Overcoming the Challenges of Mentoring
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Crayton, Kim
There is an ongoing mantra within the developer community: that there are far more jobs available then programmers to fill them. Which should be an indication as to the wonderful potential for both business and those learning to code. Yet what often follows such statements are not words of joy but rather a list of frustrations related to the difficulty in finding and retaining enough skilled developers to fill these positions. The challenge is not in the number of newbies entering the field but the number who leave because they are not able to bridge the divide between bootcamps, online tutorials, books, videos, etc. to an employable developer who is able to contribute to the team. Kim has years of experience working with learners of various ages in helping them develop the skills they needed to be successful at whatever their chosen goal. She understands that for businesses to be successful, they must develop more effective and efficient ways of recruiting and retaining developers in order to meet organizational benchmarks. The developer community is a overwhelmingly generous one and a well designed mentoring or apprenticeship program could be one answer that business leaders and newbies are looking for. The business costs associated with corporate hiring managers inability to recruit and retain skilled workers to fill current and future entry-level positions are increasing (Queen, 2014). 89 percent of organizational leaders stated that they are having difficulties filling open positions, which is causing them to either turn down orders, miss key deliverable deadlines or hire individuals from outside of the United States (Aho, 2015). Aho, K. (2015). The robotics industry: creating jobs, closing the skills gap. Techniques, (7), 22.
 Music No, let's do that again. Please welcome the amazing Kim. That's what I'm talking about. Yes! Yes! Welcome! I am Kim Cretan and I, you can get all this stuff out of the way, please tweet. I need people to know that I exist. So Kim Cretan won. That is my main Twitter. We'll be talking about Junior Dev Mentoring, which is my mentoring website and Slack team. We also have Community Engineering Report, which is my new podcast that talks about diversity, community and safe spaces in tech from an economic standpoint. I'm not going to argue with you about your politics. I'm not going to argue with you about your morals. It's about your bottom dollar. So if you want to be able to compete, you need to have diverse perspectives and inclusivity on your teams. I do a training that helps people transition in tech, so I'm using the hashtag Taming the Wild West because this is what this is. There is no path to this. It is Taming the Wild West. And because of all the crap I see on Twitter and whatnot, I've just started just putting out, hashtag we can do better. I don't even respond. It's just hashtag we can do better. That's how I roll. I am a community engineer. And if you don't know what that is, I was speaking at a closure west conference and one of the attendees came down and he said, I have a name for you. Because at the time I was like, Tim, figure out, is that me? What am I doing? He said, we're engineers. You're a community engineer. I went to research the words. I am a researcher, so words mean something to me. Community engineer to me is that person. Community is that heart. That's the mission. That's the stuff that makes people feel really, really good. But it usually gets you nowhere. It's the engineering that you need to make the heart stuff work. It's the operationalizing your mission, your vision, your goals. That's where people make a mistake. So they'll put their vision and their mission statements on their websites, but just because you put it there, that doesn't mean anything. So that's what a community engineer is. And I added this to my slides today because I am transitioning. I am in the last few months of my doctoral program. I am, thank you for those who class. I am my thesis. So a doctoral program is different from a PhD program. I have a DBA because PhD is theory. I'm all about practical. I'm not trying to test theories. I'm trying to put theories into play. So my topic is successful strategies for increasing organizational knowledge sharing through mentoring junior developers. That's what my topic is about. And so I'm class of 2018. My story started August 2014. It started before then, but it started with, I've always been a tech person. I was the person who would go to, would watch the Apple Keynote not just to see what was coming out next, but to see why did they put that button there. Why didn't they do that? And they always had a reason. Other people didn't like it sometimes, but who cares? But at least they gave me a reason. It would drain battery life. It did this, it did that. And those are the things that were important to me. So if I had to build a website, I mean, I just went to YouTube, followed, found something, Google, WordPress, and I just found some good things and just, it took me days because I had to stop and do, and stop and do. But that was the kind of techie I was. I never saw myself as a producer of tech, but I was more than a consumer of tech. In 2014, as an only child, my worst fear came. I thought the death of a parent would really just knock me out. And my father and I lived together. And so he died of cancer in 2014, but I didn't die. And so it led me to think, let me back up. I was an educator. I was a high school teacher. I don't like your kids. I don't like your kids. Let me, okay, hold on. I really don't like your kids. And it's a part, most of it is because you tell them how special they are and they're really not. They're special to you. And you really need to get them ready for the real world because everyone wants to complain about millennials, but you got them believing that they're so freaking special. And so they have this false idea of, I don't like your kids. Okay, so after that, I was like, I didn't die. I'm gonna, I don't like these kids, so I'm gonna leave. So I went away to, okay, my clicker's not working. So I went away to Maui for a week. Yeah, exactly. I went away to Maui for a week. And as I was crying and snotting and surfing and snotting and crying, and I had an epiphany, I said, screw this, I'm going into tech. So I sent back a text message to the people who would care. And I said, I'm going into tech. And yes, I put it in quotes. Because I said, when I figure that out, I'll let you know. That's what