Find my way?

Deadlines and clients and bugs! Oh My!

Seriously, if your friend is looking for mentoring, one of the local Perl Monger groups, or barring that any local computer oriented group might be a place to start. There are lots of them in different flavors. If your friend is web oriented, the Cold Fusion user groups are fairly friendly (at least IMHO) if there isn't a Perl group around.

Your friend might find someone or some guidance here as well. I'm sure with all the nice friendly folk who inhabit these electronic stone halls there would be someone who would benefit from some mutual dialog.

But to answer your question directly, my mentors were my fellow brothers in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers LU #164. I learned more about making things work from those folks (most of whom never touched a computer) than anyone else.

Fraternally,

EEjack

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

It ended up that he mentored me during the first two years of my career. I was fairly new to programming and just beginning to learn Perl and Unix. He directed me in some software design practices, process documentation and how to take charge of the direction my career would take. This all happened by accident since there was no formal process for mentoring and we just seemed to 'click'.

It ended up that he helped me more than I could have imagined and we are still very good friends even though we no longer work together.

One year Dr. Cripps took off for a year long sebatical, he was temporily replaced by quite possibly one of the best professors I have been lucky enough to learn from, David A. Sykes (co-author of A Practical Guide To Testing Object-Oriented Software). He taught an Object Oriented Design class. The textbook was the ubiquitous Design Patterns. Four of the students were professors, one other was maverick.

maverick was my first mentor, although he didn't know it. I came from a graphics background (my first degree was in Recording Industry with a minor in Computer Animation). I showed him some graphics techniques, he showed me Linux.

In the 'real world' - the only mentors I have worked for were maverick and eduardo - at Surfari.com, mav taught me how to program Perl like a Perl programmer, and Ed (besides introducing me to Perl Monks), taught me how to act professional (and shoot a gun).

Both of these cats are younger than me - mentors do not have to be elders - just impactful teachers.

<suck-up>
Today my mentors are here at Perl Monks - everyday I learn something new.
</suck-up>

Jeff

R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--R-R-R--
L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--L-L--

I have a feeling that a lack of time is often the case in the professional world. Because of this it is important to spend as much of it as you can on methods that are most beneficial to the individual. When I decided to apply for my current job, I had to teach myself the skills needed to administrate a UNIX enviornment in less than a week. In a situation like this, the only way you have a chance is to totally immerse yourself and experiment/practice constantly.

When I decided to start using perl at my company in place of kludgy shell scripts, and even VB at times, I knew nothing about it except that I had just decided it would be the language of choice on a new project that was due in a couple of days. The only thing that I could do was program...get stuck...read, find a solution...get stuck...read, not find a solution...go about it another way... I think that this can be a great approach to a langauge, but you have to be resourceful, determined, and work well under pressure. The things that I found most helpful (and still do), are meaty textbooks (O'Reilly is great), online documentation (linuxdoc.org, cpan.org, this site), and tons of experimentation. I also think that it is really important to have an enviornment at home that can emulate the one at work.

The bad part of having a single mentor is that you will pick up all the bad habits and only one person's set of skills. I think that a community such as this one is a much better place to field questions, as you usually get a pretty immediate response from many knowlegable people.

I also want to say something about these certification programs that promise to teach you everything you need to know in 6 or 9 months. I think that they are very, very bad. I do not like the whole ideology behind them. I think that if you are motivated enough to throw five or ten thousand dollars at a "technical institute" then you should be motivated enough to pick up a few books, sit down at your machine and teach yourself in less time and for a fraction of the cost. I really do not think these programs are a good solution for anyone.

To sum up, I think that your friend should determine how she learns best and spend her time on that. Documentation, experimentation, and motivation are what got me along, and places like this are great for when you don't understand something or need a quick answer to a question that is holding you back.

tigervamp

I also want to say something about these certification programs that promise to teach you everything you need to know in 6 or 9 months.

I submit that this is exactly what college suggests that it can do, only less focused on what we want to learn in a given genre, and less interested in how well we do as a student.

For me, I need to get out of my office for a while, especially if I am trying to learn something new, like a new language or platform. I don't have the luxury of being able to study, etc. A training class, be it a week long or something longer, allows me to remove myself from a VERY interuption prone environment and immerse my self in a topic that I want to learn. Granted, what you say is true, once I've had that exposure, I usually spend my time 'booking' my way to a solution, and then streamlining and asking around from there.

C-.

I feel that the entire world mentored me. I have only a GED, yet today my employment is as a senior technical analyst creating perl objects and scripts to manipulate the database or it's information.

If you would like to pass along some information to your friend, that is nice. I think though as an independent consultant it would benefit her much more to post to the monastery herself.

If she really wants a mentor a local "running your own business" class would be extrememly helpful. As would a subscription to Contract Professional magazine. What ever her specialty is, I am sure that she has some local user groups available to her.

I was mentored by every teacher from the school of hard knocks. The quote I try to remember most often is from Illusions by Richard Bach, "There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in it's hands. We seek out problems because we need their gifts."

What I call workplace mentoring is much harder to find, especially for women. I look for role models in postions I'd like to be in some day and try to gather how they handle day to issues - personnel, decision making - the things you learn by experience more than reading. I take whatever opportunitiy I can to forge working relationships with these folks.

