Coaching
Hello everyone! Welcome to a new work week. I hope you had an excellent restoration time during the weekend. We spent the time with my wife doing chores around the house. 😅
A cousin and his partner visited the city, and we ate clam chowder!
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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been pairing with another engineer who’s new to our tech stack. I’ve taken the opportunity to talk about past decisions and give more context for some things that seem broken upon first inspection, among other stories.
Since their task is migrating an app to use our latest framework, I divided it into multiple milestones. I help them to get out of the woods, and then they go on their own, and then we check in again after a few days.
These sessions have made me think about coaching and pairing with people. Generally, people learn more when they’re in the driver's seat. Other times are better for them to see.
It’s been interesting for me to learn to identify these opportunities to switch or how they better learn a given topic. Other times, it is less about coding something and more about sharing context to internalize a decision or get the understanding they need to keep pushing forward.
This coaching/teaching setup has been very different from more “formal” institutional mentoring sessions, which haven’t been so great. I think culturally, we weren’t there to formalize to such a degree.
In those cases, people treat it as homework, as opposed to a two-way street. They expect to show up given some tasks or specific steps to follow to get to the next level. It takes time to discuss what they want and explain mentoring ethos, and afterward, they’re not convinced in a way.
People do not show up regularly or only do the first session. Anyhow, I’ve also sent that comment to the organizers. In general, having a mentoring and coaching culture is excellent if you can build it at your company!
I do have “informal” mentoring and coaching sessions, both with more senior members, as well as with more junior members of the staff. So don’t think that I’ve only seen some aspect of it.
Your turn!
Let me know how you coach or mentor other engineers in your organization. What has worked? What hasn’t? Please reply to this email to let me know your thoughts.
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- The Cult of Obsidian a post about the Obsidian note-taking app, which I use after trying a bunch of others. It solved a lot of issues for my use case.
- Your creativity owes you nothing “As Elizabeth Gilbert says in Big Magic: Inspiration "owes you nothing, except the transcendence of the experience of working with it".”
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