I’m working with a group of interns on one of my teams right now. In a meeting recently, I offered to spend a small amount of 1-1 time with any of them, on general career advice (as a side note: don’t expect that I can lay out your career path for you - no one can. Everyone’s career is different, and mostly what I can tell people is what I write here).
All of them expressed gratitude and eagerness, but to date, only one has actually asked for the time. I suspect it’s the usual combination of procrastination/busy as well as maybe (though it pains me immensely to say this) intimidation/trepidation.
I think this is a mistake. Most senior people, if you have good questions to ask, are willing to spend time with someone who is motivated, polite, and genuinely trying to learn something. Usually people are more shy about asking for help than they should be. Trite as it seems, “the worst they can do is say no” is really true here. Never hurts to ask.
That said, I get requests for my time that I turn down or ignore, often. Why? It’s a little hard to define, but when I invest time in talking to someone, I want to “get” something back - at least the sense that I’ve helped out a bit, that I may have helped set someone on a better path or given them some energy they didn’t have.
I often get requests that seem perfunctory - the person is asking for my time, but it’s very open ended, we don’t have a relationship, they haven’t thought much about what they need or what I can offer and haven’t asked an interesting question. Very much in the “why not?” category - but I (like most senior people) am busy! If I can’t tell from your request that the time will be well spent for both of us, I won’t do it - there are other things I can do instead.
That does put some pressure on you. One technique many senior people I know use is to give requestors “homework” to see if they’re serious. Often I will ask something as simple as “tell me what you want to talk about and why I’m the right person”. You’d be surprised how many people don’t even answer a simple question like that!
Mentoring done well is helpful for both parties. But both people have to come to the table ready to have a good conversation for that to be true. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but also think about how you can make the time valuable for the mentor too!
(Thanks to the folks who keep pledging to pay for this. I appreciate the support very much. I like doing these and I worry that having it be for pay would change that, so I’m not likely to do it any time soon, but it means a lot to me that you find the writing valuable enough to make that offer)
I think it's everybody's job to make sure their time is well spent.
Mentorship is not as popular as it should be, and many people don't understand how to prepare well and what to expect. Especially given that all mentors are different and they all would appreciate different things for "getting something back."
I think a mentor should take care of the "homework" definition to make sure all expectations are met. I.e., provide a short README with how to prepare, what to expect, examples of what's a good topic and what's a bad topic. That way people know what to expect and what is expected of them.
Sometimes people who need advice face a problem, and they don't know what the goal should be, and what are the right questions. The best they can say is "I don't want to have that problem." In most of the cases, this is where mentors can make the most impact by helping the person explore possible paths forward and ways to set the goal, or even make the goal more ambitious.
Very familiar! My email is easy to find on the web so I get a lot of random requests. Career advice is common, but there are also many other categories, like "newbie found a bug in Python", "newbie has a severe criticism of Python", "please help me with my homework", and crackpot conspiracy theories -- a subcategory of the latter is "I have an idea for solving a major world problem and I need you to promote it / write the app for me". Very rarely are the requests motivating me to answer. Worse, sometimes when I do reply I get a response back along the likes of "Oh my! The creator of Python answered my email! I never expected you'd write back!"