it meant to me. I had no plan. Again, this is the one, I had no idea what I was doing. So when I came back home, this is gonna be interesting. So when I came back home, I ended up immediately going to workshops and conferences and meetups in Atlanta. I mean, Atlanta's a thriving community. So for the first six months, I was like a kid in the candy store. I was like, what is this stuff? UXUI. Why didn't know that thing had a name in the net of things? Oh, that thing has a name. I knew about connected technology, but I was putting names on things. I was just in awe the first six months. So also, for the first time, being black female in the South was working for me. I was rocking it. I was getting free tickets to everything. I wasn't paying for anything. I was going to conferences. I went to my first JavaScript conference. I didn't even know what JavaScript was. I was just sitting there. At some point, some of this is gonna make sense. It really didn't, but I was there anyway. So I was like, okay. I was just doing all kinds of things because I was black and female. Check. Yeah? Check. You got some free check. Check. Yeah. I was just going for it. So I was just like, I was just like a superhero. I was like, yes. I'm a black female. You got something for free? So that's what I did until people kept saying, oh, you really need to learn to code. It's so easy. Oh, you really need to learn to code. It's so easy. Coding is not easy, which led me to write this blog post. Stop lying to newbies. Just stop doing it. You're doing them at this service. You're doing the industry at this service. Because this shit's hard. Learning is hard, period. Learning a language is even harder. And so we devalue what you do when you tell people that this is easy. Maybe you forgot what it was like when you first started, but this shit's hard. And we need people, we need to stop doing it for the reasons that we need people in the industry. There are jobs everywhere. You know, you hear this mantra, oh my God, there's so many jobs and we can't find qualified people to fill them. Oh my God, there's so many jobs. We can't come. I was like, oh my God. It's like shut up already. We heard you. There's so many jobs you can't find people to fill them. What are you going to do about it besides wine? The challenge is not the number of newbies that are coming in the field. It's the number of newbies who stay in the field. That's the problem. We don't have a great way of helping people acclimate to this, this wild west. There is no path. If you do this at every talk, can you raise your hand if you think of any industry where you get hired and you're not supposed to be a professional when you're hired. You're not supposed to be an expert. Just don't think I can think of. Not only are you not only supposed to be an expert when you're hired, but you can't make mistakes because that's liable. So even when you're a custodian, they expect you to know how to mop when you get to job. But this is a thing that is just so, you know, I want to make this thing that's never been made before. I know a few lines of code. Let's figure this out. Let's Google it. Let's stack over for it, whatever. You're hired not to be an expert in whatever this thing they may need you to create. So that's overwhelming for a lot of people. Particularly career changes where you've had to be an expert your whole life. And I have particular problems with some of these resources here and I'll just boot caps. I have a problem with boot caps. And I'm happy that some of them are closing down. Because if I pay $15,000 for a course, there is no child left behind. You're going to figure out how to make this work for me. And the reason that that model is not working is because it only works for a subset of people. It works for people who have some kind of technical engineering background who are looking to be focused and can handle a 12 week, 16 week, whatever accelerated program. But it's because it's not enough of those people, they start bringing the marketing and sales people to reach out to people who don't even know what a variable is. And there is no way a person who doesn't know what a variable function is on day one is going to do well in a 12 week accelerated class where every two days they're learning something new. It's not going to happen. So you've just wasted their money. And most times you require them to leave their jobs and do this thing full time. And I find that a great disservice. You need to be definitely put out of business for that. And again, the developer community is so overwhelmingly generous. So you have this pool of people who need your help and you have this pool of people who are willing to help. They just don't know really how to help because they see mentoring as this overwhelming thing. And again, the researcher in me, this is the researcher that I've collected myself, business costs associated with corporate hiring managers, the ability to recruit and retain field workers to field current jobs is only increasing. The fast-paced uncertainty of today's economic climate have business leaders turning to mentoring as a strategy for increasing organizational knowledge or knowledge sharing. And organizational leaders have reported, now this is a big number, ineffective employee mentoring and inadequate knowledge sharing is costing $31.5 billion per year. Now if that doesn't hit you in the pocket, I don't know what does. So this is not a moral issue. It's not a political issue. It's a business issue. It's costing businesses money. So what we're going to talk about is, I'd like to break this down into four quadrants. We're talking about the differences between personal and professional mentoring and youth and adult mentoring. So those are the quadrants and we're going to start with the youth. Mentoring youth is focused on them. When I'm mentoring a young person, somebody under 18 years old, it's not about Kim. It's about making sure I provide that person with the skills that they need to become a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen. Hopefully happy. That is my goal. What I find is, when I take on that person, when I take them home, now I need to mentor these nuts at the house because this explains why this person is acting this way. So that's a lot to take on. And it's personal. You know, you end up going to people's graduations and going to people's birthday parties and just being with the family and you're just like, God, I don't want to be with you. But you have to do this for this young person. Adult mentoring is different. Adult mentoring