Secrets of a Stealth Mentee
Wu, Katherine
Your dream mentor is right around the corner, but they don't need to know that! In this talk, you’ll discover how to find and work with the great mentors you deserve. You’ll learn how to extract insights tailored to you and to keep the great advice coming. The best part? You can use these strategies even if you're not in a formal mentorship program. Maybe you don’t even know what you want right now, and that’s ok! You can still receive mentorship to help you identify and grow into the next stage of your career. We don’t have to wait to be chosen-let’s help others help us.
 Thank you all for coming. I have given a decent number of conference talks now over the years and right now I'm going through the moment before every single one of them where I'm like this was a terrible idea why did I sign up for this and also a reminder like it feels like it but I'm not like literally going to die like this I'm going to survive the next 30 minutes probably it's happened in the past. So hello I'm Kay Wu it's short for Catherine Wu but everyone calls me Kay Wu. I am a senior software engineer at Heroku currently and I'm here today to share some things I've learned over the years about receiving good mentorship. The slides should be shared off of my Twitter account the handle should be on most of the slides in here and as a quick run through of the structure of the talk overall I'm going to dive quickly into what I think the issue is or how I've experienced it at least you know the usual why do we care about this problem and then the meat of the talk is of course in the solutions of tactics that I've had figured out up until now and then there's a fairly extensive list of additional recommended references and resources. So in terms of the problem. Okay first problem was my clicker stop working for a little bit. So let's talk a little bit about a typical mentoring interaction that I at least often experienced. Oftentimes there is maybe some sort of program that that where I got matched up to someone maybe a little randomly and there are definitely good intentions on both sides but we're still not quite sure what to talk about and maybe we go out for lunch a few times in one case I've been in college I'd had a mentor assigned for all four years. However at the end I ended up often feeling like nothing was really different nothing really changed as a result of that relationship necessarily and that's kind of weird right for for something that's supposed to be quite important for one's career development overall. I have a theory that especially in the tech world I feel like there aren't that many of us necessarily that have both the experience and the aptitude for becoming really good mentors I mean the field overall is really quite young but the potential is definitely there. So what might this look like instead once I felt like I got better at figuring this out overall all sorts of things opened up for me a really big deal would be situations where I got encouragement from my mentors to even consider applying for and ended up receiving job opportunities that I on my own didn't think I was even qualified for. I changed careers into software engineering I got into giving conference talks and in the most recent example when I joined Heroku I called up my friend Jonan who gave a talk about his waffle making machine just earlier I just just called him to let him know that oh I'm like really excited about this offer and like here are some of the details and just on the phone unprompted he like forced me into practicing salary negotiation with him for 30 minutes and made me promise to him that I was going to give it a shot and so I would like to say to Jonan that our nanny's bank account really thanks you I was like really helpful right there. So I feel like overall my strategies are not necessarily groundbreaking but they weren't obvious to me at first anyway and so maybe there might be some ideas that'll be new for you as well. Overall what I really want to do is level the playing field a little bit and have everyone walk away and power to get better mentoring for themselves and those that they work with. I do want to clarify a distinction between mentors and sponsors both are very important and in this talk I will be mostly focusing on mentors. The distinction between these if you haven't come across this before is something that my friend Kate introduced me to. She had a blog post where she wrote about how mentors give her perspective but sponsors give her opportunity and you definitely need both at various points throughout sometimes you'll have the same you know both roles in the same person sometimes they will be different and I would say the you could think of the difference of something like the difference between a sponsor who might think of you when there's a really cool job or project opportunity that comes up and says like oh this person would be really great at that like let me put forth their name and nominate them for this versus a mentor who instead might be someone that you would go to to get feedback on how you can improve your approach to searching for a job overall. So I do want to call those two distinctions a little bit because I think they get muddled sometimes and then it gets confusing based on what you're trying to achieve. And then just some broader caveats overall. I am definitely here to share what I think has worked for me but I very much want to be self aware of the fact that I know that I'm in general probably a little bit more comfortable than average just asking for help from other people and making requests generally. If you've ever heard of the ask versus guess culture spectrum I'm like pretty far on the ask side of things I am from the East Coast so that probably makes a big difference there. And what that means for me is that in general I end up operating under philosophy where it's almost always OK to ask for something because hopefully people are totally allowed to say no. That said I definitely recognize that a lot of people grow up in cultures where that is not really what's done and there's a lot of importance placed instead on not imposing on others instead. So in case it causes discomfort of some kind. I do have a separate talk that goes into this idea a lot more in depth but I do just want to call it out because maybe some of the tactics might be a little bit more forward than you're used to or you're comfortable with. I mean I certainly at least hope that I'm still being polite and respectful but either way I think you can definitely adapt these different ideas for your own interests and strengths get kind of creative and figure out how it might work for your comfort level. Hopefully there will be time for questions at the end and we can go through that or you can always find me sometime at the rest of this conference and we can chat and brainstorm a little bit too. So hold up a second. You have to go through the obligatory why is this problem even a problem? Why is it that we want to be mentored? Well if I can be so bold as to disagree with a part of Matt's keynote this morning I would have to say maybe some of us do want to take over the world someday. You know? I wouldn't want to rule that out necessarily. So yeah the characters on the left here are from an old cartoon show called Pinky and the Brain. If in general you're everyone familiar with some random picture or pop culture reference that I'm making, like my brain just is making random connections as I'm frantically trying to pull these slides together so I do have an appendix at the very end with associated phrases so you can feel free to go look it up more in depth. There might be some fun stuff in there. So yeah, anyway, so outside of that though more seriously I just I guess I just generally had this always had the sense that it's important to have mentors throughout your career but for me for a long time it always seemed like something that other people made happen somehow mysteriously instead. For example one of my college roommates was just always really amazing at applying for grants, she got a full bright, she just like had really amazing recommendation letters from all of her different professors and some of them in the same classes that I was taking with her as well. And eventually I learned that she would like actually regularly go to these professors office hours which when I heard about it I was just like oh like I have like the same syllabus, the same schedule and somehow that just never really occurred to me as a strategy to use to just get to know someone that way and build the relationship there. So I feel like there are all sorts of things that are kind of like that that once you spend some time reflecting on it and partnering I think there might be lots and lots of untapped opportunities in front of you. One thing I think that you can get out of mentoring is to just demystify the world around you a little bit more. If you've ever felt like wait like did I miss something that somehow everyone else seems to know a lot about I feel like mentoring can be a really great way to address that. As another example I was once matched up with a CTO and decided in our first conversation that I was just going to go for it and just ask this like pretty important dude or whatever like what even is a CTO? Because that was like never covered in a textbook or anything for me. I like somehow missed that part just growing up in suburban middle class New Jersey or whatever it's not like we run into venture capitalists like all the time or anything like that. And the more I thought about it it's like hey like no one is born knowing this stuff and the people that do know it don't have like an ownership claim on any of it so I can go ahead and ask and then I will know more than I did the day before. Another follow on to that I think that mentoring is really helpful at is just seeing what your options might be. For example if I know what the options are then I can figure out what experiments I might run to runs what plans I might want to make to steer towards something or even not towards away from something instead as well. This could be very concrete things like the next project you might work on but it can also be for longer term things too like what various different lifestyles and work setups might be like and whether I would be well suited to them or not. And finally please don't tell my kid this but doing things the easy way is awesome. If you can learn something the easy way rather than the hard way you should totally go for that. Also the reason there's a picture of Ali Wong's baby cobra comedy special from Netflix here is that she has a bit in the special where she's like I don't want to lean in I want to lie down instead so if I could borrow that bit. And honestly if you take away nothing from this talk what's ever totally fine but if you haven't seen this comedy special you should totally watch it it's like really brilliant. I mean totally not safe for work so hopefully I haven't violated the code of conduct but on your own time you should totally go watch it. That's awesome she's great. Okay enough setup overall let's get into the meat of the talk. I have bucketed my strategies into three general sections. First adapting a phrase from the movie Glenn Gary and Glenn Ross I haven't ever actually watched this movie I just like hear it get referenced in conference talk so I'm just going to adapt that phrase as well but the phrase is always be mentee-ing I'm going to get into a little bit more about what that means in a bit. Second find your kindred spirits this here is a reference to Anne of Green Gables wonderful wonderful childhood book which is the story of an orphan who has lots of misadventures and cares a lot about finding good friends and making connections that way. And third barring a slogan I saw all the time in the 90s keep it easy breezy beautiful it's really hard to say this phrase without tacking along the cover girl at the end. But as I was doing this apparently like they're not even using the slogan anymore which like really blew my mind so like I guess if they don't want to use that I can use it here so we're good. So this first one always be mentee-ing what I mean by this is that all of this process around mentorship I think it's helpful to really think about it as constantly ongoing as well as the fact that well I always built it up in my head as like a you know it's super important for your career you have these really long term mentorships and I just really held it up as this like giant big like oh it's like it has to be like super meaningful super deep etc etc but I actually think that there is a lot of benefits of thinking of it and accepting the fact that you can totally have much more short term goals and relationships all the way up to you know the long term types of relationships that we often hear more about. So I'm here to say it's totally okay to have some more short term short term goals in mind maybe oriented around a particular or topic or goal such as giving your first conference talk or something like that that that could totally be a focus of a particular mentorship and when you achieve that depending on how things go like that might be just where you you wind up and that's totally fine. Edmund Lau has an article that I've linked in the references where he talks about the idea of designing a relationship. It's he's mostly talking about have running effective one-on-ones between you and your manager but I think the idea is still really useful in terms of going into something thinking a little bit more of kind of what are we both in this for what are we going to get out of it at the end. So let's talk a little bit about who you might receive