You Can Be a Mentor For the Next Cohort of Android Engineers

We hear a lot about the importance of finding mentors, but how about the other side of the equation? What if you realize you’re the one with experience and knowledge to share? Or maybe your company requires you to be a mentor - how can you get started?

In fact, every engineer can contribute to someone’s growth.
With specific examples, I’ll show you how to be an effective and successful mentor, and how those skills can power up your career. This talk will cover tactics to find and maintain good relationships, how to make sure both you and your mentee(s) get career benefits, and how to get credit at work for doing critical “glue work”.

Strong mentorship builds strong engineers on both sides, and Android in particular is a field that needs mentoring for the next generation of engineers. I’ll show you how to develop your mentoring skills, and how that experience can make an impact on your career, your team, and the Android community.

Transcript

1. YOU can be a mentor for the next cohort of Android engineers Sumayyah Ahmed
2. about me Github: https://github.com/sumayyah LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumayyah-ahmed
5. Now Monolith -> modules Java -> Kotlin Callbacks -> RxJava -> Coroutines MVP -> MVI -> MVVM
6. common theme
7. And I’m guessing that’s where a lot of you are today.
8. let’s get tactical 1) YOU can be a mentor • How every engineer, at every level, can be a mentor to others • How to find mentees; how to find topics to mentor on; how to get career benefits out of it 2) For the next cohort of Android engineers • Why the Android community really needs mentoring • How to have impact outside of your company
9. we all have knowledge to share
10. we need it for career growth “it” = the ability to impact a large number of people positively
11. how do we get started?
12. Formal 1-1 Up-down Learning relationship Formal 1-1 Up-down Learning relationship
13. look laterally, not down Utilize peers as a network of learning and teaching opportunities peer mentoring
14. what does peer mentoring look like? • Onboarding a new hire, at any level • Distributing knowledge on something new: a library, framework, architecture, practice, etc • Creating learning groups for one-to-many or many-to-many learning ◦ Study groups ◦ Presentations/Brown bags Key: do it consistently, regularly, from a deep well of knowledge/area expertise
15. what can I teach? Find the gaps How is knowledge processed in the team? How does it accumulate? How is it disseminated? Through what channels, and via which people? What gaps are there between technical needs and current skill sets? What is your team makeup currently like?
16. The institutional knowledge problem Who learns it first? Who becomes the subject matter expert?
17. This is a great opportunity for peer mentoring
18. find knowledge gaps then build bridges
19. Outcome: you have impact!
20. Now we’re doing glue work All the non-coding work that goes into making effective and productive tech teams https://noidea.dog/glue =
21. Be careful of the “glue work” problem
22. find relevant topics Mentor on things that move the needle for your team
23. getting credit • Set expectations with your manager • Define your mentoring work in terms of impact and results ◦ Ok: I spent time working with X and Y on unit tests ◦ Better: Because I spent time working with X and Y on unit tests, our juniors can now write te with every PR and our test coverage is going up • Make your impact visible ◦ Write it in your end of year reviews • Maintain flexibility - you don’t have to mentor all the time in every season ◦ It’s a constantly developing skill set
24. broadening impact
25. challenges facing Android engineers today Android is a tough field to break into!
26. so many ways to do things! • Aka viewbinding - Butterknife? Kotlin synthetics? Android viewbinding? • Theming • Which Activity to use?
27. incomplete learning resources • Lack of documentation • Out of date resources ◦ unclear best practices in online resources
29. a lot of institutional knowledge - and devs not hired yet don’t have access to that either!
30. There is no easy pipeline to becoming an Android engineer - Which means not enough of us!
31. Android developers Web development Bootcamps Product CS programs
32. mentoring is not just optional but necessary
33. how to impact engineers outside your company • GDG • Local meetups and local tech bootcamps • Online communities (Droidcon online, WWCode Mobile) • Blog or speak • Deliberately make yourself available to others ◦ Be humble and open to learning
34. Anyone, at any level, can develop mentoring skills Mentoring has an outsize impact on the industry Mentoring requires deliberate intention and effort
35. Resources Florian Mierzejewski: Becoming a mentor, why and how? - droidcon Tanya Reilly: Being Glue — No Idea Blog