is usually focused on a specific career thing they're trying to accomplish. So it's not this nebulous, ongoing thing. It's something specific. It's focusing on making them better at doing something. And acquiring knowledge and skills, best practice, it's mutually beneficial. I don't have to go to Thanksgiving dinner with you, but I do at least have to like you. Mentoring, I have mentored some people and I'm just like, Lord, give me strength. But because it was about them, I had to suck it up. But if it's another adult and I don't like you, deuces, I'm out of here. And so that's what that is. And adults can be in the role of mentor, mentee, or both. You see that when people are learning. I might have this skill, so I'm going to help you with this, but I don't have this skill, so can you help me with that? So it goes back and forth. We talked about that personal mentoring. That's that whole, oh, come over and meet my grandma. It's her 70th birthday. Then you think about, what am I bringing this gift to this woman I've never met? All this stuff. Not with professionals. Mentoring, it's the best mentoring to me is an apprenticeship program. It's where you bring people in. And we have the history that we have tons of research. Apprenticeship programs are, I mean, from the middle ages and beyond. I mean, these are things that we know how to do. We need to apply them to development because they're defined goals and objectives. Again, that's the engineering part. How do you take tacit knowledge from someone who knows it and knows it? And tacit knowledge is that learned experience, which is different from explicit knowledge. So you want to take that knowledge that someone has because they learned it and experienced it. How do you transfer that to someone else? That's the challenge. But if you have identified goals and objectives, it's easier. So we're going to focus on, I'm going to stop. It's not easier. It's less challenging. It's going to be done. Don't like that word. All right. So we're going to focus on adult and professional. Talk about what mentoring is not. Mentoring is not Stack Overflow. Mentoring is not Slack. Stack Overflow and Slack is like, when my house is burning, please put it out. Particularly for a newbie, you do not know what they're doing. Everything is a fire that needs to be put out. So you need to think about that when you're providing assistance. First of all, don't be jerks on Stack Overflow. If this is a question that somebody asked before, just direct them to, you don't have to be snipey about this isn't appropriate. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are no rules when you come to Stack Overflow because most people have Googled it. So that's my issue with Stack Overflow. If I'm offending you, I don't care. So all you people who are Stack Overflow guards, if there was a, when I Googled it, it sent me to a page with some rules, then I would say fine. But since it takes me directly to the answer I'm looking for and it might not have it, then you need to get off these people's back because they don't know what that is. They've been told to Google. They don't know that there are rules on Stack Overflow. Also, when you're doing this, what I had many times, somebody's working with me. I've chopped up my whole code base. I'm just, they're trying to, and then they die. I don't know where they went. I don't know if they got off work. I don't know what they just leave. They don't say goodbye. They don't say I'm leaving. They don't say nothing. You just sitting there with now this code that you don't understand because they made you change it. And you just got to, hopefully, you use Git so you can roll back something. But the, yeah, exactly. But a newbie using Git? Come on, what, no. So they have to start over and they have no idea what they're doing. So Stack Overflow and Slack, that's the fires. My house is on fire. Please help me. And there's, mentoring changes. So what mentoring is, is a relationship. That's one of the reasons I built Junior Dev Mentoring. It was a website where people can make a commitment for a year to mentor someone. What I found was a challenge. What people, again, people don't know how to ask for mentoring. They don't know how to get. I have people coming up to me, Kim, where you mentoring? First of all, I don't know who the hell you are. So you're asking me to give my time. You have no defined goals. What do you want to do with web development? Do you know how broad that is? It's like, no, that's, no, no. So I started the Slack channel that is very active. It's to allow people to get on there and put out fires while building relationships. So then they can get a mentor and then they can move to the website and make a commitment. Because people are having trouble figuring out how to build relationships. You know, people go to this whole going to meet up and passing out cards. That just, I am an introvert and that just gets on my nerves. Don't have me in your car. I'm going in the garbage can. Don't know who you are. I connected nothing to you. We need to have a meaningful conversation or something for me to connect who and what you are and what matters to me. And what you're doing fits in what I want to do. So it's a relationship. And like any relationship that you value, I don't know about your personal life, but I'm sure there's one relationship that you value. You put in time. You respect the boundaries. If you're not going to be there, you say, hey, I need to reschedule. You don't just drop the ball. You don't just ignore people. Even on the mentee side, when there's work to be done, you do it. You get it done. You don't waste people's time. And it's a commitment. It's like, it could be as short as, you know what? I'm going to mentor you on this thing for, I have, let's say, I have six months, six weeks, I know a big project's coming up. Tell me something you're working on so I can see if this fits in my schedule and then I can work around how we can do that. That's how adult mentoring works. And it's professionally transformational. Because I can tell you, I know very few newbies who get junior developer jobs without somebody stepping in and helping them out, because they don't even know where the pitfall is. It's like, you're just walking on, go ahead, clap, baby, clap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, people need to know from these newbies. I mean, it's like you're forever walking on my field. You're just a roof, roof, and you're like, what, a roof? It's like ridiculous. You don't know a thing that's going on. Your face