kind of the same; I have a lot of ad-hoc mentoring going on, at least 2 or 4 people a day on Slack and Twitter asking for various career advice or something similar to that, but it's all ad-hoc, nothing assigned. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think that's mostly been my interaction, too. I kind of sent out a tweet over the weekend kind of soliciting for mentees, just because I'd like to play a more active role than just the occasional question that comes my way, especially -- I don't think that I get career-based questions or personal... |
I think I kind of like the idea of watching somebody grow too, and checking in on him... Knowing these couple of people that you're interacting with, knowing what their goals are and whether they're on course or falling behind, and trying to offer advice along the way. You know, not that there's not value in being avai... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** See, I don't get ad-hoc technical questions, though. Nobody asks me about technical things. I think it's the grey hair; I get all ad-hoc personal growth, development, employment stuff. They're asking you the technical questions, I get the "How do I advance my career?" questions. It's because I'm rea... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[laughs\] How about you, Chase? You said you're mentoring someone mostly in JavaScript. |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, so I have 3-4 people -- and I say 3-4 because there's one that is a little more ad-hoc. But I do have three people that at the beginning of the year I decided that I wanted to invest time with them. Part of that was every year the past couple years I pick a couple of themes for what that year is ... |
So for me, I wanted to be able to invest in people in that way, and I'm hoping to carry that over next year as well, to pick up a few more people. Having a brand new baby in the house has made it a little bit harder to invest in anyone else except for her, which I'm totally -- I couldn't be happier to be spending most ... |
I have definitely one guy that I'm mentoring for JavaScript, but the other two people are a lot more -- those relationships are a lot more about their... Not their technical growth, but their growth where they're working. |
\[40:01\] At the end of the day, I try to write as much code as I can and I try to get into the code, but the reality is when you work somewhere like Walmart or Zappos or any company that is large enough that you're not just able to turn out code because there's all this greenfield stuff... You are spending a lot of ti... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Now, here's that question kind of flipped around a little bit... Who's had a really good mentor that changed their life? I'll go first if you want... I had a manager named Jim Young ten years ago, and to this day I still call him and get amazing life advice. During the time where we worked together,... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think through my career I've had a lot of really good managers... Whether I consider them mentors, I think, is a little harder to determine, but I would probably say that Brian is actually the person who's mentored me the most... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Aw. |
**Erik St. Martin:** And it's interesting, because only when I think about who's mentored me does that come to mind, because it's really kind of been a friendship, and discussions we have, and things like that that doesn't feel like a mentorship. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Those are the best kind. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[unintelligible 00:41:46.25\] had any mentorship. My current manager is really good as far as keeping me on track with my work in general, and I have a person when at work to mentor me technically. That did not pan out, so I'm planning on approaching somebody else, and I think having someone fro... |
So I'd very much like to have a more senior Go developer mentor me at work. But I don't have that. How about you, Chase? |
**Chase Adams:** Yeah, I'd like to call out three, if that's okay. I know it's two more than everyone else said... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Of course. |
**Chase Adams:** So my first one would definitely be my dad... And again, it was never an official mentorship, because it's my dad, but he invested in my growth as a person, especially in my early 20s. There were a lot of times when I would come across situations that I didn't know how to handle, and just being able to... |
My dad was my boss when I first started working, and having to not work for him -- being able to tell your dad "Hey, I'm not gonna be able to work here anymore, I'll go work somewhere else" is pretty hard, especially if you have a good relationship with your dad. But you know, ever since then, he's invested in trying t... |
\[43:54\] The second one that I wanna call out is my previous manager. His name is Dave Cadwallader. He was at Walmart, he's at a place called DNA Nexus now. He was one of those people who -- he was my manager, but more than anything he helped me think through how to do things the right way and how to say things the ri... |
He's helped me through a lot of those (like Erik said) politically tricky questions that can easily -- probably your entire career could go out in flames if you asked the wrong way. Being able to talk me through how to ask those both in a way that is clear and concise, and in a way that doesn't come across as trying to... |
Then my third one, there's a guy -- I've tweeted about him a few times, and then my [Getting started with Emacs](https://chaseadams.io/getting-started-with-emacs/) article points to him, but his name is Shane Hanson. He's on my team currently. And I don't know that he would say he was my mentor, but he has helped me gr... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Nice. |
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