mentoring from. A really common approach I've seen is where there are mentoring programs set up and then you kind of get assigned to a mentor and I've definitely had both helpful and maybe less helpful experiences out of this but you know it isn't even always up to me necessarily whether there's a program like this around and so what do you do then. Well you might be tempted to approach people you admire and ask them you know just like well like will you be my mentor. I'm generally totally all about asking people for help but the direct approach here I think generally doesn't necessarily end up being that effective. On the other hand I feel very strongly that you don't have to just sit around waiting to be noticed either like it just always makes me feel like like I'm back in like at the middle school dance and like everyone is just like standing by the walls of the gym hoping that you know that someone will ask you to dance or whatever super super awkward and unnecessary. This is one of my personal pet peeves about Cheryl Sandberg's Lean In book. I mean the whole book is very much about putting the onus on the individual for progressing their career and yet I felt like the chapter there on mentoring very much still had an attitude that you shouldn't go seeking mentors but you know instead of like just do good work and like wait for someone to notice. I mean overall I don't have as strong negative feelings about that book as I know a lot of other people do but this one point I definitely disagree with the idea of you know kind of you know just keeping your head down until someone picks you to like bestow some mentoring on or whatever. So given that how do you reconcile these two ideas? One way that I would approach it is just skip this part altogether. I really think that people don't have to even formally agree to be your mentor in order to mentor you. They don't actually even have to be aware that it's happening necessarily because one way I would think about mentoring is really just like you're going off and learning something from someone and you know obviously we do this all the time from books that people write, articles they publish, you know videos of talks that you can you could receive so much mentoring from someone and they're never even really aware of it and like that's super cool. Like that's totally an option that's already out there. The rest of the talk is going to be more focused on like the more one-on-one relationships that you would think about but just wanted to point out like mentoring is learning and that comes in all forms and ways of doing things. I for example have had a bunch of mentors where it just seemed like like I would always ask them questions and then they would just always answer them so I just kept asking them some more questions and later I was the one that told them hey by the way I consider you a mentor now like and it's already kind of a done deal and then they can't say no. Too bad. I trick them into it. So what might a good mentor look like? In general I feel like I'm looking for someone that I might click with on their values and how they look at the world. I like direct communicators, people who don't beat around the bush and usually I feel like I can sense that just like me they're probably like on the inside we're just like really on the inside we're really judgmental people. We want to be better and nice on the outside and I really admire folks that I feel like I've done a really good job of that and I can really learn a lot from them. But it's not just about having stuff in common because what I think what elevates a friend into a mentor is someone who maybe has had a variety of different life experiences of one kind or another. The best is when it's someone who I'm always curious to hear their take on something because I'll probably be a little bit surprised and I feel like when I'm surprised it probably means that I am about to learn something from here. So for example I would consider that I have mentors in a whole bunch of different subject areas both technical and work wise but also I mentioned on public speaking. Before I took the job at Heroku and through it I've had various mentors who are more experienced at working remotely, changing careers. I would even have folks I would say I consider like my parenting mentors. You know folks I turn to and like oh they seem like they're doing a really good job and I would like to do more like how they are. Oftentimes my mentors are people who are doing stuff that I think is really cool or they've achieved something that I think I might want and I just really admire them. But there is an important aspect to this I think of having it not be someone that I am just elevating onto a pedestal of some kind because there needs to be the opening to eventually come to really trust this person and be willing to be vulnerable with them. It can be really scary to share that you don't know what you want or what it is that you really dream about and when just inherently I think that there's very naturally a lot of fear and hesitation around that and it's really wonderful when you can find folks that you trust and feel safe with and be able to bring those things out into the life and into the light and figure out where you're going to go from there. So how do we find folks like this? Let's talk about networking. Networking is definitely one of those other topics that I always felt like I heard people talk about but I didn't really understand like how you were supposed to do it. And the thing that changed for me is when I redefined networking in my head and thought about it instead as just going out and getting to know people and making friends like with no expectations necessarily, just getting to know folks out there. I had a baby last year and so I kind of dropped off the Ruby conferences for a couple years or so but this is my first one back in a while and it's been really nice just to walk around and see some familiar faces and catch up with people that I've known for like a few years now which is pretty amazing I think. So definitely set the groundwork for that. I think that that is really valuable. And so there are lots of specific ways that you might go about this. Of course like we are at a conference right now. There are 800 of us here. Most of them probably you don't know and that's like a really great opportunity. Another way, once you go home and we might be a little bit more scattered and dispersed, a strategy that I have found really helpful is when I come across something that I have found really insightful or helpful in some way to make sure that I actually take the time and give positive, thoughtful feedback about that work. Like everyone wants to hear more of that right? They put a time and effort into something. They share it with the world and to hear that someone saw it and took the time with it. I think that that builds really good vibes and in general I think it's really nice to find ways to put more positivity out into the world when I can. I mean I'm not totally not above leaving a bad Yelp review and stuff. When there are good things make sure to stop and notice them and let those folks know. And sometimes even taking it a step further and saying like oh I really learned a lot from this and going forth and sharing it with others. There have been times when I feel like I've almost become like an unofficial evangelist of some kind for various projects around like my friend Kate had this and Chuki, they ran a newsletter on public speaking at tech conferences that I always thought was amazing and I just kind of glommed on and became a real cheerleader for that project. I thought it was awesome. And finally another point I want to make in this area is to make sure to go ahead and take people up on their offers to help. Like the office hours for the professors, they made that time available and I definitely could have took advantage of that a lot more. There are other folks that I know in the Ruby community like Opti Grimm I think every so often sometimes he'll just sort of be like oh it's my birthday and to celebrate I'm going to make available pairing sessions for folks or run a discount of some kind and those opportunities are out there and you deserve to make use of them. You do. And then on the social aspect of things here, one thing I wanted to bring up that my friend Amy taught me actually is to just like go ahead and embrace the awkward. I feel like a lot of times we have hesitations from trying to connect with folks as we just sort of think in our heads. I mean I definitely have this too of like I am just like kind of an awkward person and like that's just oh I don't know if I want to deal with it necessarily and like what if they don't want to deal with me blah blah blah. But if you think about it like probably those of us that are kind of awkward like we really outnumber all of the smooth people instead. So like just go for it and if it's really truly awkward or uncomfortable like just like go forth and apologize. And I'm trying to do that more of trying to put myself out there and then just you know it's very also like tied to therefore needing to apologize if I've forgotten someone's name. But usually like I remember the conversation but I may have like forgotten someone's name but you know I can ask and then we'll be in good terms again. Okay so now that you have found and gotten to know some cool potential mentors what next? So maybe you want to reach out and see if they'll answer a few questions or go grab coffee sometime. And at this stage I think it's all about making it easy for that person to say yes. Schedule with their time in mind maybe offering up a location that's convenient for them or if you're not co-located pick a commonly used platform something they can just say yes or no to ideally. In general I do think that having conversations is usually a little easier than having an email chain thread back and forth just because be able to talk out loud is often just a little smoother than having to like figure out the exact right words to write out. This can vary a little bit so like while I was on maternity leave I did try to shift this the daily schedule was unpredictable enough that I wanted to shift things more into email so that you know I may not be able to make a scheduled meeting depending on like the diaper situation right but with an email thread like if I wake up at two in the morning and can't go back to sleep like I can type something out and try to give a semi coherent thoughtful response at that point in time. I think ideally it is also helpful to give a general sense of the topics so that the person you're talking to can think about it in the background ahead of time a little bit and not just be completely off the cuff but otherwise try to have it be so that they don't have to prepare very much and can just show up like the more you can set things up and smooth the way so that all they have to do is just be present for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever it may be the more likely it is folks will say yes to your request. Keep it breezy by which I mean trying to keep things just like pretty low key and casual. I got this really great tip from my friend Cara who had said she likes to do a thing of trying to lessen the burden or the sense of responsibility someone might feel by asking them and calling it unofficial mentors instead for them to be unofficial mentors to her. In general I think if you can be specific about why you're reaching out to them in particular and keeping this tone of I really respect your work and would love to learn from you it just helps a ton because mentors they're just like us they get imposter syndrome too and they may not necessarily know like why you, why them, why now. The closer the connection in your situations in background I think the better chance you have generally. You phrased this as well like oh I'm really interested in your opinion because dot dot dot fill in the blank there. And overall you're trying to demonstrate that you have done your homework and this isn't just a generic request of some kind. And of course beautiful I really just like shoehorned a bunch of things here to keep it with the slogan but what this section is about is learning relevant things. So first it is okay to not know what to talk about at first. This is totally fine and very common and very normal I think. In the next few slides I'm going to try to give you some ideas and strategies but just know that that again is totally normal. One tactic that I really enjoy that this computer science professor Cal Newport writes about is this idea that you can go ahead and ask for experiences rather than asking for advice. The idea is that people don't necessarily have the introspection needed to determine what really helped them most in their own careers. So if you think about it more as interviewing them on your experiences you are trying to gather a bunch of data, you talk to a few different people and then you can analyze for yourself and look for patterns on what the key trigger points might have been along the way. So I think that that's like a really interesting strategy in general and the nice thing as well is it doesn't require very much prep work on the receiving person's or the mentor side of things. You can just ask them questions about what was happening and leading up to some event that you're interested in learning about for example. So I have a variety of list of sample topics that you can take forward as well. One is in general things around problem solving like any current dilemmas that you're facing, what options you might have and maybe getting feedback on proposed solutions that you have technical or otherwise. For