is getting blown off. You have no limbs. You're walking around like this and everybody's like, you look weird. Yeah, because nobody will help me. It's like stepping in and help. But you don't know how to do it, so I get it. This is why you should do it. Mentoring, the role of mentoring, you need to understand that it's vocational support. You're providing psychosocial support, role modeling. And I'm going to caveat. If you don't like people, please stay away from newbies. A bad mentor is worse than having no mentor at all. I'm going to repeat that because some of you will not hear it. A bad mentor is having no mentor at all. Evaluate your motivation, honest assessment of your time, your talent, and your temperament, set realistic goals, and give them examples. For the mentee, reciprocity, respect the relationship, and identified goals. Mentors have no idea what a realistic goal is because people have lied to them so much about how easy this is. They think they can go to the moon tomorrow. They have no idea. So it takes somebody to come in and say, hey, no, you can't get to the moon, but you're not going to get there tomorrow. We can, you know, step by step. And then we say, why? Reasons why development community needs mentoring. We talked about all those things. Mentors, it's all about economics. People need to be able to level up. And positive mentoring relationships for those people who think they're bringing in the mentee and they're going to leave. If you have a positive culture that supports positive mentoring, newbies will not leave. They will appreciate what you've done for them and they will stay longer. Because who wants to go to another job, you don't know what that is, and it might be even worse. So think about that. Mint and posture syndrome is my pet peeve. Newbies do not have imposter syndrome. You don't know shit. You can't be an imposter. Imposter syndrome are for people who have skills who still doubt their skills. But if you don't know anything, you can't have imposter syndrome. You wouldn't tell a baby, oh, you have imposter syndrome because you can't roll over. I mean, that's just absurd. They just don't know. You don't know a variable. It's not like you're making, I'm not joking. I don't know what this thing is. So if you see any mint, newbies saying that they have imposter syndrome, because everybody wants to have this label for some reason, please correct them. They do not have imposter syndrome. How much time do I have? Yeah. Okay, because we started late. Okay, well, my... I'm not laughing, I'm teaching right? No, yeah, exactly. We started a little late. So, okay, that is it. I have the slides because there's some other stuff on here. So, thank you. So, the cool thing is, Kim, because you book into a break, we can definitely talk about your developer survey results. Okay. So, it's break time, but let's just do it. Let's go for it. All right, so this is from Stack Overflow because I mean, they have great information. And this is what people need to understand. It's a misconception that most people have CS degrees. When you go to get a computer science degree, they're teaching you a different skill. You're learning how to solve problems algorithmically. So they're using Python or whatever they're using to solve problems. They're not... The language they're using is for them like writing a... using a pencil. You're not the pencil, you're not... I don't know how to make a pencil, I use pencil to write stuff down. So that's why they're using code. That's why a lot of CS people come out and they don't know how to code either, because that's not the skills they're focusing on. But most people are self-taught. And so we need to... Employees need to understand that that's what it is. Most people are self-taught. And most people have less than eight years experience, but if you look at it, most people have less than three years experience. And as you know, it takes between... I would say two years solid of somebody working with some... to really say they can develop their coder. I really would, because they... You're being hired as a developer to solve problems. And in a newbie, you can't solve problems. You can... somebody can give you some code and you can fix it if it's broken, but no one can get... The chances of someone giving you a blank slate and saying, this is the problem to solve it, it's very slim if you're a newbie. So that takes about... Again, that's that tacit knowledge. You have to do some things, build some muscle to be able to get that. So people are saying, you know, a former education is not very important, because we... as we see, there's a lot of free stuff out there. So most... 90% of people are thought. I don't know how they got to 125% on this, but 125% of people have been through mentoring programs, and that has made them successful. So if 125%, which is over 100, big people say that that's what's successful, why aren't we doing this more? It doesn't make sense. Why aren't we doing this more? And so I say use project-based learning. So I'm going to give you an example of how to use this as a project-based learning. So someone says... I'm just going to say web development. It's too broad, but we're just going to use this as an example. So we already know that if somebody is an effective developer of web development, they need to know CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, at least minimally, right? So what I would do is say, hey, project-based learning, here's a document that has some text on it. We're just going to start with HTML, put some tags on it. And then they have to come back to me and explain why they use those tags as opposed to other tags, because that lets me know what they've learned, do they understand how the tags are used. Then I would say, okay, now add some color to the background or some other stuff. So now I'm bringing in CSS, but because it's learning, you take two steps forward, you're going to take ten steps back, they're not going to remember all the tags. So that's why they need the time. So that's why I don't like boot camps, because you don't get the time to try to figure, you're just doing this a lot and you just don't know what's going on. So then they add some color. And then you say, ooh, let's use the box method. Oh, but that right there just totally demoralizes a lot of people, because now you've got to deal with margins and figure out if this margin is this padding, is this book. I don't know what this thing is, so you do that thing. Then once they get there, you say, hey, let's add a click event. That's it. You don't just give them a whole project and just say, you just add, you keep, it's called scaffolding. You just keep adding. So what I need you to do is that box that we just did, let's make that a button. And so then they go into the job, you know they learn a little JavaScript, and then they make that a click event, and then, oh, and then you just keep adding onto that. That's how you do make the mentoring very, make it manageable, you make it measurable, and people know it's very objective. It's not subjective. And this is what I usually do in assessment, but we don't have time. I'll take any questions later, but thank you again. And if you would like to get involved, this is how you get involved.
