 Oh, it's not empty. All right, I think we're about ready to get started at the time now. So I'm going to give it another minute with stragglers. They're good. All right, cool. Well, my name is Jess Unrod. And today we're going to be talking about the process of cultivating mentorships, both for mentors and mentees. First, a little bit about my background. I am a career changer. My formal training is in political science and music. I worked in nonprofit administration for a couple of years. And I was really not liking it. So I decided to learn how to code after I was, you know, digging around on Twitter one day and somebody tweeted out resources for adults to learn how to code. And I was like, you know, it's probably better than what I'm doing now. So that's how I decided to move from Denver to Chicago to go to Dev Bootcamp in January of 2014. I got a job in Python right after I graduated from Dev Bootcamp and I've been working in Python for since. Right now I'm at Threat Social. I've been there for a little bit over a year. And I'm a somewhat lapsed organizer of the Chicago Pile Ladies chapter. So my first conference talk was actually this time last year at Pile, Ohio. And since then I've spoken all around the country and I talk mostly about women in tech, Python, and community engagement. So my ability to go around and talk in front of people and do this largely started here at Pile, Ohio. And this do a lot in part to some of the wonderful mentors we have here in the Python Midwest community. So why give this talk at all? And what qualifications do I have to give this talk? Like I've only been in the industry for about three years. So on the surface it seems like I might not have developed the expertise to talk about the topic of mentorship. Or at least not the way that we talk about mentorship a lot in the development community. Get yourself a mentor is advice that I hear a lot given to new coders. As if it's like easy to just like be like you. You're going to mentor me right now. So it kind of borders on like useless and vague impossible advice just to be like yeah, go find one of those. But mentorship is something that's really near and dear to my heart and I believe that it changes careers. And so honestly like a lot of my near and dear friends now started out as teachers and mentors and I owe a lot of my success to them. And so when you're thinking about what you need a mentor for you might be thinking about something like leaving an unsatisfying job contributing to open source doing community organizing work or speaking at conferences. So that's why I'm giving this talk is because I believe that these are really valuable and it's a diverse skill set. So who needs a mentor? I guess I think that just about everyone needs a mentor no matter what stage you're in in your career. What that relationship is going to look like is largely different based on your level of experience and what you're looking to do. But mentors are part of that essential landscape that's going to get you to achieving your goals. So what is a mentor then if that's what we're looking for? A mentor is somebody who's going to give you an honest assessment of your capabilities who will assist you within reason and keep you accountable to your goals. Or at least this is my very subjective definition of what makes a healthy mentoring relationship. Your mentor is not there to inflate your ego. They're not there to make you feel better. They're there to help you achieve your goals by your request. So a mentor is not your partner and a mentor is not your sponsor. The same person can occupy different roles in your life but the mentoring relationship is inherently unbalanced and should be voluntary. There isn't an obligation to participate in this on either part. A mentor should be receiving something from this relationship. So I think it's important to mention specific partners and sponsors as not mentors because they can get completed. A partner is somebody who shares responsibility for a project or a goal and is equally invested in your success as you are. A mentor cannot effectively be your partner because that strips them of the emotional distance necessary to help to perform their role for you. A mentor is also not necessarily a sponsor. There is somebody who advocates on your path. This could be at your job, recommending you for a raise or a keynote or just generally looking out for you. A mentor might also be your sponsor but being a mentor is not creating an obligation for your mentor to seek their neck out for you in social situations. Also the same sort of skills gap that is present in a mentorship is not necessarily present in a sponsorship. Your friend at work might be able to advocate for you and sponsor you to get that raise and they don't necessarily need to be at that higher level in terms of skill or influence in order to sponsor for you. Mentorships are inherently about skilling somebody up. It's a private internal process and sponsors are more about using power and influence to get somebody else's standing as an external process. These two are not necessarily incompatible but they shouldn't be confused for one another and doing one doesn't create an obligation to do the other. And I feel it's necessary to point out both what a mentor is and a mentor isn't because as we all know from writing tests the presence of the correct answer doesn't necessarily imply the absence of the wrong answer. So I want to make sure we're all on the same page about what exactly mentoring is before we go further. So if you are mentee and you're trying to engage in this sort of relationship these are your responsibilities. You have to initiate the conversation. You have to have specific actionable goals in mind. You need to research the appropriate people to approach with this problem. You need to ask appropriate questions to that person and you need to be flexible about the scheduling. You're asking someone a lot of someone and you're asking a lot of time and they're going to be doing this for you for free. You have a responsibility to make sure that you're using that time in a way that is productive for both of you and can't be answered in a simple Google search. For example, if you're asking for somebody about help with job interviewing you've already looked up some basic interview questions and know where you struggle before you come to somebody asking for advice about