How can I be an effective teacher when it comes to teaching coding concepts or mentoring within the company?

Question

I feel like it's more joyful to positively impact the life of others vs. only getting a really high title/pay. The latter also has high stress, and I don’t want work to be everything. I believe that teaching is a way to improve communication skills and software engineering skills overall, and I would like to mentor more junior engineers than myself at work. Another option I'm considering is going back to my bootcamp App Academy bootcamp to teach others how to code.

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

The #1 core concept for a teacher is empathy. Envision every SWE you're teaching/mentor as a new entry-level engineer who's a fresh member of your team, and then put yourself in their shoes. When you properly champion the concept of empathy, you will naturally be able to take complex concepts and break them down in a considerate, simple way. This is fundamentally what teaching is about. 2 common failure modes of teachers: Not enough patience and using jargon (e.g. acronyms). Both of these stem from a lack of empathy! If your goal is to become a very strong software engineer, an inherently deep and multi-faceted undertaking, I recommend against teaching others how to code. This is the earliest stage of the career journey, and it's the closest realm to a solved problem within software. There are so many amazing self-serve resources teaching people how to code: There's relatively little value doing the same job these resources are doing. It's much higher-value teaching more complex SWE concepts as a technical mentor. Think of aspects like code review, project management, and how to communicate effectively.

How can I be an effective teacher when it comes to teaching coding concepts or mentoring within the company?

Discussion