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.
The months have flown by, and my last Mentoring blog was back in August!
Back then, we were in different teams and I stated that I wasn’t going to be proactive in helping him since I had constantly given him advice, offered to spend time with him, but I didn’t see much effort on his part. Since he was in a different team – it wasn’t really my responsibility to help him progress with his team’s work.
Things have changed slightly since I got reassigned to his team (managers sure do love reassigning people!). I gave him a list of bugs to look at, which were (what looked like) easy ones. It is proper work to do (rather than working through tutorials), although hasn’t gone through the normal prioritisation process, so even when he fixed them (well with a lot of supervision from me), they are just now lingering in a code branch and won’t actually get tested and released.
I spoke to him at the start of December and said there’s going to be downtime as most of the team are off, and we end up having a “change freeze” where we don’t release anything to our users anyway. December is the perfect time to do his personal project and write as much code as he can without any expectation/pressure from any management or team members.
A few weeks later, I asked him what he had done and he said he was just “finishing off some online courses”. Which to me, should have taken a week at most and it mainly involves just watching videos. He said he would move onto his personal project next. A week later, I asked him if he had any code to show me or discuss and he said
“I’ve been chilling out… it’s Christmas”.
Apprentice
I really wanted him to get involved in the projects next year because I think January/February is going to be really busy. We’ve been putting off starting projects (although a few of them I actually had a look at in the December downtime, and prototyped a solution), but they will no doubt want to rush them out as they suddenly become “urgent”.
However, since he has barely put the effort in again, he still is way behind the skills level he should be performing at – which means it’s going to be difficult to assign him parts of a project he can actually do.
Stranger Coding Tings 