[IggleSniggle]

Everyone is looked at as a young person when they are young. I've definitely had "junior" colleagues that "got it" better than my 50yo colleagues. It's possible I shouldn't say that outloud, because skilled youngsters have a tendency to misidentify themselves as being part of that set while the wise youngsters have a tendency to *underestimate* their own capability or insight. But I don't think you can make that same assumption about a senior thinking back to their early years.

I desperately wish, to this day, that I had been in the position to receive mentorship. I basically hang out on HN as a way to gather it where I can. Attended engineering meetups when I was younger as well. But I never had the benefit of working with engineers senior to myself. I was a junior "business employed person" but when you need to make a roof you do what you can and learn the hard way even if there's no other humans to show you how to make a proper roof. Luckily, you can receive mentorship not just online, but through books, or even just studying the craft of others...but you take what you can get.

Receiving mentorship is such a gift, and as I approach the end of my career, I am still hungry for it, and harboring some degree of wistful envy for those that receive mentorship as an engineer. I've had many great mentors, but my for the most part, engineering mentors have never seen my face, heard my voice, or known my name, and certainly not for the first decade of my professional career as a software developer, where I didn't have any other developers to work with.

[reactordev]

You see, the issue is you’re framing your mentorship (or lack thereof) on a very specific topic, that you are already well versed in. Why would someone give you advice in your field? You probably already know…

Mentorship is about more than just “don’t use strings directly in your squeal”, it’s about navigating the organization. Filing proper TPS reports. Encouraging refactoring. Having empathy when shit goes south. Coffee talks. Hikes. Walks. Getting to know them as a person and giving them life advice.

My best mentor taught me, if you keep looking under rocks, all you’ll find is dirt. Look up.

[IggleSniggle]

Of course. And I thought I acknowledged that mentorship is many things and there are many things that we need to grow as individuals. I've had a lot of great mentors in my life.

I still think you've missed the point. You can be grateful for the many gifts you've received and still wish to have had engineering guidance from a trusted mentor. There is not enough time in a life to go down every single rabbit hole; it's nice to have experienced people accurately point out where the rabbit holes are. Non-engineers are not equipped to help spot engineering rabbit holes; they might even tell you that engineering itself is ultimately a pointless rabbit hole.

But even then...that's just my own experience and my own wishes for my past self. I try to give what I wish I had had, of course.. think that's what drives most mentorship, and maybe that's the point you're trying to make, that mentorship is given out of that wistful feeling of wishing you had received advice/help and passing along the lessons that took you too long to find.

But still, if your role is getting stuck alone in the server room or whatever with a team of people who don't understand or respect what you do, good luck.

The point I was trying to make (and maybe failed because I got too focused on my own experience) is that really, not everyone gets mentors, even of the broader sort that you're referring to (which I might say are more accurately called friends or peers). But even if we widen the scope of what mentorship is, it's also perfectly reasonable for field-specific mentorship to be a cultural expectation for software engineering. I think it's a good thing to expect this of each other, and to encourage explicitly making space for the practice.

But again, however you want to widen the scope of what mentorship is, not everyone is getting it. The reason people look under rocks is because they don't know where to look. Or they do know where to look but also know they have blind spots and don't know how to get them addressed. "Look up" is nice and all, but it's a bit rude and distracting when you're trying to build something and need help understanding the foundation below your feet. Sometimes you don't need someone telling you to look up, you need help seeing where to look closer.