example I once was in a situation where I've been working with a mentor really hard towards getting this promotion. It was like a multi-quarter process of some kind and afterwards I was pretty exhausted and I went to her and was just like, hey, is it okay if I'm really tired right now and just kind of want to take a little bit of a break? Is that okay? She was like, yeah, totally. It's fine. I know you. You're totally, you're still meeting everything you need to do and by the way, you're not the kind of person that's going to accidentally stagnate because you're just going to get bored. I know you. You get easily bored and sure enough, two months later, one of these job opportunities popped up and she was like, you should apply for this. I think you'd be awesome at it and that was kind of the start of my eventual move into software engineering myself. That was pretty cool and it came about because we'd had this relationship and I respected her and trusted her judgment even on something as whether I was what I should be doing next and what I might be qualified for. One area where I really love hearing more about how people think is on decision making because every single time when things come up and people are just like, oh, this is just like, well, it's like a case by case basis. This drives me nuts because I'm always just like, well, what, it depends. What does it depend on? Can we get a little bit more specific here? Things like technical intuition, I think it takes a really long time to build that up and it's hard to just, you can't really just take a past situation and try to apply it to the present because there will be so many details that will be really different in a little bit one way or another. I feel like asking questions along the lines of what made you decide some certain thing, what were the factors that you considered? One question I really like to ask is what would have changed your mind? What are some things that if they were different would have led down a different path in this situation? Because then you can, it takes that past experience and broadens up the potential future situations that you might apply it to and gets that much more out of it, I feel. Another area then is as you're building up this trust is all sorts of things where you just get the behind the scenes look at what's going on. There's an idea I came across recently that I really like that is called Effort Shock. The idea behind this is we are so used to movies like The Karate Kid or Rocky or whatever else where there's the training montage and you're like, oh, there's all these clips and John T. Music playing and in real life you're like, that is the hard part. That is where that takes sweat and tears and what is going on in there? What do I really need in order to do something along those lines? So asking what was your strategy to achieve your goal and how did you work through a mistake? Because I assure you other people have made all sorts of mistakes. If someone doesn't have a mistake that they can talk about then they're just lying. There's something there and if you have that relationship you could learn more about it and again learning things the easy way may be avoiding that particular situation yourself in the future. And finally this is where the trust and that vulnerability really come into play of asking for fairly personal feedback at this point. When you get to know someone over a longer period of time, sometimes this is even harder in a way because I've been working with someone and I really respect their judgment and I'm scared of hearing that I'm not measuring up in some way, right? But if I can find a way to get past that, I think that information there can be so valuable because this person knows me, knows my tendencies, knows what I've done before in the past and knows where I need support perhaps and where I might need to be pushed a little bit. But they don't want to hurt my feelings either and so if I take the step and go to ask them instead of, hey, what do you think I could really, like would be really worthwhile for me to focus on learning next or if I have this goal in mind what do you think, what are some options that I have for trying to improve in this area? Because these folks, they're in this to help you as well. They want you to do better and if you solicit that for them, it just makes it easier for you to get that information that you need. Overall, I do want to take a moment and make the point as well that you don't have to take all the advice that you're given. It's not an all or nothing situation which I would definitely sometimes have a pretty black and white view of it but all you really need to do is to indicate that you've thought about it. I mean, if you've never followed any of the advice or if you never make any changes like in those before interactions that I talked about, then maybe this isn't quite a mentoring relationship but I do want to say you don't have to take everything that you're given, you just think about it and see if it suits you. So overall, you can really do a lot to make yourself be a great mentee and stand out as someone that others feel rewarded for helping in some way. I don't actually mean literal gifts in this case so a lot of times, like if I'm going out for coffee with someone, I actually prefer to buy my own drink and I just don't want to impose on someone when maybe they're looking for a job right now. On the other hand, once I've gotten to know other people more, I definitely sometimes have bought them books or I really love buying baby shower gifts for people all of their registries. Baby stuff is so small and so cute. Okay. But we can go a little more classic and write some really good thank you notes where you specifically reference what you talked about, how that had an impact on you and demonstrate that reflection that I've been talking about. And so like Matt said this morning, seriously, for our Rubik's community, we're trying to form these positive feedback loops here. So finally, then a really key point is to make sure to follow up and stay in touch. Tell people how you made use of your advice. I kind of live and die by my calendar so I literally have a monthly reminder in there or recurring event that's just like do a networking thing of some kind. And usually what that really means is just firing up and writing a short to medium length email to maybe a former work colleague of some kind or a friend I haven't talked to in a little while and just sort of like, hey, here's what I'm up to, wondering how things are on your end, hope you're well kind of thing. Oftentimes I'll even include like, oh yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I still think about the story that you told me or like this insight that you shared from years ago and I think that that can be something that's really nice for folks to hear. I'm running out of time. Oh yeah, I like this quote of it's remarkable how much people appreciate hearing from you when you don't even want something from them. I think it's a good thing to keep in mind. Really a lot of what I've been talking about is towards this theme again of building relationships with trust so that you get that honest advice that you might not get elsewhere. And I think as well, it can actually be really helpful from even just a selfish perspective to consider paying it forward and mentoring others from that idea of you learn something better by teaching it. Because like if you consider it from an instructor's perspective, a really good teacher, you know, they might worry about being pushy or condescending. So even while they take responsibility with those power dynamics to manage the classroom or that relationship, you can help them by making eye contact or kind of speaking up and raising your hand when you have questions. And so to that end, I did find recently this guidebook that Thoughtbot has put out for mentorships there. So that's definitely available as well. Okay, resources as I'm near in the end. A whole bunch of articles and references. So these will have like sample wording that you can use and go into more depth again about a lot of ideas I mentioned, even more articles, podcasts and videos. I don't listen to a ton of podcasts, but these ones were pretty good. And the Asuka Manager one has transcripts that get done. So I can read that really quickly too. Logs in general, I like reference these folks. I think they're amazing. They're super smart and thoughtful about these things. And then a variety of these books. The first one, Deep Work, I am super obsessed with it. It's all about how to really go deep in your field and do meaningful work. The Effective Engineer is really good about how do you increase your impact. I have some quibbles with working in a corporate environment and unconscious bias, that part of things, so I can talk about that later. And the Manager's Path, I haven't actually read that one, but it's by Camille. And I've heard that even though it's kind of written for managers, it has a lot of good stuff as well from an individual contributor perspective, things that you might do to improve that relationship. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
 Thank you all for coming.  I have given a decent number of conference talks now over the years and right now I'm  going through the moment before every single one of them where I'm like this was a terrible  idea why did I sign up for this and also a reminder like it feels like it but I'm not  like literally going to die like this I'm going to survive the next 30 minutes probably  it's happened in the past.  So hello I'm Kay Wu it's short for Catherine Wu but everyone calls me Kay Wu.  I am a senior software engineer at Heroku currently and I'm here today to share some  things I've learned over the years about receiving good mentorship.  The slides should be shared off of my Twitter account the handle should be on most of the  slides in here and as a quick run through of the structure of the talk overall I'm  going to dive quickly into what I think the issue is or how I've experienced it at least  you know the usual why do we care about this problem and then the meat of the talk is of  course in the solutions of tactics that I've had figured out up until now and then there's  a fairly extensive list of additional recommended references and resources.  So in terms of the problem.  Okay first problem was my clicker stop working for a little bit.  So let's talk a little bit about a typical mentoring interaction that I at least often  experienced.  Oftentimes there is maybe some sort of program that that where I got matched up to someone  maybe a little randomly and there are definitely good intentions on both sides but we're still  not quite sure what to talk about and maybe we go out for lunch a few times in one case  I've been in college I'd had a mentor assigned for all four years.  However at the end I ended up often feeling like nothing was really different nothing  really changed as a result of that relationship necessarily and that's kind of weird right  for for something that's supposed to be quite important for one's career development overall.  I have a theory that especially in the tech world I feel like there aren't that many of  us necessarily that have both the experience and the aptitude for becoming really good  mentors I mean the field overall is really quite young but the potential is definitely  there.  So what might this look like instead once I felt like I got better at figuring this out  overall all sorts of things opened up for me a really big deal would be situations where  I got encouragement from my mentors to even consider applying for and ended up receiving  job opportunities that I on my own didn't think I was even qualified for.  I changed careers into software engineering I got into giving conference talks and in  the most recent example when I joined Heroku I called up my friend Jonan who gave a talk  about his waffle making machine just earlier I just just called him to let him know that  oh I'm like really excited about this offer and like here are some of the details and  just on the phone unprompted he like forced me into practicing salary negotiation with  him for 30 minutes and made me promise to him that I was going to give it a shot and  so I would like to say to Jonan that our nanny's bank account really thanks you I was like  really helpful right there.  So I feel like overall my strategies are not necessarily groundbreaking but they weren't  obvious to me at first anyway and so maybe there might be some ideas that'll be new for  you as well.  Overall what I really want to do is level the playing field a little bit and have everyone  walk away and power to get better mentoring for themselves and those that they work with.  I do want to clarify a distinction between mentors and sponsors both are very important  and in this talk I will be mostly focusing on mentors.  The distinction between these if you haven't come across this before is something that  my friend Kate introduced me to.  She had a blog post where she wrote about how mentors give her perspective but sponsors  give her opportunity and you definitely need both at various points throughout sometimes  you'll have the same you know both roles in the same person sometimes they will be different  and I would say the you could think of the difference of something like the difference  between a sponsor who might think of you when there's a really cool job or project opportunity  that comes up and says like oh this person would be really great at that like let me  put forth their name and nominate them for this versus a mentor who instead might be  someone that you would go to to get feedback on how you can improve your approach to searching  for a job overall.  