it. You should have specific ask and actionable asks and you can't rely on your mentor to hold up both sides of the conversation. This should be a collaborative process. So for example, my primary experience with being a mentor is for career changers, specifically with boot camp graduates. And one of the things that I would get a lot is emails asking like, hey, can I meet you for coffee? And then I would. So what kind of person should go to boot camp? And I have written multiple blog posts on exactly that topic. And they knew me enough to figure out what my personal email address was. So they should know enough to Google to see if I've written about this topic before asking me to sit down and read aloud what I've already written about. So that's the sort of thing where you need a little bit of research before you're asking people questions and you need to make sure that they're relevant to the person that you were asking them to. So in essence, when you're asking your mentor for help, you're asking them to perform emotional labor for you. Emotional labor is when you ask somebody to perform a task that's heavily based in managing the emotions and expectations necessary to get something done. Teaching and mentoring is often a form of emotional labor because they're not just like pointing you to a resource and sending you on your way. They're engaging with you, often face-to-face, with the knowledge that you might not like everything that they have to say. And they have to manage that situation and manage your expectations as part of that relationship. So emotional labor can be a little bit of a loaded term because of the way that people throw it around online. You know, people don't like having their time wasted and their emotional labor exploited. But I want to make it clear that asking for somebody's emotional labor but it means that you need to be respectful of the time and energy it takes to meet with somebody on their free time asking for the benefit of their experience. So one of the hardest things to learn how to identify is when you're in a mentorship or when a mentorship might be about to happen. Especially when we're coaching new developers what to look for. I think we tend to err on the side of being incredibly formal about when mentorships are. So if you've never embarked on finding a mentor before this process can seem a little stilted and awkward. So I'm going to talk about maybe some of the kinds of candidates you should or shouldn't look for. So let's start with bad mentorship candidates. Family, roommates, romantic partners, and anybody you have a financial relationship is a bad candidate for mentorship. And like, so this is a little, I mean, it sounds obvious but it can also be counterintuitive when you're working through the process of finding a mentor because these are people who already care about you and you want to find somebody who already cares about you, right? Not necessarily. Like we talked about, mentorship is an inherently imbalanced relationship where somebody has more skills, more access, and more expertise. And especially with finances, you don't want to introduce any more imbalance into that relationship or it can tip over and become incredibly unhealthy. Same thing with family, roommate, romantic partners. Those should be on more equal footing and you don't want to inject something into that relationship that could cause it to fall out of balance. Yeah, so, you know, you want to stay healthy with this just like you wouldn't in any other relationship. Good mentoring candidates are managers, peers that you might meet at work, meetup groups or code and coffee, community organizers, open source maintainers, and Twitter. So community organizers, people who are at meetups organizing meetups, they often have their contact information publicly available because that's what they want to do. They want to be helping people. So, you know, reach out to them as a great resource either as mentors themselves or pointing you in the right direction because they tend to know a lot of people in the community and they might be able to help you find what you're looking for. Open source maintainers are often going to be de facto mentors and you know, hopefully they should be following codes of conduct and being kind, but they're the ones who are going to be reviewing your code and might not really care, you know, about your feelings beyond making sure that, you know, they're not being jerks to you. And for Twitter, I really like Twitter as a way to get like quick one-off mentorship conversations started. Remember, I would have never started to code in the first place if I hadn't gotten a little bit of an extra motivational push from a random stranger on Twitter. People engage online because they care about what they're saying and if you show a genuine interest and are respectful of their time, they're likely to lend that time to you as a way of paying forward the help that they received when they were in your position. So, if you mentor candidates or friends, it's much easier to move from mentorship to a friendship than the other way around. This isn't a say that friends shouldn't help you out or can't help you out, but the level of critical feedback that a mentor can and should provide puts strain on friendships that can be difficult to recover from. I have several friends, like I said, who started out as teachers and mentors, and I'm really grateful to have them. But the shift in our relationship from mentor to friend means that we don't rely on them as heavily for the same kinds of advice anymore because we're now emotionally invested in one another's lives and successes, and that's not conducive to hard truths and tough love. Go to your friends in your personal cheerleading sessions when you want to embark on something new and you want unconditional love and support. After you've gone out and tried a little bit and failed and stumbled, find a mentor to help you out, iron out the wrinkles in your day-to-day implementation details. So, all of this might be a little bit squishier of definition than people are used to when talking about mentorships, but I think it's good to keep in mind the different ways this relationship can manifest in your career so that you know what to look out for and can more effectively harness those relationships for professional development. But just like any other relationship, mentorships can become