Mentorship Q&A and Videos

I already have great working relationships with several staff engineers in my org, but I'd like to take it a step further and enter a formal mentorship with them. How can I go about this in a natural way?

Hello everyone! I recently started my journey as a software engineer at Meta, and I’m eager to continue growing and excelling in my role. To help me navigate this exciting new chapter, I’m looking for a mentor—preferably a senior software engineer at Meta—who can provide guidance, share insights, and help me develop both technically and professionally.

I’m particularly interested in mentorship around:

• Building scalable and impactful solutions.
• Navigating the culture and expectations at Meta.
• Accelerating my growth as a software engineer.

I deeply value mentorship and understand the time commitment it requires, so I’m open to a paid arrangement to ensure the partnership is mutually beneficial.

If you’re interested or know someone who might be, please feel free to reach out or share this post. I would be grateful for any recommendations or advice!

Thank you!

Finding a mentor requires effort and patience. It’s about building relationships based on trust, respect, and mutual benefit. By actively seeking out mentors and demonstrating your commitment to growth, you can gain invaluable guidance and support as you navigate your career path.

How to find the best people who would like to be mentored and people who are mentors?

In your experience, what methods worked best to motivate engineers that don't report to you or work on a daily basis?

As a Staff engineer, I need to advocate and motivate engineers in my span to adopt new tools or processes. The main challenge is around building rapport with the remote team that are mostly new hires or I didn't interact a whole lot earlier.

While this questions, majorly sounds how to influence without authority. I am looking for more concrete steps for a quick win while I work on the culture part as a whole.

My company has a structure where new hires with limited experience are assigned both a manager and a mentor. While the mentor doesn't manage you directly, they help onboard, provide business context, and often review your work. It's a formal arrangement that's hard to change.

Nine months into my job, I’m not a fan of my mentor. While competent, he’s rude, especially in technical discussions. When he disagrees with something, he aggressively asks "why would you do it that way?" instead of giving constructive feedback. This often turns discussions into confrontations rather than collaborative problem-solving. He’s helpful with business context, but he speeds through unfamiliar topics and reacts with scorn if I ask for clarification. He’s also prescriptive with how tasks should be done, even when I ask general questions, which adds to the complexity.

Moreover, I don’t find him useful as a mentor. While he's better with business context and attention to detail, I don't find his communication skills or career progression worth emulating. He's pretty much just a shitty extra layer of management.

I’m considering a few ways to address this:

• Directly communicating my frustrations to him. This is possible, but I doubt he’d take it well and might turn it back on me for cases where I had bad ideas or made mistakes.
• Talking to my manager. He is far more approachable and supportive than my mentor, and I'd be comfortable talking to him about this (of course, with less charged language than I use here). But my manager and mentor don’t have a good relationship (as the mentor drunkenly admitted to me once during a team event), so I’m unsure how this would play out. I'd be concerned the net result is that my mentor would just get more frustrated and aggressive. Also, I'd be slightly concerned somehow this feedback could hurt my mentor's career or performance eval, and even though I don't like working with him, I don't actively want to cause harm to him.
• Switching teams, which I’ve been considering for unrelated reasons about not thinking the team's work is a good fit. I've talked to my manager about this possibility and he supports me doing so next year if I still find the team a bad fit. This will get me away from the mentor, but I’d lose an amazing manager, and could have bad teammates on the next team.

Curious to hear others' perspectives. Thanks!

Hi there Taro people!

I want to mentor an intern, but in order to get one my manager asked me to come up with a few project proposals.

I’m finding that hard to do because I have no idea what could be good intern-level tasks, and to be honest I don’t have many ideas coming to me at all.

Have you ever been through that and could give me some advice?