 Music  No, let's do that again. Please welcome the amazing Kim. That's what I'm talking about. Yes! Yes! Welcome!  I am Kim Cretan and I, you can get all this stuff out of the way, please tweet. I need people to know that I exist.  So Kim Cretan won. That is my main Twitter. We'll be talking about Junior Dev Mentoring, which is my mentoring website and Slack team.  We also have Community Engineering Report, which is my new podcast that talks about diversity, community and safe spaces in tech from an economic standpoint.  I'm not going to argue with you about your politics. I'm not going to argue with you about your morals. It's about your bottom dollar.  So if you want to be able to compete, you need to have diverse perspectives and inclusivity on your teams.  I do a training that helps people transition in tech, so I'm using the hashtag Taming the Wild West because this is what this is.  There is no path to this. It is Taming the Wild West. And because of all the crap I see on Twitter and whatnot, I've just started just putting out, hashtag we can do better.  I don't even respond. It's just hashtag we can do better. That's how I roll.  I am a community engineer. And if you don't know what that is, I was speaking at a closure west conference and one of the attendees came down and he said, I have a name for you.  Because at the time I was like, Tim, figure out, is that me? What am I doing?  He said, we're engineers. You're a community engineer. I went to research the words. I am a researcher, so words mean something to me.  Community engineer to me is that person. Community is that heart.  That's the mission. That's the stuff that makes people feel really, really good.  But it usually gets you nowhere. It's the engineering that you need to make the heart stuff work.  It's the operationalizing your mission, your vision, your goals. That's where people make a mistake.  So they'll put their vision and their mission statements on their websites, but just because you put it there, that doesn't mean anything.  So that's what a community engineer is. And I added this to my slides today because I am transitioning.  I am in the last few months of my doctoral program. I am, thank you for those who class.  I am my thesis. So a doctoral program is different from a PhD program. I have a DBA because PhD is theory.  I'm all about practical. I'm not trying to test theories. I'm trying to put theories into play.  So my topic is successful strategies for increasing organizational knowledge sharing through mentoring junior developers.  That's what my topic is about. And so I'm class of 2018.  My story started August 2014. It started before then, but it started with, I've always been a tech person.  I was the person who would go to, would watch the Apple Keynote not just to see what was coming out next,  but to see why did they put that button there. Why didn't they do that? And they always had a reason.  Other people didn't like it sometimes, but who cares? But at least they gave me a reason.  It would drain battery life. It did this, it did that. And those are the things that were important to me.  So if I had to build a website, I mean, I just went to YouTube, followed, found something, Google, WordPress,  and I just found some good things and just, it took me days because I had to stop and do, and stop and do.  But that was the kind of techie I was. I never saw myself as a producer of tech, but I was more than a consumer of tech.  In 2014, as an only child, my worst fear came. I thought the death of a parent would really just knock me out.  And my father and I lived together. And so he died of cancer in 2014, but I didn't die.  And so it led me to think, let me back up. I was an educator. I was a high school teacher.  I don't like your kids. I don't like your kids. Let me, okay, hold on. I really don't like your kids.  And it's a part, most of it is because you tell them how special they are and they're really not.  They're special to you. And you really need to get them ready for the real world because everyone wants to complain about millennials,  but you got them believing that they're so freaking special. And so they have this false idea of, I don't like your kids.  Okay, so after that, I was like, I didn't die. I'm gonna, I don't like these kids, so I'm gonna leave.  So I went away to, okay, my clicker's not working. So I went away to Maui for a week. Yeah, exactly.  I went away to Maui for a week. And as I was crying and snotting and surfing and snotting and crying,  and I had an epiphany, I said, screw this, I'm going into tech.  So I sent back a text message to the people who would care. And I said, I'm going into tech. And yes, I put it in quotes.  Because I said, when I figure that out, I'll let you know. That's what it meant to me. I had no plan.  Again, this is the one, I had no idea what I was doing. So when I came back home, this is gonna be interesting.  So when I came back home, I ended up immediately going to workshops and conferences and meetups in Atlanta.  I mean, Atlanta's a thriving community. So for the first six months, I was like a kid in the candy store.  I was like, what is this stuff? UXUI. Why didn't know that thing had a name in the net of things?  Oh, that thing has a name. I knew about connected technology, but I was putting names on things.  I was just in awe the first six months.  So also, for the first time, being black female in the South was working for me.  I was rocking it. I was getting free tickets to everything. I wasn't paying for anything.  I was going to conferences. I went to my first JavaScript conference. I didn't even know what JavaScript was.  I was just sitting there. At some point, some of this is gonna make sense. It really didn't, but I was there anyway.  So I was like, okay. I was just doing all kinds of things because I was black and female. Check.  