"The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves." - Steven Spielberg
In our world of never ending Stack Overflow answers and Github code reviews, there still remains some knowledge that can only be found through experience. Mentoring relationships are an indispensable part of any developer’s career and allow for experiential knowledge transfer. Programming, as a culture, has an underdeveloped network of mentors. As a community, we need to turn mentorship from a wishful yearly resolution into a cultural reality.
We’ll use research from scholars like Kathy Kram and historical examples of mentor-protege pairs (think: Larry Page/Marissa Mayer ) to get to the bottom of what makes a successful pair tick. Finally, we’ll share some of our experience in putting this research into action so that you may join us in discovering what it takes to cultivate a meaningful mentorship.
First given @ Mountain West Ruby Conf 2015