So I do want to call those two distinctions a little bit because I think they get muddled  sometimes and then it gets confusing based on what you're trying to achieve.  And then just some broader caveats overall.  I am definitely here to share what I think has worked for me but I very much want to  be self aware of the fact that I know that I'm in general probably a little bit more  comfortable than average just asking for help from other people and making requests generally.  If you've ever heard of the ask versus guess culture spectrum I'm like pretty far on the  ask side of things I am from the East Coast so that probably makes a big difference there.  And what that means for me is that in general I end up operating under philosophy where  it's almost always OK to ask for something because hopefully people are totally allowed  to say no.  That said I definitely recognize that a lot of people grow up in cultures where that is  not really what's done and there's a lot of importance placed instead on not imposing  on others instead.  So in case it causes discomfort of some kind.  I do have a separate talk that goes into this idea a lot more in depth but I do just want  to call it out because maybe some of the tactics might be a little bit more forward than you're  used to or you're comfortable with.  I mean I certainly at least hope that I'm still being polite and respectful but either  way I think you can definitely adapt these different ideas for your own interests and  strengths get kind of creative and figure out how it might work for your comfort level.  Hopefully there will be time for questions at the end and we can go through that or you  can always find me sometime at the rest of this conference and we can chat and brainstorm  a little bit too.  So hold up a second.  You have to go through the obligatory why is this problem even a problem?  Why is it that we want to be mentored?  Well if I can be so bold as to disagree with a part of Matt's keynote this morning I would  have to say maybe some of us do want to take over the world someday.  You know?  I wouldn't want to rule that out necessarily.  So yeah the characters on the left here are from an old cartoon show called Pinky and the  Brain.  If in general you're everyone familiar with some random picture or pop culture reference  that I'm making, like my brain just is making random connections as I'm frantically trying  to pull these slides together so I do have an appendix at the very end with associated  phrases so you can feel free to go look it up more in depth.  There might be some fun stuff in there.  So yeah, anyway, so outside of that though more seriously I just I guess I just generally  had this always had the sense that it's important to have mentors throughout your career but  for me for a long time it always seemed like something that other people made happen somehow  mysteriously instead.  For example one of my college roommates was just always really amazing at applying for  grants, she got a full bright, she just like had really amazing recommendation letters  from all of her different professors and some of them in the same classes that I was taking  with her as well.  And eventually I learned that she would like actually regularly go to these professors  office hours which when I heard about it I was just like oh like I have like the same  syllabus, the same schedule and somehow that just never really occurred to me as a strategy  to use to just get to know someone that way and build the relationship there.  So I feel like there are all sorts of things that are kind of like that that once you spend  some time reflecting on it and partnering I think there might be lots and lots of untapped  opportunities in front of you.  One thing I think that you can get out of mentoring is to just demystify the world around  you a little bit more.  If you've ever felt like wait like did I miss something that somehow everyone else seems  to know a lot about I feel like mentoring can be a really great way to address that.  As another example I was once matched up with a CTO and decided in our first conversation  that I was just going to go for it and just ask this like pretty important dude or whatever  like what even is a CTO?  Because that was like never covered in a textbook or anything for me.  I like somehow missed that part just growing up in suburban middle class New Jersey or  whatever it's not like we run into venture capitalists like all the time or anything  like that.  And the more I thought about it it's like hey like no one is born knowing this stuff  and the people that do know it don't have like an ownership claim on any of it so I  can go ahead and ask and then I will know more than I did the day before.  Another follow on to that I think that mentoring is really helpful at is just seeing what your  options might be.  For example if I know what the options are then I can figure out what experiments I might  run to runs what plans I might want to make to steer towards something or even not towards  away from something instead as well.  This could be very concrete things like the next project you might work on but it can  also be for longer term things too like what various different lifestyles and work setups  might be like and whether I would be well suited to them or not.  And finally please don't tell my kid this but doing things the easy way is awesome.  If you can learn something the easy way rather than the hard way you should totally go for  that.  Also the reason there's a picture of Ali Wong's baby cobra comedy special from Netflix  here is that she has a bit in the special where she's like I don't want to lean in I  want to lie down instead so if I could borrow that bit.  And honestly if you take away nothing from this talk what's ever totally fine but if  you haven't seen this comedy special you should totally watch it it's like really brilliant.  I mean totally not safe for work so hopefully I haven't violated the code of conduct but  on your own time you should totally go watch it.  That's awesome she's great.  Okay enough setup overall let's get into the meat of the talk.  I have bucketed my strategies into three general sections.  First adapting a phrase from the movie Glenn Gary and Glenn Ross I haven't ever actually  watched this movie I just like hear it get referenced in conference talk so I'm just  going to adapt that phrase as well but the phrase is always be mentee-ing I'm going to  get into a little bit more about what that means in a bit.  Second find your kindred spirits this here is a reference to Anne of Green Gables wonderful  wonderful childhood book which is the story of an orphan who has lots of misadventures  and cares a lot about finding good friends and making connections that way.  And third barring a slogan I saw all the time in the 90s keep it easy breezy beautiful it's  really hard to say this phrase without tacking along the cover girl at the end.  But as I was doing this apparently like they're not even using the slogan anymore which like  really blew my mind so like I guess if they don't want to use that I can use it here so  we're good.  So this first one always be mentee-ing what I mean by this is that all of this process  around mentorship I think it's helpful to really think about it as constantly ongoing  as well as the fact that well I always built it up in my head as like a you know it's super  important for your career you have these really long term mentorships and I just really held  it up as this like giant big like oh it's like it has to be like super meaningful super  deep etc etc but I actually think that there is a lot of benefits of thinking of it and  accepting the fact that you can totally have much more short term goals and relationships  all the way up to you know the long term types of relationships that we often hear more about.  So I'm here to say it's totally okay to have some more short term short term goals in mind  maybe oriented around a particular or topic or goal such as giving your first conference  talk or something like that that that could totally be a focus of a particular mentorship  and when you achieve that depending on how things go like that might be just where you  you wind up and that's totally fine.  Edmund Lau has an article that I've linked in the references where he talks about the  idea of designing a relationship.  It's he's mostly talking about have running effective one-on-ones between you and your  manager but I think the idea is still really useful in terms of going into something thinking  a little bit more of kind of what are we both in this for what are we going to get out of  it at the end.  So let's talk a little bit about who you might receive mentoring from.  A really common approach I've seen is where there are mentoring programs set up and then  you kind of get assigned to a mentor and I've definitely had both helpful and maybe less  helpful experiences out of this but you know it isn't even always up to me necessarily  whether there's a program like this around and so what do you do then.  Well you might be tempted to approach people you admire and ask them you know just like  well like will you be my mentor.  I'm generally totally all about asking people for help but the direct approach here I think  generally doesn't necessarily end up being that effective.  On the other hand I feel very strongly that you don't have to just sit around waiting  to be noticed either like it just always makes me feel like like I'm back in like at the  middle school dance and like everyone is just like standing by the walls of the gym hoping  that you know that someone will ask you to dance or whatever super super awkward and  unnecessary.  This is one of my personal pet peeves about Cheryl Sandberg's Lean In book.  I mean the whole book is very much about putting the onus on the individual for progressing  their career and yet I felt like the chapter there on mentoring very much still had an  attitude that you shouldn't go seeking mentors but you know instead of like just do good work  and like wait for someone to notice.  I mean overall I don't have as strong negative feelings about that book as I know a lot of  other people do but this one point I definitely disagree with the idea of you know kind of  you know just keeping your head down until someone picks you to like bestow some mentoring  on or whatever.  So given that how do you reconcile these two ideas?  One way that I would approach it is just skip this part altogether.  I really think that people don't have to even formally agree to be your mentor in order  to mentor you.  They don't actually even have to be aware that it's happening necessarily because one  way I would think about mentoring is really just like you're going off and learning something  from someone and you know obviously we do this all the time from books that people write,  articles they publish, you know videos of talks that you can you could receive so much  mentoring from someone and they're never even really aware of it and like that's super cool.  Like that's totally an option that's already out there.  The rest of the talk is going to be more focused on like the more one-on-one relationships  that you would think about but just wanted to point out like mentoring is learning and  that comes in all forms and ways of doing things.  I for example have had a bunch of mentors where it just seemed like like I would always  ask them questions and then they would just always answer them so I just kept asking them  some more questions and later I was the one that told them hey by the way I consider you  a mentor now like and it's already kind of a done deal and then they can't say no.  Too bad.  I trick them into it.  So what might a good mentor look like?  In general I feel like I'm looking for someone that I might click with on their values and  how they look at the world.  I like direct communicators, people who don't beat around the bush and usually I feel like  I can sense that just like me they're probably like on the inside we're just like really  on the inside we're really judgmental people.  We want to be better and nice on the outside and I really admire folks that I feel like  I've done a really good job of that and I can really learn a lot from them.  But it's not just about having stuff in common because what I think what elevates a friend  into a mentor is someone who maybe has had a variety of different life experiences of  one kind or another.  The best is when it's someone who I'm always curious to hear their take on something because  I'll probably be a little bit surprised and I feel like when I'm surprised it probably  means that I am about to learn something from here.  So for example I would consider that I have mentors in a whole bunch of different subject  areas both technical and work wise but also I mentioned on public speaking.  Before I took the job at Heroku and through it I've had various mentors who are more experienced  at working remotely, changing careers.  I would even have folks I would say I consider like my parenting mentors.  You know folks I turn to and like oh they seem like they're doing a really good job  and I would like to do more like how they are.  Oftentimes my mentors are people who are doing stuff that I think is really cool or they've  achieved something that I think I might want and I just really admire them.  But there is an important aspect to this I think of having it not be someone that I  am just elevating onto a pedestal of some kind because there needs to be the opening  to eventually come to really trust this person and be willing to be vulnerable with them.  