Yeah? Check. You got some free check. Check. Yeah. I was just going for it.  So I was just like, I was just like a superhero. I was like, yes. I'm a black female. You got something for free?  So that's what I did until people kept saying, oh, you really need to learn to code. It's so easy.  Oh, you really need to learn to code. It's so easy. Coding is not easy, which led me to write this blog post.  Stop lying to newbies. Just stop doing it. You're doing them at this service. You're doing the industry at this service.  Because this shit's hard. Learning is hard, period. Learning a language is even harder.  And so we devalue what you do when you tell people that this is easy. Maybe you forgot what it was like when you first started, but this shit's hard.  And we need people, we need to stop doing it for the reasons that we need people in the industry. There are jobs everywhere.  You know, you hear this mantra, oh my God, there's so many jobs and we can't find qualified people to fill them.  Oh my God, there's so many jobs. We can't come. I was like, oh my God. It's like shut up already.  We heard you. There's so many jobs you can't find people to fill them. What are you going to do about it besides wine?  The challenge is not the number of newbies that are coming in the field. It's the number of newbies who stay in the field.  That's the problem. We don't have a great way of helping people acclimate to this, this wild west. There is no path.  If you do this at every talk, can you raise your hand if you think of any industry where you get hired and you're not supposed to be a professional when you're hired.  You're not supposed to be an expert. Just don't think I can think of.  Not only are you not only supposed to be an expert when you're hired, but you can't make mistakes because that's liable.  So even when you're a custodian, they expect you to know how to mop when you get to job.  But this is a thing that is just so, you know, I want to make this thing that's never been made before.  I know a few lines of code. Let's figure this out. Let's Google it. Let's stack over for it, whatever.  You're hired not to be an expert in whatever this thing they may need you to create.  So that's overwhelming for a lot of people. Particularly career changes where you've had to be an expert your whole life.  And I have particular problems with some of these resources here and I'll just boot caps.  I have a problem with boot caps. And I'm happy that some of them are closing down.  Because if I pay $15,000 for a course, there is no child left behind.  You're going to figure out how to make this work for me.  And the reason that that model is not working is because it only works for a subset of people.  It works for people who have some kind of technical engineering background who are looking to be focused and can handle a 12 week, 16 week, whatever accelerated program.  But it's because it's not enough of those people, they start bringing the marketing and sales people to reach out to people who don't even know what a variable is.  And there is no way a person who doesn't know what a variable function is on day one is going to do well in a 12 week accelerated class where every two days they're learning something new.  It's not going to happen. So you've just wasted their money.  And most times you require them to leave their jobs and do this thing full time.  And I find that a great disservice. You need to be definitely put out of business for that.  And again, the developer community is so overwhelmingly generous.  So you have this pool of people who need your help and you have this pool of people who are willing to help.  They just don't know really how to help because they see mentoring as this overwhelming thing.  And again, the researcher in me, this is the researcher that I've collected myself, business costs associated with corporate hiring managers,  the ability to recruit and retain field workers to field current jobs is only increasing.  The fast-paced uncertainty of today's economic climate have business leaders turning to mentoring as a strategy for increasing organizational knowledge or knowledge sharing.  And organizational leaders have reported, now this is a big number,  ineffective employee mentoring and inadequate knowledge sharing is costing $31.5 billion per year.  Now if that doesn't hit you in the pocket, I don't know what does.  So this is not a moral issue. It's not a political issue. It's a business issue. It's costing businesses money.  So what we're going to talk about is, I'd like to break this down into four quadrants.  We're talking about the differences between personal and professional mentoring and youth and adult mentoring.  So those are the quadrants and we're going to start with the youth.  Mentoring youth is focused on them. When I'm mentoring a young person, somebody under 18 years old, it's not about Kim.  It's about making sure I provide that person with the skills that they need to become a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen.  Hopefully happy. That is my goal.  What I find is, when I take on that person, when I take them home, now I need to mentor these nuts at the house  because this explains why this person is acting this way.  So that's a lot to take on.  And it's personal. You know, you end up going to people's graduations and going to people's birthday parties  and just being with the family and you're just like, God, I don't want to be with you.  But you have to do this for this young person.  Adult mentoring is different.  Adult mentoring is usually focused on a specific career thing they're trying to accomplish.  So it's not this nebulous, ongoing thing. It's something specific.  It's focusing on making them better at doing something.  And acquiring knowledge and skills, best practice, it's mutually beneficial.  I don't have to go to Thanksgiving dinner with you, but I do at least have to like you.  Mentoring, I have mentored some people and I'm just like, Lord, give me strength.  But because it was about them, I had to suck it up.  But if it's another adult and I don't like you, deuces, I'm out of here.  And so that's what that is.  And adults can be in the role of mentor, mentee, or both.  You see that when people are learning.  I might have this skill, so I'm going to help you with this, but I don't have this skill, so can you help me with that?  So it goes back and forth.  We talked about that personal mentoring.  That's that whole, oh, come over and meet my grandma.  It's her 70th birthday.  Then you think about, what am I bringing this gift to this woman I've never met?  