toxic. If you are a mentee and you find yourself having a really hard time finding time for mentoring appointments or your breaking promises that you make to your mentor or you have guilt about not being able to get stuff done or you disagree about what level of commitment that you have and things that you agree to do, these are all warning signs that something is not going well. If you can't find time for your mentor, that might be a subconscious signal that you're giving to yourself that this is not working out. If you can't find time for it, why are you trying to keep it going? If you are breaking promises or you disagree about the promises that you've made, it might be that you are asking... that your mentor is asking too much of you for your level right now. One thing I want to make very clear about mentorships is you should be doing this to make yourself better and to learn and grow from experience. You shouldn't be doing this because you want to impress somebody and you shouldn't be engaging as a mentee in a relationship because you want higher regard in something. That's not a specific actionable goal that you're going to achieve from interacting with a person. This can be really hard that you need to be very clear about the expectations that you have and the things that are realistic for you to accomplish. Failing to do that could lead to some emotional and boundary breaches that can be very difficult to recover from. The reason why this distance is important is because coding work can be hard and emotional labor can be hard and being a mentee is both. Tech has fairly high attrition rates as far as industries go. Women leave the industry at twice the rate of men. That's really hard. We need to make sure, especially in marginalized communities, that we're mentoring effectively. It's important to have a diversity of viewpoints and skill sets in our industry in order to keep growing and making products that impact both lives and make our industry better. If you aren't able to maintain professional boundaries with your mentors, you're more likely to burn out and become an aversion to this statistic. That's hopefully something that everybody in this room wants to avoid. Again, like we talked about, your last responsibility as a mentor is to initiate the conversation. You've done your research, you've identified specific people. You think it can help you out, get something done. You have actionable requests prepared. You've found somebody in the community who seems like they're receptive to helping people. What do you do? You can be a brick brave and you have to ask. Figure out which conversation streams people are most active on. Twitter, meetups, IRC, ask them questions. If you have more than one or two questions, it's okay to ask something like, hey, I have a couple of questions. Is it okay if I take up some of your time? It's also your responsibility to accept no as an acceptable answer to that question. It doesn't necessarily mean that whoever you're approaching doesn't care about you. It is not a referendum on your character that somebody does not agree to be your mentor. I know I struggle with that, like, oh my God, what did I do wrong? They must hate me now. No, they're probably busy, and you need to accept that and move on and find somebody else who can help you. And you should not pester somebody who has said no with additional requests to help you out. So that's a little bit about, like, how to find a mentor and how to be responsible and respectful mentee. But why should you have a mentee and who should, right? So one thing I hear from people in the community is, like, oh, well, experienced people should mentor because that's the right thing to do. That's the longer knowledge so that other people can benefit from it, right? And it should only be experienced people. Well, not really. I don't believe in doing things for a period of altruistic reasons, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But, and I also don't think that you necessarily need to be like a staff engineer to be a mentor. You have things that you have more experience than other people want, and that is something you can help out with. But everybody should mentor because mentoring keeps you honest about what you know and what you don't. And it encourages you to keep learning and sharpen your skills beyond what is comfortable for you in your day-to-day. It also helps you build a reputation in your community as somebody who is knowledgeable and dependable. And remember that mentorships are inherently unbalanced. Once your mentee outgrows that relationship and you've given help to them, they have the potential to become valuable peers who will possibly advocate for you in the future. So you are, and you absolutely should be, getting something out of this relationship. So your responsibilities as a mentor are showing up on time, giving honest feedback, shutting down rabbit holes, and admitting ignorance and vulnerability. Your primary responsibility is to ask questions and provide honest and critical feedback. You might have to be blunt, and if this is the first time you're doing it, it might be really uncomfortable, but this is exactly why having a measure of professional distance in your mentorship relationships is incredibly important. It's also really good for you to learn how to exhibit vulnerability in front of your mentee. One of the most valuable things that you can do is show that even though you might be somebody that somebody's put up on a pedestal, you can still make mistakes and you can work through that problem together. That is one of the most valuable learning experiences that you can give to somebody who's showing that not everybody knows everything, even if they are considered knowledgeable in that field. So how do you show that you're available as a mentor? Like we talked about this is the mentee's responsibility to find you. I mean, you can make yourself available, but it's a little weird if you wander up to people and be like, looks like you need help. So there are a few things that you can do. Be active on Twitter, IRC, local Slack channels in areas of your expertise. Go to or organize meetups and when you're out in the community, initiate conversations with people you don't know and really get your face out there. It's the same advice that I would give to anybody looking to build any sort of professional network. Once you develop a