It can be really scary to share that you don't know what you want or what it is that you  really dream about and when just inherently I think that there's very naturally a lot  of fear and hesitation around that and it's really wonderful when you can find folks that  you trust and feel safe with and be able to bring those things out into the life and into  the light and figure out where you're going to go from there.  So how do we find folks like this?  Let's talk about networking.  Networking is definitely one of those other topics that I always felt like I heard people  talk about but I didn't really understand like how you were supposed to do it.  And the thing that changed for me is when I redefined networking in my head and thought  about it instead as just going out and getting to know people and making friends like with  no expectations necessarily, just getting to know folks out there.  I had a baby last year and so I kind of dropped off the Ruby conferences for a couple years  or so but this is my first one back in a while and it's been really nice just to walk around  and see some familiar faces and catch up with people that I've known for like a few years  now which is pretty amazing I think.  So definitely set the groundwork for that.  I think that that is really valuable.  And so there are lots of specific ways that you might go about this.  Of course like we are at a conference right now.  There are 800 of us here.  Most of them probably you don't know and that's like a really great opportunity.  Another way, once you go home and we might be a little bit more scattered and dispersed,  a strategy that I have found really helpful is when I come across something that I have  found really insightful or helpful in some way to make sure that I actually take the  time and give positive, thoughtful feedback about that work.  Like everyone wants to hear more of that right?  They put a time and effort into something.  They share it with the world and to hear that someone saw it and took the time with it.  I think that that builds really good vibes and in general I think it's really nice to  find ways to put more positivity out into the world when I can.  I mean I'm not totally not above leaving a bad Yelp review and stuff.  When there are good things make sure to stop and notice them and let those folks know.  And sometimes even taking it a step further and saying like oh I really learned a lot  from this and going forth and sharing it with others.  There have been times when I feel like I've almost become like an unofficial evangelist  of some kind for various projects around like my friend Kate had this and Chuki, they ran  a newsletter on public speaking at tech conferences that I always thought was amazing and I just  kind of glommed on and became a real cheerleader for that project.  I thought it was awesome.  And finally another point I want to make in this area is to make sure to go ahead and  take people up on their offers to help.  Like the office hours for the professors, they made that time available and I definitely  could have took advantage of that a lot more.  There are other folks that I know in the Ruby community like Opti Grimm I think every so  often sometimes he'll just sort of be like oh it's my birthday and to celebrate I'm going  to make available pairing sessions for folks or run a discount of some kind and those opportunities  are out there and you deserve to make use of them.  You do.  And then on the social aspect of things here, one thing I wanted to bring up that my friend  Amy taught me actually is to just like go ahead and embrace the awkward.  I feel like a lot of times we have hesitations from trying to connect with folks as we just  sort of think in our heads.  I mean I definitely have this too of like I am just like kind of an awkward person and  like that's just oh I don't know if I want to deal with it necessarily and like what  if they don't want to deal with me blah blah blah.  But if you think about it like probably those of us that are kind of awkward like we really  outnumber all of the smooth people instead.  So like just go for it and if it's really truly awkward or uncomfortable like just like  go forth and apologize.  And I'm trying to do that more of trying to put myself out there and then just you know  it's very also like tied to therefore needing to apologize if I've forgotten someone's  name.  But usually like I remember the conversation but I may have like forgotten someone's name  but you know I can ask and then we'll be in good terms again.  Okay so now that you have found and gotten to know some cool potential mentors what next?  So maybe you want to reach out and see if they'll answer a few questions or go grab coffee  sometime.  And at this stage I think it's all about making it easy for that person to say yes.  Schedule with their time in mind maybe offering up a location that's convenient for them or  if you're not co-located pick a commonly used platform something they can just say yes or  no to ideally.  In general I do think that having conversations is usually a little easier than having an  email chain thread back and forth just because be able to talk out loud is often just a little  smoother than having to like figure out the exact right words to write out.  This can vary a little bit so like while I was on maternity leave I did try to shift  this the daily schedule was unpredictable enough that I wanted to shift things more into email  so that you know I may not be able to make a scheduled meeting depending on like the  diaper situation right but with an email thread like if I wake up at two in the morning and  can't go back to sleep like I can type something out and try to give a semi coherent thoughtful  response at that point in time.  I think ideally it is also helpful to give a general sense of the topics so that the  person you're talking to can think about it in the background ahead of time a little bit  and not just be completely off the cuff but otherwise try to have it be so that they don't  have to prepare very much and can just show up like the more you can set things up and  smooth the way so that all they have to do is just be present for 30 minutes, 60 minutes,  whatever it may be the more likely it is folks will say yes to your request.  Keep it breezy by which I mean trying to keep things just like pretty low key and casual.  I got this really great tip from my friend Cara who had said she likes to do a thing  of trying to lessen the burden or the sense of responsibility someone might feel by asking  them and calling it unofficial mentors instead for them to be unofficial mentors to her.  In general I think if you can be specific about why you're reaching out to them in particular  and keeping this tone of I really respect your work and would love to learn from you  it just helps a ton because mentors they're just like us they get imposter syndrome too  and they may not necessarily know like why you, why them, why now.  The closer the connection in your situations in background I think the better chance you  have generally.  You phrased this as well like oh I'm really interested in your opinion because dot dot  dot fill in the blank there.  And overall you're trying to demonstrate that you have done your homework and this isn't  just a generic request of some kind.  And of course beautiful I really just like shoehorned a bunch of things here to keep  it with the slogan but what this section is about is learning relevant things.  So first it is okay to not know what to talk about at first.  This is totally fine and very common and very normal I think.  In the next few slides I'm going to try to give you some ideas and strategies but just  know that that again is totally normal.  One tactic that I really enjoy that this computer science professor Cal Newport writes about  is this idea that you can go ahead and ask for experiences rather than asking for advice.  The idea is that people don't necessarily have the introspection needed to determine  what really helped them most in their own careers.  So if you think about it more as interviewing them on your experiences you are trying to  gather a bunch of data, you talk to a few different people and then you can analyze  for yourself and look for patterns on what the key trigger points might have been along  the way.  So I think that that's like a really interesting strategy in general and the nice thing as well  is it doesn't require very much prep work on the receiving person's or the mentor side  of things.  You can just ask them questions about what was happening and leading up to some event  that you're interested in learning about for example.  So I have a variety of list of sample topics that you can take forward as well.  One is in general things around problem solving like any current dilemmas that you're facing,  what options you might have and maybe getting feedback on proposed solutions that you have  technical or otherwise.  For example I once was in a situation where I've been working with a mentor really hard  towards getting this promotion.  It was like a multi-quarter process of some kind and afterwards I was pretty exhausted  and I went to her and was just like, hey, is it okay if I'm really tired right now and  just kind of want to take a little bit of a break?  Is that okay?  She was like, yeah, totally.  It's fine.  I know you.  You're totally, you're still meeting everything you need to do and by the way, you're not  the kind of person that's going to accidentally stagnate because you're just going to get  bored.  I know you.  You get easily bored and sure enough, two months later, one of these job opportunities  popped up and she was like, you should apply for this.  I think you'd be awesome at it and that was kind of the start of my eventual move into  software engineering myself.  That was pretty cool and it came about because we'd had this relationship and I respected  her and trusted her judgment even on something as whether I was what I should be doing next  and what I might be qualified for.  One area where I really love hearing more about how people think is on decision making  because every single time when things come up and people are just like, oh, this is just  like, well, it's like a case by case basis.  This drives me nuts because I'm always just like, well, what, it depends.  What does it depend on?  Can we get a little bit more specific here?  Things like technical intuition, I think it takes a really long time to build that  up and it's hard to just, you can't really just take a past situation and try to apply  it to the present because there will be so many details that will be really different  in a little bit one way or another.  I feel like asking questions along the lines of what made you decide some certain thing,  what were the factors that you considered?  One question I really like to ask is what would have changed your mind?  What are some things that if they were different would have led down a different path in this  situation?  Because then you can, it takes that past experience and broadens up the potential future situations  that you might apply it to and gets that much more out of it, I feel.  Another area then is as you're building up this trust is all sorts of things where you  just get the behind the scenes look at what's going on.  There's an idea I came across recently that I really like that is called Effort Shock.  The idea behind this is we are so used to movies like The Karate Kid or Rocky or whatever  else where there's the training montage and you're like, oh, there's all these clips and  John T. Music playing and in real life you're like, that is the hard part.  That is where that takes sweat and tears and what is going on in there?  What do I really need in order to do something along those lines?  So asking what was your strategy to achieve your goal and how did you work through a mistake?  Because I assure you other people have made all sorts of mistakes.  If someone doesn't have a mistake that they can talk about then they're just lying.  There's something there and if you have that relationship you could learn more about it  and again learning things the easy way may be avoiding that particular situation yourself  in the future.  And finally this is where the trust and that vulnerability really come into play of asking  for fairly personal feedback at this point.  When you get to know someone over a longer period of time, sometimes this is even harder  in a way because I've been working with someone and I really respect their judgment and I'm  scared of hearing that I'm not measuring up in some way, right?  But if I can find a way to get past that, I think that information there can be so valuable  because this person knows me, knows my tendencies, knows what I've done before in the past and  knows where I need support perhaps and where I might need to be pushed a little bit.  But they don't want to hurt my feelings either and so if I take the step and go to ask them  instead of, hey, what do you think I could really, like would be really worthwhile for  me to focus on learning next or if I have this goal in mind what do you think, what  are some options that I have for trying to improve in this area?  Because these folks, they're in this to help you as well.  They want you to do better and if you solicit that for them, it just makes it easier for  you to get that information that you need.  Overall, I do want to take a moment and make the point as well that you don't have to take  all the advice that you're given.  It's not an all or nothing situation which I would definitely sometimes have a pretty  black and white view of it but all you really need to do is to indicate that you've thought  about it.  