All this stuff.  Not with professionals.  Mentoring, it's the best mentoring to me is an apprenticeship program.  It's where you bring people in.  And we have the history that we have tons of research.  Apprenticeship programs are, I mean, from the middle ages and beyond.  I mean, these are things that we know how to do.  We need to apply them to development because they're defined goals and objectives.  Again, that's the engineering part.  How do you take tacit knowledge from someone who knows it and knows it?  And tacit knowledge is that learned experience, which is different from explicit knowledge.  So you want to take that knowledge that someone has because they learned it and experienced it.  How do you transfer that to someone else?  That's the challenge.  But if you have identified goals and objectives, it's easier.  So we're going to focus on, I'm going to stop.  It's not easier.  It's less challenging.  It's going to be done.  Don't like that word.  All right.  So we're going to focus on adult and professional.  Talk about what mentoring is not.  Mentoring is not Stack Overflow.  Mentoring is not Slack.  Stack Overflow and Slack is like, when my house is burning, please put it out.  Particularly for a newbie, you do not know what they're doing.  Everything is a fire that needs to be put out.  So you need to think about that when you're providing assistance.  First of all, don't be jerks on Stack Overflow.  If this is a question that somebody asked before, just direct them to,  you don't have to be snipey about this isn't appropriate.  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  There are no rules when you come to Stack Overflow because most people have Googled it.  So that's my issue with Stack Overflow.  If I'm offending you, I don't care.  So all you people who are Stack Overflow guards,  if there was a, when I Googled it, it sent me to a page with some rules,  then I would say fine.  But since it takes me directly to the answer I'm looking for and it might not have it,  then you need to get off these people's back because they don't know what that is.  They've been told to Google.  They don't know that there are rules on Stack Overflow.  Also, when you're doing this, what I had many times, somebody's working with me.  I've chopped up my whole code base.  I'm just, they're trying to, and then they die.  I don't know where they went.  I don't know if they got off work.  I don't know what they just leave.  They don't say goodbye.  They don't say I'm leaving.  They don't say nothing.  You just sitting there with now this code that you don't understand because they made you change it.  And you just got to, hopefully, you use Git so you can roll back something.  But the, yeah, exactly.  But a newbie using Git?  Come on, what, no.  So they have to start over and they have no idea what they're doing.  So Stack Overflow and Slack, that's the fires.  My house is on fire.  Please help me.  And there's, mentoring changes.  So what mentoring is, is a relationship.  That's one of the reasons I built Junior Dev Mentoring.  It was a website where people can make a commitment for a year to mentor someone.  What I found was a challenge.  What people, again, people don't know how to ask for mentoring.  They don't know how to get.  I have people coming up to me, Kim, where you mentoring?  First of all, I don't know who the hell you are.  So you're asking me to give my time.  You have no defined goals.  What do you want to do with web development?  Do you know how broad that is?  It's like, no, that's, no, no.  So I started the Slack channel that is very active.  It's to allow people to get on there and put out fires while building relationships.  So then they can get a mentor and then they can move to the website and make a commitment.  Because people are having trouble figuring out how to build relationships.  You know, people go to this whole going to meet up and passing out cards.  That just, I am an introvert and that just gets on my nerves.  Don't have me in your car.  I'm going in the garbage can.  Don't know who you are.  I connected nothing to you.  We need to have a meaningful conversation or something for me to connect who and what you are and what matters to me.  And what you're doing fits in what I want to do.  So it's a relationship.  And like any relationship that you value, I don't know about your personal life,  but I'm sure there's one relationship that you value.  You put in time.  You respect the boundaries.  If you're not going to be there, you say, hey, I need to reschedule.  You don't just drop the ball.  You don't just ignore people.  Even on the mentee side, when there's work to be done, you do it.  You get it done. You don't waste people's time.  And it's a commitment.  It's like, it could be as short as, you know what?  I'm going to mentor you on this thing for, I have, let's say, I have six months, six weeks, I know a big project's coming up.  Tell me something you're working on so I can see if this fits in my schedule and then I can work around how we can do that.  That's how adult mentoring works.  And it's professionally transformational.  Because I can tell you, I know very few newbies who get junior developer jobs without somebody stepping in and helping them out,  because they don't even know where the pitfall is.  It's like, you're just walking on, go ahead, clap, baby, clap.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, people need to know from these newbies.  I mean, it's like you're forever walking on my field.  You're just a roof, roof, and you're like, what, a roof?  It's like ridiculous.  You don't know a thing that's going on.  Your face is getting blown off.  You have no limbs.  You're walking around like this and everybody's like, you look weird.  Yeah, because nobody will help me.  It's like stepping in and help.  But you don't know how to do it, so I get it.  This is why you should do it.  Mentoring, the role of mentoring, you need to understand that it's vocational support.  You're providing psychosocial support, role modeling.  And I'm going to caveat.  If you don't like people, please stay away from newbies.  A bad mentor is worse than having no mentor at all.  I'm going to repeat that because some of you will not hear it.  A bad mentor is having no mentor at all.  Evaluate your motivation, honest assessment of your time, your talent, and your temperament,  set realistic goals, and give them examples.  For the mentee, reciprocity, respect the relationship, and identified goals.  