On mentorship
In this issue, I will talk about mentoring junior professionals and the importance of dedicated mentors. Two tips are also there 🤔 ⏳📏 📷.
One article 🧑🏫💰💡👀 (about mentorship) and two tips.
🧑🏫💰💡👀
Spare Yourself the Drama: Why Your Juniors Deserve a Dedicated Mentor
Hey there, fellow professionals! Let me share some thoughts on the importance of mentorship for your junior team members.
The gist is: If you have senior teammates with the right expertise, ensure mentoring is part of their job description. If your organization lacks suitable mentors, hire an external mentor.
Let me explain why. Remember that I'm a data scientist; my perspective primarily stems from that background. However, the overall approach applies to knowledge-based workers, so keep reading. I hope you'll thank me.
Oh, and one more thing, this article is about junior professionals. I'll talk about mentoring seniors in the next issue.
They make costly mistakes and cost you money
Complex projects involve shortcuts, pitfalls, and workarounds. Programmers may skip unit tests or ignore edge cases; data scientists could make incorrect evaluations or mix up datasets. Designers might overlook user feedback or prioritize aesthetics. Knowing when to accelerate projects legitimately is crucial.
Inexperienced data scientists may not ensure users aren't in both training and testing datasets. Junior programmers may claim full unit test coverage but ignore integration and use hard-coded constants. They are not lazy or malicious. They lack experience and struggle with concepts others already know by heart.
Confession time. During the early stages of my career, I worked with a limited data set. In trying to find the best model, I didn’t notice that I compromised the necessary separation between training and testing data. This oversight led to overly optimistic outcomes and substantial investments that ultimately went down the drain. A knowledgeable mentor could have guided me through this challenge and helped prevent such costly missteps.
They are too naive
Ah, the innocence of youth. One of my all-time favorite quotes is, "What do you mean the dates in the date column don't mean dates?" And who can forget, "I took these numbers from the database; they are correct"? Or how about junior programmers who say, "Why do I need version control? I've got it all backed up on my USB stick!"? Bless their hearts.
Sometimes they cut too many corners, and sometimes too few of them. It's a delicate balance, isn't it? Juniors might completely ignore good practices, like skipping code reviews, or they could strive for perfection when the business problem doesn't warrant it. Other times, they're terrified of heuristics and insist on the most exhaustive solutions, like building an overly complex algorithm when a simpler one would suffice.
We've all been there. A mentor with experience and insight can help them strike the right balance, saving time, effort, and resources.
They tend to be distracted by shiny things
Remember when you first stumbled upon a cool new tool and tried to solve every problem with it? That was me with the graph database Neo4j. I wanted to turn everything into a graph problem, and nobody was around to tell me to cut the nonsense. How many times have we seen data scientists attempting to build a deep learning model when a simple logistic regression or decision tree would suffice? Or when a developer discovers a new development tool and spends days configuring it, despite a deadline just around the corner?
A friendly, periodic conversation with a mentor can help identify such "crushes" and guide the individual in determining whether the new shiny thing is worth pursuing (sometimes it is) or not.
A fresh pair of eyes is not always solution
Earlier in this post, I mentioned my past mistake of overusing training and testing data, which went unnoticed. It wasn't that no one tried to help; my managers even brought in an expert to review my project. So, why didn't they catch the issue? The expert was a one-time visitor, impressed by my presentation but lacking the context, in-depth project knowledge, and regular contact to spot the problem. A classical case of "here today, gone tomorrow"” Proper mentorship is a process, not an action. It takes time and regularity.
One more thing, and a summary
Mentoring benefits both the mentees and the mentor: the mentor is empowered and gets the chance to contemplate and formalize their knowledge. If you assign a mentor from within your company, it's better if the mentor is not the mentee's manager. One of my best mentors was indeed my direct manager (hi, Marcelo), and I mentored my direct reports, but I think the dialogue is more open, and the learning is more efficient when there is no hierarchical pressure. Whatever you decide, remember that mentorship and management are different things.
The bottom line: You want to save headaches and money, right? It's time to invest in mentorship for your junior team members.
If you don't have a suitable mentor in your org, you may ask for help. With my experience and a healthy dose of cynicism, I'll guide them through potential pitfalls, naive assumptions, and alluring distractions. Contact me today, and let's discuss how we can help your junior team members thrive together. Remember, a little mentoring goes a long way!
Two tips
Tip 1: 🤔 ⏳ You were asked to do something? Delay the action as long as responsible and socially acceptable. The requestor may forget, some things may fix themselves, or someone else might jump in first and do that for you.
Tip 2: 📏 📷 In Zoom meetings, sit far away from the computer and the camera. Your counterparts will better see your body language, and you will be less tempted to read emails and be more engaged.