 outer space and doing yoga and I also like to learn stuff you can find me on Twitter at Mary Catralli, a paperless post and we are an online and print stationery company that allows you to create cards that reflect your personal style. And I am Danny Gluntz. I live in Boulder, Colorado right now. I'm into book books, none of that Kindle bullshit. I'm into startups right now. I'm part of an early-stage startup. I love traveling and like Mary I love to learn stuff so we come together on that. You can find me Danny Gluntz on Twitter and D Gluntz on GitHub. But the real question is who are we? Why are we up here together and how did we get into this position? Well Mary and I met at Turing School six months ago and we've been pairing ever since. So I am an alumni mentor at Turing. I came out of Hungry Academy in 2012 which was like a precursor to Turing. I work with Danny in a posse style mentorship so there's three mentors. Two of us are alumni. One is like a professional mentor and then there are four to five students at any given time. So we're here to answer the question of what does this mentoring relationship work look like and how do you create one for yourself? And we have four big steps to cover. One being the phases of mentorship, that relationship, what that looks like, the trials and tribulations of that process, the habits you can take to form those relationships, the benefits of doing so, like why the hell should you even do this, and then the repetition process or how you go about redoing this. So there are four phases and they're covered in a bunch of like management studies about mentorship and we're gonna come back to those studies quite a few times in our presentation because we like science and we think it supports a lot of the points that we're about to make. So the first study we want to talk about is called the phases of mentorship and their outcomes and it was done in 1997 by a psychologist Georgia T. Chow and she touches on this study that happened in 1985 by Kathy Cram and it's really the like foundational study on mentorship. So the first phase is the initiation phase and that's like the awkward phase when you get to know each other. We have these meetings where we sit down for like half an hour and just talk about like ourselves and our feelings and expectations for the relationship and the scientific wording for that is like it's when the mentor and mentee begin to recognize each other as someone deserving of attention. So it's that like relationship forming phase. And like Mary said, we take 30 minutes, no code, no anything, just coming together and really figuring out what our hobbies are, like what our interests are, the goals for the relationship, like what we want to get out of one another and really making sure that it's a going to be a relationship that's like judgment free and that you can come to the other person with any sort of question. So then science says that you move into this phase called cultivation and cultivation is really the meat of the relationship. In most studies this lasts for two to five years but at Turing and other boot camps this is a lot faster. This is like two to five months and this is when you sit down and do work and work is whatever you want that to be but it's when you and your protege get to know each other skill sets. You work on developing particular skills and preparing your protege to go out into the real world. Which leads us to the phase that I'm currently in. This is the separation phase. This is at Turing, it's the last month or module of the program. This is when most of the developers are looking for jobs and are in that phase of job hunting and applying for interviews and it's really crucial at this point to be able to come to marry. Be like what should I wear to the interview? What kind of questions are they going to ask me? Like we can go over some sample interview questions. It's really important. And mentors and protegees approach this phase with anxiety because you don't know when it's coming. You have an idea but you think like is my mentee leaving me because they don't like my style? Am I not serving their needs? Do I not come with enough knowledge? And the mentee is thinking the same thing. Does my mentor not care for working with me? Do they think that I've surpassed them? Do they think that I'm not good enough to work with? And so the key to getting through this phase is keeping open and honest communication. Which leads us to where we're at now. So the redefinition phase is kind of the culmination. And this is when you and your mentee have spent some time apart. Maybe they've gotten a job or they're approaching other fields or taking some time off. And you come back together more like peers. You can approach each other about problems and that judgment free context still exists. But the relationship is less senior and junior and more like friend to friend. So at this point, we don't have our weekly pairing sessions, but I can still feel like as a peer to marry, I can come to her with any question that I might have in my day to day job. So what habits support this sort of relationship? Like how do we get through these phases successfully? So the NIH and the Management Center and a bunch of business magazines did this study called the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Mentors, which is like a really catchy way of saying to be a good person. So the habits we talk about are active listening, active listening, dedication, curiosity, engagement, willingness, and then what they call the three Rs, which is really just respectfulness and responsibility. Yep. So we have all these fluffy concepts that these studies are telling us about, but how do we actually make these applicable and actionable in real life? So first off, we're going to make a schedule. Once a week, you want to pair at least one and a half hours, you want to dedicate that time. Have your mentee know that they have that space every week. And that gives them the motivation to come prepared and actually show up to do work for mentors. This is a little bit different because a lot of us don't have this space in our work day to be available for our mentees who are maybe on a different schedule. So for me, I set aside that time to be fully present. And I also allow my mentee asynchronous channels to contact me. So when they have a question, they can