Mentors have no idea what a realistic goal is because people have lied to them so much about how easy this is.  They think they can go to the moon tomorrow.  They have no idea.  So it takes somebody to come in and say, hey, no, you can't get to the moon, but you're not going to get there tomorrow.  We can, you know, step by step.  And then we say, why?  Reasons why development community needs mentoring.  We talked about all those things.  Mentors, it's all about economics.  People need to be able to level up.  And positive mentoring relationships for those people who think they're bringing in the mentee and they're going to leave.  If you have a positive culture that supports positive mentoring, newbies will not leave.  They will appreciate what you've done for them and they will stay longer.  Because who wants to go to another job, you don't know what that is, and it might be even worse.  So think about that.  Mint and posture syndrome is my pet peeve.  Newbies do not have imposter syndrome.  You don't know shit.  You can't be an imposter.  Imposter syndrome are for people who have skills who still doubt their skills.  But if you don't know anything, you can't have imposter syndrome.  You wouldn't tell a baby, oh, you have imposter syndrome because you can't roll over.  I mean, that's just absurd.  They just don't know.  You don't know a variable.  It's not like you're making, I'm not joking.  I don't know what this thing is.  So if you see any mint, newbies saying that they have imposter syndrome, because everybody wants to have this label for some reason, please correct them.  They do not have imposter syndrome.  How much time do I have?  Yeah.  Okay, because we started late.  Okay, well, my...  I'm not laughing, I'm teaching right?  No, yeah, exactly.  We started a little late.  So, okay, that is it.  I have the slides because there's some other stuff on here.  So, thank you.  So, the cool thing is, Kim, because you book into a break, we can definitely talk about your developer survey results.  Okay.  So, it's break time, but let's just do it.  Let's go for it.  All right, so this is from Stack Overflow because I mean, they have great information.  And this is what people need to understand.  It's a misconception that most people have CS degrees.  When you go to get a computer science degree, they're teaching you a different skill.  You're learning how to solve problems algorithmically.  So they're using Python or whatever they're using to solve problems.  They're not...  The language they're using is for them like writing a... using a pencil.  You're not the pencil, you're not...  I don't know how to make a pencil, I use pencil to write stuff down.  So that's why they're using code.  That's why a lot of CS people come out and they don't know how to code either,  because that's not the skills they're focusing on.  But most people are self-taught.  And so we need to...  Employees need to understand that that's what it is.  Most people are self-taught.  And most people have less than eight years experience,  but if you look at it, most people have less than three years experience.  And as you know, it takes between...  I would say two years solid of somebody working with some...  to really say they can develop their coder.  I really would, because they...  You're being hired as a developer to solve problems.  And in a newbie, you can't solve problems.  You can... somebody can give you some code and you can fix it if it's broken,  but no one can get...  The chances of someone giving you a blank slate and saying,  this is the problem to solve it, it's very slim if you're a newbie.  So that takes about...  Again, that's that tacit knowledge.  You have to do some things, build some muscle to be able to get that.  So people are saying, you know, a former education is not very important,  because we... as we see, there's a lot of free stuff out there.  So most... 90% of people are thought.  I don't know how they got to 125% on this,  but 125% of people have been through mentoring programs,  and that has made them successful.  So if 125%, which is over 100, big people say that that's what's successful,  why aren't we doing this more?  It doesn't make sense. Why aren't we doing this more?  And so I say use project-based learning.  So I'm going to give you an example of how to use this as a project-based learning.  So someone says... I'm just going to say web development.  It's too broad, but we're just going to use this as an example.  So we already know that if somebody is an effective developer of web development,  they need to know CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, at least minimally, right?  So what I would do is say, hey, project-based learning,  here's a document that has some text on it.  We're just going to start with HTML, put some tags on it.  And then they have to come back to me and explain why they use those tags  as opposed to other tags, because that lets me know what they've learned,  do they understand how the tags are used.  Then I would say, okay, now add some color to the background or some other stuff.  So now I'm bringing in CSS, but because it's learning,  you take two steps forward, you're going to take ten steps back,  they're not going to remember all the tags.  So that's why they need the time.  So that's why I don't like boot camps,  because you don't get the time to try to figure,  you're just doing this a lot and you just don't know what's going on.  So then they add some color.  And then you say, ooh, let's use the box method.  Oh, but that right there just totally demoralizes a lot of people,  because now you've got to deal with margins and figure out  if this margin is this padding, is this book.  I don't know what this thing is, so you do that thing.  Then once they get there, you say, hey, let's add a click event.  That's it.  You don't just give them a whole project and just say,  you just add, you keep, it's called scaffolding.  You just keep adding.  So what I need you to do is that box that we just did,  let's make that a button.  And so then they go into the job,  you know they learn a little JavaScript,  and then they make that a click event,  and then, oh, and then you just keep adding onto that.  That's how you do make the mentoring very,  make it manageable, you make it measurable,  and people know it's very objective.  It's not subjective.  And this is what I usually do in assessment,  but we don't have time.  I'll take any questions later, but thank you again.  And if you would like to get involved,  this is how you get involved.
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