I'm in groups like DC WebWomen with people who offer to help out or mentor JV members and I would urge your friend to seek out this type of group. I think that online communities offer great environments for mentoring, particularly groups that also have face to face meetings for networking.

I've seen mentors who simply have their adept look over their shoulder and answer questions w/ "You'll have to figure that out, like I did" or "If you don't know that, you're in the wrong job". Nothing builds the self-esteme quite like that.

I've seen other mentors who are more motherly, in the "Mommie Dearest" vein. "NO! YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. ~sigh~ Here ... let *ME* do it!"

More often, tho, the adept comes not with an open mind and heart but with serious self doubt, a short attention span, little patience, fear, or a (oft misplaced) feeling of superiority over the mentor (i.e. "Well, that's not how *I* would do it").

If the above offers too little complexity, the mentor can be overwhelmed with the teaching and covering the workload. Management needs, from time to time, to bite the Catch 22 bullet and sacrifice either the mentoring quality or service quality (I recommend sacrificing the service in the short term, BTW. Benefits of quality training pay off in the long run ... YMMV).

Real life example, I was a firewall and VPN admin. I was in the job for six weeks (w/o mentoring) covering twice as many devices as I should have. We were understaffed, and we finally hired some qualified people. I started with one "grasshopper", but within the week I had all four (my co-workers were if the poor mentoring metal I mentioned). It was painful, but by the end of their second week they were up and running. The adepts were open to what I had to say, took notes dilligently, asked questions, and were not afraid to drive and make a mistake. Their quality as students exceeded my quality as a mentor, tho they claim otherwise.

In short ('bout time!), the adept must show a willingness to learn, and the mentor must possess the willingness to teach. Otherwise it is all for naught.

TIMTOWTDI

p.s. - knowing where to find information is sometimes better than knowing the information (i.e. PM, NNTP, that person in the office who forgot more than you will likely know, etc. <- my mentors in a vastly unstructured and informal way) An excellent question for any adept to ask is "Where can I find out more about this?".

p.p.s. - I also believe, humbly, that mentoring is only one piece to training, like a firewall is only one piece to security. Depending on the person, classes or additional resources (books, magazines, playing with old hardware, etc.) sould come together into a "training plan" with the employee and management agreeing on time frames and resource allocation.
--
idnopheq
Apply yourself to new problems without preparation, develop confidence in your ability to to meet situations as they arrise.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

Don Elmore, Tom MacAnally, and Bob Koehler from HEM Data corp all taught me how true code poets think. Don is truly a genious, and could explain, down to simplistic levels, the most complex ideas (like sampling 1 million data points per second of live, analog data reliably and accurately every time to a windows based PC - no small feat). Tom has an application mind that was awesome and his ability to think out side the box and solve Customer problems and desires always amazed me. Bob is a workhorse, and had a grasp of algorithms that was staggering.

One of my current mentors (aside from groups like this), and one of my best friends is Edan Idzerda. He is the one that put me to work learning Perl, and it has been down hill ever since.

I think the first three taught me what it means to be a good mentor in this business. They challenged me to analyze problems myself. They would give me the tools, but never the answer. I'd like to think that I bring this with me as I work with the new programmers that work under me. I try to challenge them to see and undestand the problem, and then develop a solution, rather than continuing to churn over the problem, as many, many programmers due. Solution focused, that's me...

C-.

I often think that when people think that they need a mentor, what they need more is a 'sounding block'. Somebody to 'bounce' ideas at. From the definition (as previously posted): "A wise and trusted counselor or teacher". Not necessarily somebody who knows more than you, not necessarily somebody more knowledgeable in a specific field, not even someone who knows the right answer. But a person to comment and give sound criticism on your thoughts.

This can be anyone. You parents, your friends, your colleagues, your children, newspapers, the internet. All are sources of information.

Life is like Perl: TIMTOWTDI. If you want a mentor, then ask yourself "why?", then look around at the people surrounding you and put your problems to them. You will often be surprised by the answers they give. If you want a teacher, or somebody to tell you the 'right' answers, then I suggest reading a book.

I would say that I have mentor here at work. He doesn't know any Perl. He is more of a business analyst, but he has coded in Fortran (which helps). He can often shed light on a problem - and I then if I need to I refer to the documentation on how to implement it with Perl.

So, in short, there are many mentors out there, they just all have their own topics and their own way of understanding what you need to know. Many of my mentors never knew the role they filled.

--
Graq

Mentor? I used to want a mentor so badly but everywhere I went I found myself in the position of being the resident "expert" in what I was doing at the time. Meaning really that I was a one man shop with noone to turn to when I got stuck.

I think that has been good and bad. The good is that I am very independent in my thinking when it comes to solving a problem. The bad part is that I could have saved myself a whole lot of grief over the years if I had someone to turn to in order to bounce ideas off of them.

I had a mentor once in my career. He was more of a mentor, however, in the realm of how to deal with corporate politics than in technical stuff though he was brilliant technically.

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Peter L. Berghold --- Peter@Berghold.Net
"Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
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