ping me in slack or on Skype, and then I can come to it when I'm ready during the day, and it allows them to feel like I'm always present and need the space to not feel like I need to be there every second of the day. And that gives me the feeling like she said that I can always come with no matter what kind of question is big or small and just let her answer it on her own time. And another thing about that is keeping your schedule flexible. So if the mentee or mentor can't make a session, don't have a penalty, just like respect each other's time and make sure you have that. So the next next actionable thing we can do is actually do work. When we pair, we screen hero and I'm usually the one driving. So what it's usually most helpful to have the mentee drive and the mentor there to push you along. And if you get stuck, have them help guide you in the right direction, not necessarily give you the answer, but like, open up their mindset to the right direction to take. And this is important because it like allows us to have context to our work. But work doesn't always mean let's write code together for half an hour. Work means I'm present for whatever that you need. So if Danny wants to come to a session and talk to me for half an hour about how technical interviews are terrifying, or how he's not sure where to apply for a job, I'm prepared to answer those sort of questions. And I'm valuing that at the same rate that I value writing code for an hour. And on the flip side, sometimes Mary will pair or she will be the one driving and she'll open it up to maybe paperlesses workflow and show me like the internals of a scaled organization, something that you'd never really find at a bootcamp or any sort of tutorial online. And then this leads into respecting one another. You both have very busy lives. The mentor is even more so. So showing up with actual questions, having a goal in mind when you come into the session. So for example, I could be wondering like, how could I improve this active record query or like, what's the sequel actually behind it? And coming into that, the pairing session with Mary, we can dive deep into like a simple example and really find out the core to it. And for me as a mentor to come prepared, it means that I come without expectations. And I come, as I said, like a billion times present because there's a thousand things that I can be doing after work. I can be making dinner or doing my laundry or going to bed early. But the important thing is to be there for that time and not schedule other things over and not be eating dinner while I'm pairing. And like, just being available for whatever question and not thinking like, a problem isn't worth my time. Every problem is worth my time because when you're first learning programming, it's super mind blowing. Every concept is new and as mentors, we forget that a lot. Yeah. And to go off that for the mentee side or the mentor, definitely come with a backup plan, whether that be like an exorcism problem or project oiler, like just a technical interview problem. Come with that backup because from the mentee side, like, I have no idea what a hard problem is or how long like an easy problem will take. It might take the whole hour and a half. It might take 10 minutes. So why do we bother engaging in these relationships? Like, what is the purpose? And it's an investment in people and it's an investment in learning. So from my point, it's pretty obvious like the mentee gains a lot of knowledge. They get to see how the mentor thinks approaches problems. It's really obvious. But from the mentor side, it's more of an investment, like a long term investment that you don't immediately see the benefits of. So the first type of benefit is motivational and there's this great study by Tammy Allen in 2002 that follows up on that study by Kathy Cram in 1985 that I touched on. And it's that this willingness to mentor others is strongest for people like me, people that aren't quite junior developers but haven't yet made that transition to fully senior. It gives us this activity that goes beyond our formal job requirements but still like allows us to gain a sense of personal satisfaction. And so the top three reasons from the study that we mentor is to get that satisfaction, have ability outside of our job and also to see the gratification that comes from teaching someone else your skill set. Yeah and from my side, the motivation, having that hour and a half every week that you know you have to come with like a really good question and you have to be able to like show your mentor that you're improving, that's great motivation. Like just knowing that someone's out there and they want you to succeed, it's awesome. And this motivation leads to employee happiness. And after a certain point you are no longer motivated by money and so having the ability to find happiness in your job through an outlet that isn't financial is so important. Yeah and so there's been a few studies like going back to the dispositional motivational study that we talked about earlier. They find that employee senior developers they need like a sense of purpose in the organization and being able to take on a junior developer and like see their growth and be able to every day come in and have that like motivating face like excited to learn and seeing that trajectory of improvement like that really keeps employees happy and retains them. So what is like the end goal of all that is that Danny and I get access to each other's networks. So when I meet Danny I meet the rest of his class at Turing and when Danny meets me he meets everybody that I know in the community. So it provides the opportunity to like have like a ripple effect of mentors. I can introduce Danny to people that have mentored me and Danny can introduce me to students in his class that meet my skill set and that might have use for me as a mentor. Yeah it's really helpful especially in the job seeking area like having that introduction instead of just shooting out cold resumes or cold emails to potential employers like having that inside knowledge is really helpful. So how do we repeat the cycle because that's really like the end goal of this is to turn our mentees into mentors eventually and how do I keep going with Danny after he's left and like gotten a career. So I'm going to tell a story now about how I decided to become a mentor