I mean, if you've never followed any of the advice or if you never make any changes like  in those before interactions that I talked about, then maybe this isn't quite a mentoring  relationship but I do want to say you don't have to take everything that you're given,  you just think about it and see if it suits you.  So overall, you can really do a lot to make yourself be a great mentee and stand out as  someone that others feel rewarded for helping in some way.  I don't actually mean literal gifts in this case so a lot of times, like if I'm going  out for coffee with someone, I actually prefer to buy my own drink and I just don't want  to impose on someone when maybe they're looking for a job right now.  On the other hand, once I've gotten to know other people more, I definitely sometimes  have bought them books or I really love buying baby shower gifts for people all of their registries.  Baby stuff is so small and so cute.  Okay.  But we can go a little more classic and write some really good thank you notes where you  specifically reference what you talked about, how that had an impact on you and demonstrate  that reflection that I've been talking about.  And so like Matt said this morning, seriously, for our Rubik's community, we're trying to  form these positive feedback loops here.  So finally, then a really key point is to make sure to follow up and stay in touch.  Tell people how you made use of your advice.  I kind of live and die by my calendar so I literally have a monthly reminder in there  or recurring event that's just like do a networking thing of some kind.  And usually what that really means is just firing up and writing a short to medium length  email to maybe a former work colleague of some kind or a friend I haven't talked to  in a little while and just sort of like, hey, here's what I'm up to, wondering how things  are on your end, hope you're well kind of thing.  Oftentimes I'll even include like, oh yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I still  think about the story that you told me or like this insight that you shared from years  ago and I think that that can be something that's really nice for folks to hear.  I'm running out of time.  Oh yeah, I like this quote of it's remarkable how much people appreciate hearing from you  when you don't even want something from them.  I think it's a good thing to keep in mind.  Really a lot of what I've been talking about is towards this theme again of building relationships  with trust so that you get that honest advice that you might not get elsewhere.  And I think as well, it can actually be really helpful from even just a selfish perspective  to consider paying it forward and mentoring others from that idea of you learn something  better by teaching it.  Because like if you consider it from an instructor's perspective, a really good teacher, you know,  they might worry about being pushy or condescending.  So even while they take responsibility with those power dynamics to manage the classroom  or that relationship, you can help them by making eye contact or kind of speaking up  and raising your hand when you have questions.  And so to that end, I did find recently this guidebook that Thoughtbot has put out for  mentorships there.  So that's definitely available as well.  Okay, resources as I'm near in the end.  A whole bunch of articles and references.  So these will have like sample wording that you can use and go into more depth again about  a lot of ideas I mentioned, even more articles, podcasts and videos.  I don't listen to a ton of podcasts, but these ones were pretty good.  And the Asuka Manager one has transcripts that get done.  So I can read that really quickly too.  Logs in general, I like reference these folks.  I think they're amazing.  They're super smart and thoughtful about these things.  And then a variety of these books.  The first one, Deep Work, I am super obsessed with it.  It's all about how to really go deep in your field and do meaningful work.  The Effective Engineer is really good about how do you increase your impact.  I have some quibbles with working in a corporate environment and unconscious bias, that part  of things, so I can talk about that later.  And the Manager's Path, I haven't actually read that one, but it's by Camille.  And I've heard that even though it's kind of written for managers, it has a lot of good  stuff as well from an individual contributor perspective, things that you might do to improve  that relationship.  Okay.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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Thank you all for coming. I have given a decent number of conference talks now over the years and right now I'm going through the moment before every single one of them where I'm like this was a terrible idea why did I sign up for this and also a reminder like it feels like it but I'm not like literally going to die like this I'm going to survive the next 30 minutes probably it's happened in the past. So hello I'm Kay Wu it's short for Catherine Wu but everyone calls me Kay Wu. I am a senior software engineer at Heroku currently and I'm here today to share some things I've learned over the years about receiving good mentorship. The slides should be shared off of my Twitter account the handle should be on most of the slides in here and as a quick run through of the structure of the talk overall I'm going to dive quickly into what I think the issue is or how I've experienced it at least you know the usual why do we care about this problem and then the meat of the talk is of course in the solutions of tactics that I've had figured out up until now and then there's a fairly extensive list of additional recommended references and resources. So in terms of the problem. Okay first problem was my clicker stop working for a little bit. So let's talk a little bit about a typical mentoring interaction that I at least often experienced. Oftentimes there is maybe some sort of program that that where I got matched up to someone maybe a little randomly and there are definitely good intentions on both sides but we're still not quite sure what to talk about and maybe we go out for lunch a few times in one case I've been in college I'd had a mentor assigned for all four years. However at the end I ended up often feeling like nothing was really different nothing really changed as a result of that relationship necessarily and that's kind of weird right for for something that's supposed to be quite important for one's career development overall. I have a theory that especially in the tech world I feel like there aren't that many of us necessarily that have both the experience and the aptitude for becoming really good mentors I mean the field overall is really quite young but the potential is definitely there. So what might this look like instead once I felt like I got better at figuring this out overall all sorts of things opened up for me a really big deal would be situations where I got encouragement from my mentors to even consider applying for and ended up receiving job opportunities that I on my own didn't think I was even qualified for. I changed careers into software engineering I got into giving conference talks and in the most recent example when I joined Heroku I called up my friend Jonan who gave a talk about his waffle making machine just earlier I just just called him to let him know that oh I'm like really excited about this offer and like here are some of the details and just on the phone unprompted he like forced me into practicing salary negotiation with him for 30 minutes and made me promise to him that I was going to give it a shot and so I would like to say to Jonan that our nanny's bank account really thanks you I was like really helpful right there. So I feel like overall my strategies are not necessarily groundbreaking but they weren't obvious to me at first anyway and so maybe there might be some ideas that'll be new for you as well. Overall what I really want to do is level the playing field a little bit and have everyone walk away and power to get better mentoring for themselves and those that they work with. I do want to clarify a distinction between mentors and sponsors both are very important and in this talk I will be mostly focusing on mentors. The distinction between these if you haven't come across this before is something that my friend Kate introduced me to. She had a blog post where she wrote about how mentors give her perspective but sponsors give her opportunity and you definitely need both at various points throughout sometimes you'll have the same you know both roles in the same person sometimes they will be different and I would say the you could think of the difference of something like the difference between a sponsor who might think of you when there's a really cool job or project opportunity that comes up and says like oh this person would be really great at that like let me put forth their name and nominate them for this versus a mentor who instead might be someone that you would go to to get feedback on how you can improve your approach to searching for a job overall. So I do want to call those two distinctions a little bit because I think they get muddled sometimes and then it gets confusing based on what you're trying to achieve. And then just some broader caveats overall. I am definitely here to share what I think has worked for me but I very much want to be self aware of the fact that I know that I'm in general probably a little bit more comfortable than average just asking for help from other people and making requests generally. If you've ever heard of the ask versus guess culture spectrum I'm like pretty far on the ask side of things I am from the East Coast so that probably makes a big difference there. And what that means for me is that in general I end up operating under philosophy where it's almost always OK to ask for something because hopefully people are totally allowed to say no. That said I definitely recognize that a lot of people grow up in cultures where that is not really what's done and there's a lot of importance placed instead on not imposing on others instead. So in case it causes discomfort of some kind. I do have a separate talk that goes into this idea a lot more in depth but I do just want to call it out because maybe some of the tactics might be a little bit more forward than you're used to or you're comfortable with. I mean I certainly at least hope that I'm still being polite and respectful but either way I think you can definitely adapt these different ideas for your own interests and strengths get kind of creative and figure out how it might work for your comfort level. Hopefully there will be time for questions at the end and we can go through that or you can always find me sometime at the rest of this conference and we can chat and brainstorm a little bit too. So hold up a second. You have to go through the obligatory why is this problem even a problem? Why is it that we want to be mentored? Well if I can be so bold as to disagree with a part of Matt's keynote this morning I would have to say maybe some of us do want to take over the world someday. You know? I wouldn't want to rule that out necessarily. So yeah the characters on the left here are from an old cartoon show called Pinky and the Brain. If in general you're everyone familiar with some random picture or pop culture reference that I'm making, like my brain just is making random connections as I'm frantically trying to pull these slides together so I do have an appendix at the very end with associated phrases so you can feel free to go look it up more in depth. There might be some fun stuff in there. So yeah, anyway, so outside of that though more seriously I just I guess I just generally had this always had the sense that it's important to have mentors throughout your career but for me for a long time it always seemed like something that other people made happen somehow mysteriously instead. For example one of my college roommates was just always really amazing at applying for grants, she got a full bright, she just like had really amazing recommendation letters from all of her different professors and some of them in the same classes that I was taking with her as well. And eventually I learned that she would like actually regularly go to these professors office hours which when I heard about it I was just like oh like I have like the same syllabus, the same schedule and somehow that just never really occurred to me as a strategy to use to just get to know someone that way and build the relationship there. So I feel like there are all sorts of things that are kind of like that that once you spend some time reflecting on it and partnering I think there might be lots and lots of untapped opportunities in front of you. One thing I think that you can get out of mentoring is to just demystify the world around you a little bit more. If you've ever felt like wait like did I miss something that somehow everyone else seems to know a lot about I feel like mentoring can be a really great way to address that. As another example I was once matched up with a CTO and decided in our first conversation that I was just going to go for it and just ask this like pretty important dude or whatever like what even is a CTO? Because that was like never covered in a textbook or anything for me. I like somehow missed that part just growing up in suburban middle class New Jersey or whatever it's not like we run into venture capitalists like all the time or anything like that. And the more I thought about it it's like hey like no one is born knowing this stuff and the people that do know it don't have like an ownership claim on any of it so I can go ahead and ask and then I will know more than I did