solid enough network, people from a variety of backgrounds will feel comfortable with you as a leader in the community and will come to you with questions. I know this is easier said than done, but remember you've probably mentored somebody without knowing it before and without knowing what to look for. So your first few mentorships are probably going to be incredibly small and short-lived and that's okay and it's healthy and by participating in these smaller short-lived mentorships, you will lay the foundation to become a better, more confident mentor as you gain experience doing that. So just like mentees, there are things that you'll have to look out for to see if your mentorship relationship is not going particularly well. If your mentee asks you for sponsorship and this is not something you've agreed on in the beginning that you're comfortable doing for them, then they should not be asking you for it. They should definitely not be asking you for it repeatedly. At the beginning of any sort of professional interaction, you should set boundaries and if you're constantly re-litigating these boundaries, it means that it's possible that the person who is approaching you as your mentee is not actually looking to skill themselves up. They might be looking for something else and they might be looking for something that you're not willing to give. Also, financial asks. So like I said, I used to get a lot of requests for coffee for potential Bev Bootcamp students who wanted to ask me about things and some of them would ask me to pay for their coffee. Yeah. And so that's a little insulting. If I decide I want to pay for your coffee, that's fine, but it's a huge red flag if somebody asks you even for small financial contributions at the beginning, they're looking for something from you that this is not what you want to provide in this sort of relationship. Also, if you have feelings of resentment around meeting up with your mentee, you are free to walk away at any time. You know, you don't owe anybody anything for deciding to become their mentor and this should be an entirely voluntary relationship. I am giving you permission to walk away from the people who are asking more than you can reasonably give. And it's okay to say no to being a mentor in the first place. Remember, if they have to accept no, you should be able to say no. I think that you should say yes if you've never been a mentor before and you're not exactly sure what you're looking for. You know, you want to get into it and you want to build more of those relationships in the communities, but managing those healthy boundaries is important for both you and them because you need to be protective of your mental and emotional resources. So, there are several reasons why you might want to end a mentorship. Maybe they become toxic. You're not looking for the same things. Or sometimes you realize you've crossed into the boundary of friendship and it's affecting the quality of advice you're able to impart. Maybe the mentee has gotten to the point where you're not able to provide useful feedback in that same way that you were before and you become more of peers. It's totally fine. It's natural. And, you know, it's okay to stop this passive relationship when it's done. It can be hard to identify when this happens. So, like I said, you should be having boundaries at the beginning of your relationship and you should have concrete goals and regularly check in on them to make sure that you're both still getting something out of this relationship. Mentorships are rarely indefinite long-term arrangements. Either set an expiration date at the beginning of when you start to interact or do regular health checks and set milestones. And this can seem like weirdly processing and a little bit difficult to do in a way that's not awkward. But the more you practice it, the more it'll start making sense. You know, and it's okay once you've hit that last milestone to say goodbye and wish one another well or become drinking buddies or conference friends or mutual Twitter follows. But make sure that you understand that once you hit this point, the level of emotional commitment and assistance that you are able to provide for one another is not going to be the same. It would be unhealthy if it did maintain that same level. Mentoring the same person indefinitely is a one-way ticket to burnout and you both have a responsibility to one another to make sure that burnout doesn't happen. So a little bit of a downer, but we all only have so much time. And why would you spend a lot of time fostering relationships or working on things that are not valuable to you? Despite this goal, this really isn't all doom and gloom. Mentoring is a medieval concept that reminds us that time is finite and that things are always going to decay. And that means that we need to be cognizant of that and we give ourselves permission to embrace vitality and do the things we really enjoy. This is why I say it's not okay to do things for purely altruistic reasons because that is not a useful use of your time for you. You should always be getting something of any relationship that you engage in because otherwise, you know, what's the point, what are you doing? It might be a little grim, but you know, that's how I see the world. Deciding that you want to go into the community and become the person people go to to learn, cycle, learn, that's a valid reason to do something. It's not really altruistic. You want to increase your own reputation and it's okay to be selfish in that way. I know we're not supposed to talk about it, but like it's okay, you won't have pride in yourself. Life is too short to do things based on the expectations that other people have of you for the things that you should do. So, that I've left on that happy note. Thank you so much. I talk a lot faster than I intended to, so we do have time for questions and I'm happy to take them. Hopefully you've identified some arrangements in your life that are mentorships or like how to get into one. And if you have any questions, my Twitter handle is JLUnrine. My website is jsonrine.com. You can find the slides and presenter notes for this talk at tinycc slash pyohio-mentoring. Any questions? So, the question is, is there any big difference in value in face-to-face mentorships versus remote? I think face-to-face mentorships tend to be a lot more of a commitment for the mentor, so you might be