Mentors — A Must Have At Your First Software Engineering Job

Making sure you have mentors at your first software engineering job is often overlooked. I wanted to share my experience having both a mentor and not having one.

Little background

I joined a start up that was very new (pre-seed), so when I joined, the engineering team consisted of 4 other engineers and myself, 2 being backend engineers, 1 being a dev ops engineer and another being a junior frontend engineer.

If I made changes and solved a problem, there wasn’t anyone looking at my code and telling me whether it was the most appropriate solution or how I could make it better.

There was really no one for me to go to with questions. The other junior engineer was a little more advanced than I was, which was amazing but definitely not by much and soon I’d surpass him.

But… isn’t having to learn on your own a good thing?

Well, sort of.

It can be a good thing because by not having people that can directly help you, you learn to rely on yourself since you have no choice. As a result, this causes you to very quickly learn how to get stuff done.

Since I learned how to program completely on my own, I didn’t do a bootcamp or studied computer science in college, I was very much used to figuring things out with no external help. So, this was okay for me.

However, there were PLENTY of moments where I didn’t actually know if a solution that I coded would work long term.

You could do as much research as you’d like and get a clear idea of what’s the right solution but.. it’s impossible to truly know without experience.

I will say, it was pretty cool to be trusted to build a product.

Why is having mentors crucial especially early on in your career as a software engineer?

When you’re a junior engineer, you’ve got a lot to learn which is totally normal and expected. That being said, you aren’t going to know what the best principles are from the jump, you might have some idea but you don’t have the experience to know that there’s a better way to do something yet.

This is where having senior engineers around to guide you proves to be beneficial because they’ve seen a lot more problems than you have and more often than not will have a better idea of which solution might work best long term for whatever particular problem you’re dealing with.

Another thing to keep in mind too is that it’s one thing to have senior engineers on your team but it’s another thing to have senior engineers that can actually serve as mentors and are capable of teaching you.

Most important part about having mentors early on

I’m all about growth and development, it’s literally all I care about. So, a part from a mentor being able to guide you on the best way to solve a problem, for me, the BEST part about having a mentor comes down to the speed at which you’re able to grow and how much better of an engineer you become as a result.

My REAL growth started when the company hired 2 senior engineers, 1 being a full stack engineer whom I was now going to be working under.

This is when the real fun began for me because I now had this incredible engineer who was not only wicked smart but also incredible at teaching and really helped me learn concepts that you can only learn by having years of experience programming.

I took 100% advantage of him being there and would pick his brain all the time. I looked forward to him critiquing my code and having me redo things. I loved it because I knew that I was now learning how to do things the right way.

Of course not everything he said or thought was correct and I would totally push back sometimes because someone being a senior engineer doesn’t mean they will always have the right answers.

I learned from him and he definitely learned from me.

Overall, It’s HUGE to have someone that has years of experience reviewing your work and you reviewing theirs. Because you see how they would handle things and what their thought process was.

I can confidently say that most of my growth came once I had a mentor on my team.

I’m grateful that I was sort of on my own for a couple months because I was able to experience both sides of the coin, having a mentor vs not having one early on in my engineering career.

When you’re a junior engineer you really want to have the right people around you, especially people that are invested in seeing you grow. This could easily determine whether you end up having a successful career or not.

Again, It’s great to do things on your own but you’ll be 10x better if you’ve got the right team by your side. I always say, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, like with everything else in life, very rarely what you want hasn’t already been done in some shape or form.

Ask for advice / guidance that’s what these people are there for and most importantly, enjoy the journey.