the day before. Another follow on to that I think that mentoring is really helpful at is just seeing what your options might be. For example if I know what the options are then I can figure out what experiments I might run to runs what plans I might want to make to steer towards something or even not towards away from something instead as well. This could be very concrete things like the next project you might work on but it can also be for longer term things too like what various different lifestyles and work setups might be like and whether I would be well suited to them or not. And finally please don't tell my kid this but doing things the easy way is awesome. If you can learn something the easy way rather than the hard way you should totally go for that. Also the reason there's a picture of Ali Wong's baby cobra comedy special from Netflix here is that she has a bit in the special where she's like I don't want to lean in I want to lie down instead so if I could borrow that bit. And honestly if you take away nothing from this talk what's ever totally fine but if you haven't seen this comedy special you should totally watch it it's like really brilliant. I mean totally not safe for work so hopefully I haven't violated the code of conduct but on your own time you should totally go watch it. That's awesome she's great. Okay enough setup overall let's get into the meat of the talk. I have bucketed my strategies into three general sections. First adapting a phrase from the movie Glenn Gary and Glenn Ross I haven't ever actually watched this movie I just like hear it get referenced in conference talk so I'm just going to adapt that phrase as well but the phrase is always be mentee-ing I'm going to get into a little bit more about what that means in a bit. Second find your kindred spirits this here is a reference to Anne of Green Gables wonderful wonderful childhood book which is the story of an orphan who has lots of misadventures and cares a lot about finding good friends and making connections that way. And third barring a slogan I saw all the time in the 90s keep it easy breezy beautiful it's really hard to say this phrase without tacking along the cover girl at the end. But as I was doing this apparently like they're not even using the slogan anymore which like really blew my mind so like I guess if they don't want to use that I can use it here so we're good. So this first one always be mentee-ing what I mean by this is that all of this process around mentorship I think it's helpful to really think about it as constantly ongoing as well as the fact that well I always built it up in my head as like a you know it's super important for your career you have these really long term mentorships and I just really held it up as this like giant big like oh it's like it has to be like super meaningful super deep etc etc but I actually think that there is a lot of benefits of thinking of it and accepting the fact that you can totally have much more short term goals and relationships all the way up to you know the long term types of relationships that we often hear more about. So I'm here to say it's totally okay to have some more short term short term goals in mind maybe oriented around a particular or topic or goal such as giving your first conference talk or something like that that that could totally be a focus of a particular mentorship and when you achieve that depending on how things go like that might be just where you you wind up and that's totally fine. Edmund Lau has an article that I've linked in the references where he talks about the idea of designing a relationship. It's he's mostly talking about have running effective one-on-ones between you and your manager but I think the idea is still really useful in terms of going into something thinking a little bit more of kind of what are we both in this for what are we going to get out of it at the end. So let's talk a little bit about who you might receive mentoring from. A really common approach I've seen is where there are mentoring programs set up and then you kind of get assigned to a mentor and I've definitely had both helpful and maybe less helpful experiences out of this but you know it isn't even always up to me necessarily whether there's a program like this around and so what do you do then. Well you might be tempted to approach people you admire and ask them you know just like well like will you be my mentor. I'm generally totally all about asking people for help but the direct approach here I think generally doesn't necessarily end up being that effective. On the other hand I feel very strongly that you don't have to just sit around waiting to be noticed either like it just always makes me feel like like I'm back in like at the middle school dance and like everyone is just like standing by the walls of the gym hoping that you know that someone will ask you to dance or whatever super super awkward and unnecessary. This is one of my personal pet peeves about Cheryl Sandberg's Lean In book. I mean the whole book is very much about putting the onus on the individual for progressing their career and yet I felt like the chapter there on mentoring very much still had an attitude that you shouldn't go seeking mentors but you know instead of like just do good work and like wait for someone to notice. I mean overall I don't have as strong negative feelings about that book as I know a lot of other people do but this one point I definitely disagree with the idea of you know kind of you know just keeping your head down until someone picks you to like bestow some mentoring on or whatever. So given that how do you reconcile these two ideas? One way that I would approach it is just skip this part altogether. I really think that people don't have to even formally agree to be your mentor in order to mentor you. They don't actually even have to be aware that it's happening necessarily because one way I would think about mentoring is really just like you're going off and learning something from someone and you know obviously we do this all the time from books that people write, articles they publish, you know videos of talks that you can you could receive so much mentoring from someone and they're never even really aware of it and like that's super cool. Like that's totally an option that's already out there. The rest of the talk is going to be more focused on like the more one-on-one relationships that you would think about but just wanted to point out like mentoring is learning and that comes in all forms and ways of doing things. I for example have had a bunch of mentors where it just seemed like like I would always ask them questions and then they would just always answer them so I just kept asking them some more questions and later I was the one that told them hey by the way I consider you a mentor now like and it's already kind of a done deal and then they can't say no. Too bad. I trick them into it. So what might a good mentor look like? In general I feel like I'm looking for someone that I might click with on their values and how they look at the world. I like direct communicators, people who don't beat around the bush and usually I feel like I can sense that just like me they're probably like on the inside we're just like really on the inside we're really judgmental people. We want to be better and nice on the outside and I really admire folks that I feel like I've done a really good job of that and I can really learn a lot from them. But it's not just about having stuff in common because what I think what elevates a friend into a mentor is someone who maybe has had a variety of different life experiences of one kind or another. The best is when it's someone who I'm always curious to hear their take on something because I'll probably be a little bit surprised and I feel like when I'm surprised it probably means that I am about to learn something from here. So for example I would consider that I have mentors in a whole bunch of different subject areas both technical and work wise but also I mentioned on public speaking. Before I took the job at Heroku and through it I've had various mentors who are more experienced at working remotely, changing careers. I would even have folks I would say I consider like my parenting mentors. You know folks I turn to and like oh they seem like they're doing a really good job and I would like to do more like how they are. Oftentimes my mentors are people who are doing stuff that I think is really cool or they've achieved something that I think I might want and I just really admire them. But there is an important aspect to this I think of having it not be someone that I am just elevating onto a pedestal of some kind because there needs to be the opening to eventually come to really trust this person and be willing to be vulnerable with them. It can be really scary to share that you don't know what you want or what it is that you really dream about and when just inherently I think that there's very naturally a lot of fear and hesitation around that and it's really wonderful when you can find folks that you trust and feel safe with and be able to bring those things out into the life and into the light and figure out where you're going to go from there. So how do we find folks like this? Let's talk about networking. Networking is definitely one of those other topics that I always felt like I heard people talk about but I didn't really understand like how you were supposed to do it. And the thing that changed for me is when I redefined networking in my head and thought about it instead as just going out and getting to know people and making friends like with no expectations necessarily, just getting to know folks out there. I had a baby last year and so I kind of dropped off the Ruby conferences for a couple years or so but this is my first one back in a while and it's been really nice just to walk around and see some familiar faces and catch up with people that I've known for like a few years now which is pretty amazing I think. So definitely set the groundwork for that. I think that that is really valuable. And so there are lots of specific ways that you might go about this. Of course like we are at a conference right now. There are 800 of us here. Most of them probably you don't know and that's like a really great opportunity. Another way, once you go home and we might be a little bit more scattered and dispersed, a strategy that I have found really helpful is when I come across something that I have found really insightful or helpful in some way to make sure that I actually take the time and give positive, thoughtful feedback about that work. Like everyone wants to hear more of that right? They put a time and effort into something. They share it with the world and to hear that someone saw it and took the time with it. I think that that builds really good vibes and in general I think it's really nice to find ways to put more positivity out into the world when I can. I mean I'm not totally not above leaving a bad Yelp review and stuff. When there are good things make sure to stop and notice them and let those folks know. And sometimes even taking it a step further and saying like oh I really learned a lot from this and going forth and sharing it with others. There have been times when I feel like I've almost become like an unofficial evangelist of some kind for various projects around like my friend Kate had this and Chuki, they ran a newsletter on public speaking at tech conferences that I always thought was amazing and I just kind of glommed on and became a real cheerleader for that project. I thought it was awesome. And finally another point I want to make in this area is to make sure to go ahead and take people up on their offers to help. Like the office hours for the professors, they made that time available and I definitely could have took advantage of that a lot more. There are other folks that I know in the Ruby community like Opti Grimm I think every so often sometimes he'll just sort of be like oh it's my birthday and to celebrate I'm going to make available pairing sessions for folks or run a discount of some kind and those opportunities are out there and you deserve to make use of them. You do. And then on the social aspect of things here, one thing I wanted to bring up that my friend Amy taught me actually is to just like go ahead and embrace the awkward. I feel like a lot of times we have hesitations from trying to connect with folks as we just sort of think in our heads. I mean I definitely have this too of like I am just like kind of an awkward person and like that's just oh I don't know if I want to deal with it necessarily and like what if they don't want to deal with me blah blah blah. But if you think about it like probably those of us that are kind of awkward like we really outnumber all of the smooth people instead. So like just go for it and if it's really truly awkward or uncomfortable like just like go forth and apologize. And I'm trying to do that more of trying to put myself out there and then just you know it's very also like tied to therefore needing to apologize if I've forgotten someone's name. But usually like I remember the conversation but I may have like forgotten someone's name but you know I can ask and then we'll be in good terms again. Okay so now that you have found and gotten to know some cool potential mentors what next? So maybe you want to reach out and see if they'll answer a few questions or go grab coffee sometime. And at this stage I think it's all about making it easy for that person to say yes. Schedule with their time in mind maybe offering up a location that's convenient for them or if you're not co-located pick a commonly used platform something they can just say yes