more conservative with what you agree to if you are a mentor when you're doing that. I think it's more valuable for the mentee in a short term, but I think in the long term, it's really valuable to learn how to take sort of like one and done advice and get going quicker on your own. So I think the value of face-to-face versus remote has a lot more to do with the scale of the problem that you're thinking of rather than the relationship itself. So like if I'm really struggling with my demeanor in interviews and I want somebody to run practice interviews with me, that's probably something I want face-to-face, but if I'm having a smaller problem on an open-source project where I can't quite get this thing to work and I want some quick mentoring from an open-source maintainer to help me through this, that's fine for remote. So I think it really depends on the scale of the problem they're looking at. So the question is, are there any tips for how to transition your mentee to a different mentor if things aren't working out or if there's like a list of people that you shouldn't mentor? I think that participating in local Slack communities is very valuable for that. I know in Chicago we have a couple different Tech Slack communities, one that's the general and one that's specifically the Chicago Tech Diversity Initiative. And I think asking questions there just in like product channels with your friends, asking for recommendations and really trying to narrow down the problem that person is trying to work on and then, you know, search for advice about that. I think that's a really good way to transition people. The comment was that at their company they actually assign mentors to people when they first start out and there's an expectation for the mentors that they're going to do, that they're going to take it seriously and scale up in that area and it's probably tied to management a little bit I guess, right? So it's not necessarily tied to management but it helps people scale up in what can be a difficult onboarding process. And I think that's awesome. I think that's a really great way to go about it. Unfortunately, not every company does and there has to be more of a hunting process for a lot of people but I think that's really encouraging that people are starting to do that more. Okay, so the question is to expand a little bit more on the idea of not having a financial relationship with somebody or mentoring because especially in the startup world VCs will sometimes use financial connections to stay more involved and be more active in advisory capacity. And I think that's a little bit distinct in my view because a board executive has more of a stake in the success of what's happening than a mentor should. I think they can still offer some advice but obviously they're going to be good advisors in the situation but they're more of a partner where it also negatively impacts them. Like if you're in a financial relationship with somebody and you fail then that's going to negatively impact them maybe not to the same extent that it will negatively impact you but I think that muddies up the objectivity of the advice on display and so I think a VC might or an executive might that's a little bit of a hard question I haven't actually worked with a board in a way that I experienced with that but yeah, I'm sorry I just don't have experience working with VC money so yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. Yeah, anyone else? Okay, so I don't know what am I called to do research before you go into your mentor and a lot of times I find Google is so good that I find my answers before I can actually go and ask them that and how do you keep I'm not sure how to deal with the other mentor but also not Google and Google Okay, so I think the question is how do you balance fostering an in-person relationship with all of the information that's available on Google and not just solving all your problems for yourself and so I think the good way to approach that is still do the research and understand what a person's about and where they're coming from and their opinions and then use that as a starting point to engage them in a conversation about how they came to that opinion or how they might apply their expertise in different situations I think Google is starting good at all sorts of things about everyone but using that as a research method of starting conversations is a really good way to approach that So the question is how to ease some of the awkwardness especially socially of starting out with mentoring especially I haven't done that much before and my advice to that is to lean into the fact that you're awkward and just that's what I do I'm super awkward and I don't know what to say to anybody and I talk about how we're all going to die and slide and I don't know that's just sort of how I do it is I start off with things and I'm going to be super awkward and I'm going to say inappropriate things and inappropriate times and I hope that that works for you and if it doesn't then I can maybe help you find somebody who's a little bit more on your level So the question is how do you handle differences in domain expertise and mentor somebody on something that isn't necessarily what you're good at and the first thing that I would start with is help them narrow down what resources might be appropriate and maybe even pair with them on some problems because if you're not necessarily into robotics but you've done some goading depending on their level of expertise you might be able to help them through some of the initial setup problems but if you have a relationship where maybe they're really good at Java and you've been mentoring them in Python and then they want to move to robotics and you're make unequal footing with some problem solving stuff but this is a totally new domain that's new to both of you you might not be the appropriate person to help them with that anymore and maybe helping them find resources and other people to talk to is the best thing that you can do as their mentor in that position Anyone else? Well, I'm sorry that I talked so quickly apparently when I got here because it took me about 35 minutes to get through it the first time but yeah, if anybody else has any questions and they don't want to talk about it up here like I said, my Twitter is JailOnRyn I'm very active on Twitter you've probably seen me on the hashtag so yeah, poke me anytime