Mentoring #5

I am mentoring an Apprentice who has never done C# before, and this is his first programming job. So this is a diary of some-sort of his progression and my ability to mentor. I haven’t written about my Apprentice in detail for a while – it’s been 4 months!

The bad thing is that there’s no good news to talk about, but I can sure rant about him instead. I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the past year, giving him general advice based on my journey as a developer and telling some great stories. I’ve explained what I think makes a good developer, emphasising how it is fundamental to know how to debug effectively, and how you need to find the root cause of an issue rather than papering over the cracks. 

When a batch of Apprentices joined the company, we had no plan for them, so managers passed them between teams aimlessly. When he joined my team, I promised him I would put in the effort and be the mentor he expected to have when he joined. So I can help him reach whatever potential he has, but he needs to put in the effort to get there; I can just get him there faster. I said he can ask as many dumb questions in the first year, but after that, then I will judge him.

I’ve given him exam questions, a pdf book, a list of project ideas I spent a few hours writing, a list of easy bugs to fix, and I frequently send him code samples to discuss. I’ve even made some basic programs and set the challenge to enhance them. I’ve done live coding demos, talking him through how to make a noughts-and-crosses game. I said I would code review anything he sends me.

I told him that it’s not mandatory to do everything I send him, because people learn in different ways, but he needs to put the effort in to do something. Maybe he doesn’t like reading and prefers watching videos? The key thing is just to get writing code.

However, with my Apprentice, he has been with me a year, and yet has basically nothing to show for it. He just seems to make excuses and somehow time has flown by.

I did get another Apprentice assigned to me. He did the exam questions within a couple of days. He made his own Battleships program in the following week, he completed a few easy bugs in the weeks following that. Then he moved teams, but I thought he was probably ready for proper work. He did seem far more naturally gifted, but he also had the high determination and took all my advice and instructions on board. I couldn’t have been happier with him.

A few months ago, my Apprentice also switched teams and I said to him he was nowhere near ready to be assigned proper work. The work his team had planned would feature more advanced, Senior level topics like threads, and required good knowledge of the domain.

I advised him to partake in meetings and do a bit of pair-programming so he has a feel for what is going on, but he must spend half the day practicing code, working through the assignments I had given him.

After a few weeks he calls me and says he has felt he has wasted his time and learned nothing. I asked him what code he has written and he says he has only gone to meetings and been watching a colleague work. He then asks me for advice. I remind him of my original plan and he says “oh yeah, you did say that, I should always listen to your advice because you are always right”.

A few weeks go by and I ask him why I still haven’t seen any code from him. He said he felt bad doing his own personal tasks, on work time. In his team stand-ups meetings, he felt like he needed to talk about his team’s work otherwise his colleagues would think he isn’t contributing. I ask him what he has spoken about if he hasn’t done any work for the team. He has not contributed anything. At least if he actually practiced coding over the last couple of months, he would have had the skills to try and contribute from now on. 

He said I was right again, although he was still adamant he wanted to do some proper work. He promised to start his project at the weekend and continue to do it outside work. So I picked out a few bugs from the backlog that looked easy. His Product Owner and Scrum Master weren’t happy about bringing in work to their team’s backlog when it wasn’t planned. I explained that currently their work is far too hard for him and he isn’t contributing so should imagine him not in the team. So let’s give him some easy work, then he can do something. Even if the work is shelved and the Testers don’t have time to test it, at least he has learnt something and he will feel like he has done something.

So after 1 year of my mentorship, I can now judge him and he has been a complete disappointment. He has only done 2 easy bug fixes with my supervision. In some ways, I feel like a failure but I know I’m not a bad mentor. I have put so much effort in and gave him so much advice. I feel like he disregards it, then says I am right, but then doesn’t change and carries on with the wrong approach. I definitely held my side of the bargain of being the mentor that they promised him.

Has he started his project yet? No. He just comes out with excuses. He does have some good reasons, but it’s hard to justify not being able to find a few hours here and there over a year, or even just the last couple of months:

• Moving into a new flat
• Went to visit a friend down in London
• Forgot his son was staying the weekend
• His son enjoyed his stay so wanted to stay again
• Decided to start boxing as a new hobby
• Watching the Euro 2020 England game.

I’ve stopped asking him about it, because I feel like I am just repeating myself, and have given him so many ideas of what to code. He isn’t in my team so I feel like I’m not responsible for him anymore. I’ll still be around if he wants help or advice because I enjoy helping people, but I’m not going to be proactive anymore.