or no to ideally. In general I do think that having conversations is usually a little easier than having an email chain thread back and forth just because be able to talk out loud is often just a little smoother than having to like figure out the exact right words to write out. This can vary a little bit so like while I was on maternity leave I did try to shift this the daily schedule was unpredictable enough that I wanted to shift things more into email so that you know I may not be able to make a scheduled meeting depending on like the diaper situation right but with an email thread like if I wake up at two in the morning and can't go back to sleep like I can type something out and try to give a semi coherent thoughtful response at that point in time. I think ideally it is also helpful to give a general sense of the topics so that the person you're talking to can think about it in the background ahead of time a little bit and not just be completely off the cuff but otherwise try to have it be so that they don't have to prepare very much and can just show up like the more you can set things up and smooth the way so that all they have to do is just be present for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever it may be the more likely it is folks will say yes to your request. Keep it breezy by which I mean trying to keep things just like pretty low key and casual. I got this really great tip from my friend Cara who had said she likes to do a thing of trying to lessen the burden or the sense of responsibility someone might feel by asking them and calling it unofficial mentors instead for them to be unofficial mentors to her. In general I think if you can be specific about why you're reaching out to them in particular and keeping this tone of I really respect your work and would love to learn from you it just helps a ton because mentors they're just like us they get imposter syndrome too and they may not necessarily know like why you, why them, why now. The closer the connection in your situations in background I think the better chance you have generally. You phrased this as well like oh I'm really interested in your opinion because dot dot dot fill in the blank there. And overall you're trying to demonstrate that you have done your homework and this isn't just a generic request of some kind. And of course beautiful I really just like shoehorned a bunch of things here to keep it with the slogan but what this section is about is learning relevant things. So first it is okay to not know what to talk about at first. This is totally fine and very common and very normal I think. In the next few slides I'm going to try to give you some ideas and strategies but just know that that again is totally normal. One tactic that I really enjoy that this computer science professor Cal Newport writes about is this idea that you can go ahead and ask for experiences rather than asking for advice. The idea is that people don't necessarily have the introspection needed to determine what really helped them most in their own careers. So if you think about it more as interviewing them on your experiences you are trying to gather a bunch of data, you talk to a few different people and then you can analyze for yourself and look for patterns on what the key trigger points might have been along the way. So I think that that's like a really interesting strategy in general and the nice thing as well is it doesn't require very much prep work on the receiving person's or the mentor side of things. You can just ask them questions about what was happening and leading up to some event that you're interested in learning about for example. So I have a variety of list of sample topics that you can take forward as well. One is in general things around problem solving like any current dilemmas that you're facing, what options you might have and maybe getting feedback on proposed solutions that you have technical or otherwise. For example I once was in a situation where I've been working with a mentor really hard towards getting this promotion. It was like a multi-quarter process of some kind and afterwards I was pretty exhausted and I went to her and was just like, hey, is it okay if I'm really tired right now and just kind of want to take a little bit of a break? Is that okay? She was like, yeah, totally. It's fine. I know you. You're totally, you're still meeting everything you need to do and by the way, you're not the kind of person that's going to accidentally stagnate because you're just going to get bored. I know you. You get easily bored and sure enough, two months later, one of these job opportunities popped up and she was like, you should apply for this. I think you'd be awesome at it and that was kind of the start of my eventual move into software engineering myself. That was pretty cool and it came about because we'd had this relationship and I respected her and trusted her judgment even on something as whether I was what I should be doing next and what I might be qualified for. One area where I really love hearing more about how people think is on decision making because every single time when things come up and people are just like, oh, this is just like, well, it's like a case by case basis. This drives me nuts because I'm always just like, well, what, it depends. What does it depend on? Can we get a little bit more specific here? Things like technical intuition, I think it takes a really long time to build that up and it's hard to just, you can't really just take a past situation and try to apply it to the present because there will be so many details that will be really different in a little bit one way or another. I feel like asking questions along the lines of what made you decide some certain thing, what were the factors that you considered? One question I really like to ask is what would have changed your mind? What are some things that if they were different would have led down a different path in this situation? Because then you can, it takes that past experience and broadens up the potential future situations that you might apply it to and gets that much more out of it, I feel. Another area then is as you're building up this trust is all sorts of things where you just get the behind the scenes look at what's going on. There's an idea I came across recently that I really like that is called Effort Shock. The idea behind this is we are so used to movies like The Karate Kid or Rocky or whatever else where there's the training montage and you're like, oh, there's all these clips and John T. Music playing and in real life you're like, that is the hard part. That is where that takes sweat and tears and what is going on in there? What do I really need in order to do something along those lines? So asking what was your strategy to achieve your goal and how did you work through a mistake? Because I assure you other people have made all sorts of mistakes. If someone doesn't have a mistake that they can talk about then they're just lying. There's something there and if you have that relationship you could learn more about it and again learning things the easy way may be avoiding that particular situation yourself in the future. And finally this is where the trust and that vulnerability really come into play of asking for fairly personal feedback at this point. When you get to know someone over a longer period of time, sometimes this is even harder in a way because I've been working with someone and I really respect their judgment and I'm scared of hearing that I'm not measuring up in some way, right? But if I can find a way to get past that, I think that information there can be so valuable because this person knows me, knows my tendencies, knows what I've done before in the past and knows where I need support perhaps and where I might need to be pushed a little bit. But they don't want to hurt my feelings either and so if I take the step and go to ask them instead of, hey, what do you think I could really, like would be really worthwhile for me to focus on learning next or if I have this goal in mind what do you think, what are some options that I have for trying to improve in this area? Because these folks, they're in this to help you as well. They want you to do better and if you solicit that for them, it just makes it easier for you to get that information that you need. Overall, I do want to take a moment and make the point as well that you don't have to take all the advice that you're given. It's not an all or nothing situation which I would definitely sometimes have a pretty black and white view of it but all you really need to do is to indicate that you've thought about it. I mean, if you've never followed any of the advice or if you never make any changes like in those before interactions that I talked about, then maybe this isn't quite a mentoring relationship but I do want to say you don't have to take everything that you're given, you just think about it and see if it suits you. So overall, you can really do a lot to make yourself be a great mentee and stand out as someone that others feel rewarded for helping in some way. I don't actually mean literal gifts in this case so a lot of times, like if I'm going out for coffee with someone, I actually prefer to buy my own drink and I just don't want to impose on someone when maybe they're looking for a job right now. On the other hand, once I've gotten to know other people more, I definitely sometimes have bought them books or I really love buying baby shower gifts for people all of their registries. Baby stuff is so small and so cute. Okay. But we can go a little more classic and write some really good thank you notes where you specifically reference what you talked about, how that had an impact on you and demonstrate that reflection that I've been talking about. And so like Matt said this morning, seriously, for our Rubik's community, we're trying to form these positive feedback loops here. So finally, then a really key point is to make sure to follow up and stay in touch. Tell people how you made use of your advice. I kind of live and die by my calendar so I literally have a monthly reminder in there or recurring event that's just like do a networking thing of some kind. And usually what that really means is just firing up and writing a short to medium length email to maybe a former work colleague of some kind or a friend I haven't talked to in a little while and just sort of like, hey, here's what I'm up to, wondering how things are on your end, hope you're well kind of thing. Oftentimes I'll even include like, oh yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I still think about the story that you told me or like this insight that you shared from years ago and I think that that can be something that's really nice for folks to hear. I'm running out of time. Oh yeah, I like this quote of it's remarkable how much people appreciate hearing from you when you don't even want something from them. I think it's a good thing to keep in mind. Really a lot of what I've been talking about is towards this theme again of building relationships with trust so that you get that honest advice that you might not get elsewhere. And I think as well, it can actually be really helpful from even just a selfish perspective to consider paying it forward and mentoring others from that idea of you learn something better by teaching it. Because like if you consider it from an instructor's perspective, a really good teacher, you know, they might worry about being pushy or condescending. So even while they take responsibility with those power dynamics to manage the classroom or that relationship, you can help them by making eye contact or kind of speaking up and raising your hand when you have questions. And so to that end, I did find recently this guidebook that Thoughtbot has put out for mentorships there. So that's definitely available as well. Okay, resources as I'm near in the end. A whole bunch of articles and references. So these will have like sample wording that you can use and go into more depth again about a lot of ideas I mentioned, even more articles, podcasts and videos. I don't listen to a ton of podcasts, but these ones were pretty good. And the Asuka Manager one has transcripts that get done. So I can read that really quickly too. Logs in general, I like reference these folks. I think they're amazing. They're super smart and thoughtful about these things. And then a variety of these books. The first one, Deep Work, I am super obsessed with it. It's all about how to really go deep in your field and do meaningful work. The Effective Engineer is really good about how do you increase your impact. I have some quibbles with working in a corporate environment and unconscious bias, that part of things, so I can talk about that later. And the Manager's Path, I haven't actually read that one, but it's by Camille. And I've heard that even though it's kind of written for managers, it has a lot of good stuff as well from an individual contributor perspective, things that you might do to improve that relationship. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.
next project you might work on but it can also be think what elevates a friend into a mentor is life experiences of one kind or another. The best know what you want or what it is that you really probably you don't know and that's like a really They share it with the world and to hear that convenient for them or if you're not co-located to have it be so that they don't have to prepare unofficial mentors instead for them to be right now and just kind of want to take a little you're still meeting everything you need to do they're in this to help you as well. They want Tell people how you made use of your advice. I