mentoring-developers

# Mentoring Developers

This skill provides frameworks for effective mentoring, knowledge transfer, and developing other engineers.

## When to Use This Skill

- Starting a formal or informal mentoring relationship
- Onboarding a new team member
- Teaching technical concepts to junior engineers
- Running effective 1:1 meetings
- Pair programming with less experienced developers
- Helping someone navigate their career

## Core Frameworks

### Crawl-Walk-Run Progression

A framework for teaching new skills progressively:

| Phase | Mentor Role | Mentee Role | Duration |
| ----- | ----------- | ----------- | -------- |
| **Crawl** | Do, they observe | Watch and ask questions | Until they understand the "what" |
| **Walk** | Guide heavily | They try, you correct | Until they can do it with help |
| **Run** | Provide guardrails | They lead, you advise | Ongoing with decreasing support |

#### Example: Teaching Code Review

**Crawl:** You review PRs together, thinking aloud about what you look for, why things matter, what makes good/bad code.

**Walk:** They do the review, you watch. You ask questions: "What about this section?" You course-correct in real-time.

**Run:** They review independently. You spot-check occasionally and discuss any disagreements. They come to you with edge cases.

**Key principle:** Stay in each phase long enough. Rushing to "Run" creates gaps.

### Socratic Questioning

Instead of giving answers, ask questions that lead to understanding:

| Instead of... | Ask... |
| ------------- | ------ |
| "Use a hash map here" | "What data structure would give us O(1) lookups?" |
| "You need to handle null" | "What happens if this value is null?" |
| "That's inefficient" | "What's the time complexity here? Could we do better?" |
| "Don't do it that way" | "What are the trade-offs of this approach?" |

#### Benefits

- They learn to think, not just memorize
- Builds problem-solving muscles
- They discover answers themselves (more memorable)
- You understand