and one of my mentors is here so I'm going to like tell a story about us. So in 2012 when I graduated Hunger Academy I got my first job and I was kind of lost at work. I wasn't getting the support that I needed from my managers. I wasn't feeling successful and I was at a conference and I met Ernie Miller and I shared this with him because we sort of work together. A few months later we were talking about where I would go in the organization and I Ernie reached out to me and said hey I heard you're interested in this. How would you feel about joining my team and letting me work with you and teach you some of the stuff that you want to know. I was so stoked. It was the best thing that could have happened to me because I saw someone placing value in me as an employee and value in me as a student and it gave me the confidence in my career to keep learning and to keep working and to keep being successful and without meeting Ernie I would have never grown as an engineer and never allowed myself to think that I was capable of teaching others and so from that experience I thought I want to do that for the same reasons that Ernie did it for me. I want to see other students grow and learn and not feel lost in their careers and feel that they can continue learning after I leave them and today I still consider Ernie my mentor even though we don't work together. He's still someone I reach out to for advice, for chat, for questions about code. It's someone that's always there for me in a non-judgmental context. Which leads into what do I now do. Now I have to become a mentor as well and the nice thing about how Turing the seven month program that I'm about to finish the way that it's structured in this posse setting that we touched upon earlier you have four levels of students so there's like the freshman, sophomore, junior, senior type of class structure and the nice thing is in your posse you have one of each and every morning you get together and tackle like a logic problem or just like a 30 minutes of code pretty much and what ends up happening is the more senior developers in that group just walk through and mentor the freshman and so you end up establishing these habits of just letting them reach out to whenever you want whenever they need it and being able to teach that is so helpful to like internalize and really have a good grasp and so it's a it's a great structure that's in place and it makes it easy for me to just pick up the habit of mentoring as soon as I finish and the nice part about having a mentor still is I can go to Mary if I have any questions about mentoring in general like this person asked me this question made me awkward like I don't I don't know how to approach it things like that so it's really helpful just to have that in place and keep the cycle going and so some of you might be wondering like where can you find mentees if you want to take that actionable step and actually reach out to find one just open yourself up post on Twitter that you're looking to help out just if anyone needs any help that might naturally form contact like local computer science programs at universities doesn't even have to be local Mary and I didn't meet for four months we do everything remotely Twitter boot camps like Turing just contact the administrators see if anyone's struggling or would like to meet up once a week and and also like they are here among you at conferences like obviously I met Ernie at a conference we never work together beforehand so reach out to people and really listen when like junior developers are talking to you a lot of times we're afraid to ask for the help and we'll give cues that are maybe not as direct so cool so let's recap and make sure everything is internalized so first there's those phases of mentorship right the initiation phase of really getting to know each other focusing on getting to know each other in a capacity beyond your technical knowledge and then there's that cultivation phase of actually working together and working on code getting to know each other's technical skills sending your mentee to work with other people who might better fit their technical skills working with their classmates that fit your technical skills then that separation phase letting your mentee kind of find themselves moving out into the world getting a job but still being available and present for them and then redefining your relationship knowing that they can still come to you without judgment but allowing them to be more of a peer unless someone that you teach on a regular basis and then we move into those applicable habits that we talked about so you actually want to develop a schedule pair at least once a week for an hour and a half try to be available for communication like whether that be email or Slack or just texting actually show up to do work so have have that session every week and actually code and have them come with questions which leads up to like being prepared make sure you have problems and objectives that you want to reach and make sure you have like that trajectory of being able to evaluate whether or not they are improving and maybe at the end of each session have like a mini retro to make sure you felt like that session was useful and then keep in mind that the benefits are two ways not that you're just imparting knowledge on someone but that mentors learn from their mentees whether that's skill or cool new stuff that's happening like in new versions of rails that you don't get to use at work or even just like ease of learning and hunger for knowledge those are all benefits you get from pairing with someone who's more junior and also that the benefits go beyond that to the benefits of professional networking and employee happiness and one of the benefits we forgot to touch upon was the one that we learned from the last presentation you get to be you get to do harm to your junior developers so that's always that's always fun a little nervous for that and then the fourth and like probably the most important part teacher mentee how to be a mentor and like encourage them to reach out to someone who might be only a couple months behind them but may be struggling with just those fundamental skills so we are we are done with like the meat of our content but we do want to thank paperless and Turing for letting us get together and give you all of this information and we thank