Mentorship
Mentorship can be an incredible experience, both for mentors and mentees. Having a mentor, or even better, a set of them, can be really powerful (especially when it comes to careers, though I hardly think mentorship is constrained to the workplace). I have had the good fortune to both have good mentors and also the opportunity to mentor others. I’ve also had the opportunity to design formal mentorship programs at a few of the engineering organizations I’ve worked at. Suffice it to say, I have some Opinions about mentorship. You can hear some of them, and more about the program I developed and ran at Jellyvision over on their podcast.
One of my favorite mentorship adjacent tools at work, something I use for myself in addition to recommending for mentees, not to mention anyone else who slows down long enough for me to throw links at them, is a Brag Document. I first read about them in a Julia Evans blog post, and I highly recommend you head over there for the rundown, because I mostly follow the path she laid out. I’ve run workshops similar to the ones she describes four or five times now, and they have been well liked by both fellow engineers and management. If you’re looking for a place to start for yourself or your mentee, read Julia’s post and go from there.